5 tips for surviving scenarios

Scenarios are like the palate-cleansing sorbet that comes in between courses at a fancy restaurant. They’re not as involved as questing through zones, and they don’t offer upgrades on a per-boss basis like heroic dungeons. But they also don’t require a five man group to complete. Because there is no need for a tank or a healer, this means that the queue times for scenarios are usually ultra-fast.

And maybe it’s because they don’t have the loot tables or span of a heroic dungeon, but scenarios come across as a little more lighthearted and fun. It’s not quite fluff content, because you do get valor points and a chance at some gear as well as gold. But it’s not really something you need to farm for that one piece of gear you need for raiding, either. Scenarios fall somewhere in between, and because of this, sometimes people just don’t quite know what to do once they’re in one.

1. NPCs like it if you don’t die

NPCs in scenarios are put there to help you out. In some cases, this means they’re going to throw you a heal — but they aren’t just going to cast it on you. They’ll place a green circle on the ground, and you have to stand in the circle to get the heal. It’s an active process, and that means you need to be paying attention to your health bar. If you see yourself getting low and you see a green circle nearby, go stand in it and let the NPC help you out.

And just like any heroic dungeon out there, there is also stuff on the ground that you shouldn’t be standing in. There are patches of lightning, there are puffs of ominous red clouds, there are rings of jade shards, there are rumbling patches of earth, there are traps on the floor. If you have ever fought a rare in Pandaria, it’s likely you’ve seen plenty of these spell effects. Don’t stand in them.

2. You are responsible for your own safety

The only person solely responsible for keeping you alive in a scenario is you. Just because you see a shaman, druid, priest, paladin, or monk in your group does not mean that they will heal you. They shouldn’t have to heal you. Most damage in scenarios is easily avoidable by not standing in it, as mentioned above, or by using your class abilities to mitigate the damage.

This means interrupting, stunning, kiting, using potions, and knowing when and where to use other damage mitigating abilities. It means you need to watch your health bar — bring some bandages and food to heal yourself. It means you need to pay attention to where everyone else is at. If you go running into a group of 40 angry hozen and die, you’ve only yourself and those incredibly irritated hozen to blame for it.

 
3. Save the achievements for your friends

Scenarios take three people to complete. If you queue up with two friends, you can easily work on the various scenario achievements to your heart’s content. If you queue up with two random people, they may not be interested in achievements. They may just be running the place for gold or gear. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all — everyone’s got their own reasons for running content.

If you’d like to work on an achievement with the two random people in your group, pipe up in party chat and ask if they’d like to do it. If they don’t want to do it, don’t try to force the issue. Just find a couple of friends and do it on your own time. It’s not worth getting irritated about.

4. Pay attention and stick together

Don’t run off by yourself. Most of the mobs in scenarios are easily able to be soloed, but some require more than one person to kill. For instance, there are mobs in the Greenstone Village scenario that will cast a bubble on a player. That player won’t be able to move, and they’ll keep taking damage until someone breaks the bubble. And if you’re off by yourself, nobody will know the bubble is there, much less that they need to break you out of it!

Which is also why you need to pay attention while you’re in a scenario. It’s not just mindless killing of things, there’s an actual purpose behind why you are there, and a story that plays out. If you see one of your group members suddenly taking a lot of damage, see if they need some help. The game will tell you everything you need to do during a fight — you simply need to make sure you do it. If the game tells you to keep the orange away from that evil pirate hozen, you darn well better make sure the evil pirate hozen doesn’t get his daily dose of vitamin C.

 
5. Talk to each other

Some of the best scenarios I’ve done have been with groups that simply started talking to each other from the get-go. If you haven’t done a scenario before, pipe up and say so. If you run into a player that hasn’t done a scenario before, give them a run-down of what’s going on. If you’ve got a cool tactic for sneaking around some packs of mobs, let the people in your party know about it. Really, all you need to do is say hello!

What usually happens with groups like these is that the scenario will be smooth sailing — and then people will stick around to run another one. If you’ve found a couple of good people, why not stick with them for another couple of rounds? And at that point, it’s far easier to broach the subject of achievements. If you’re working well together, why not try achievements out, too?

Scenarios can be astoundingly easy to get through, but if you’re not paying attention to yourself and your surroundings, they can just as easily dissolve into chaos. Pay attention to yourself and what’s going on around you, and use the low-stress situation to maybe make some new friends. There’s no need to stress over the content, just relax and have some fun.

 

Source: Anne Stickney

Mists of Pandaria suffers Wrath of the Unsatisfied Warcrafter

Well friends it seems the reviews are starting to ripple in on Mists of Pandaria and a few are not so good. As with all expansions, there are players who love them and those who do not. The below article by Tamoor Hussain for CVG UK shows a few examples of what people are thinking but remember, out of over 10 million subscribers, these are only a few hundred comments.

Blizzard is in a tough position with World of Warcraft. Eight years after launching the MMO, as the market shifts towards free-to-play, it faces declining subscription numbers. It’s latest expansion, Mists of Pandaria, released earlier this week with markedly less fanfare than its predecessors.

Everybody loves progress, but no one likes change, as is evident when looking at the game’s user review average on Metacriticand reading the scathing testimonials from disgruntled fans.

Mists of Pandaria currently has a total of 313 ratings submitted by users. Of them 114 are categorised as positive, eight as mixed and 191 as negative. The majority of these negative reviews mentioned an over-simplification of the game, which – ironically – has driven the design of World of Warcraft from the outset and has been a major contributor in the MMO’s overwhelming success.

“Can’t believe I bought this game,” says SCougar91, who gave the game a rating of 0. “The whole idea of it should have turned me off from the get go, but loyalty to the series made me want to try it. The game has become a simplistic MMO that requires very little time and effort to play, which is not what I’m looking for. A dumbing down of a genre is what were seeing here.”

Others have criticised the expansion for using the “same recycled old engine”, apparently expecting Mists of Pandaria to provide a significant overhaul.

“Crashy servers, terrible graphics and still using the same textures from 2004 which look like if they came straight from a nintendo 64 game,” writes Renoxzor, who also gave the game a 0. “The best part is having to relearn all your characters with every new patch, did you take a break to have fun outside, bad news… your gear is now outdated and you need to farm it again… Did you have the best gear from hardmode bosses? Bad news, it’s garbage, the first green drops will be a major upgrade… The only thing this paid patch brings, pandas, tons of pandas… only the male panda is unique, sorta… the female only uses the female dwarf model with a panda head.”

Some have attacked Blizzard as a company, referencing other titles such as Diablo 3 to supplement criticisms of Mists of Pandaria.

“Blizzard became a greedy, **** company. Diablo 3 was a spit in the face, and this is the last straw. I wonder how many times people gonna eat the same recoloured, casual turd?”

Company hate aside, other users make some salient points, you just have to sift through the hate to find them: “Blizzard creates good games. But at some point in the last 5 yeas they stopped caring for the playerbase and instead are only thinking profit and money. MOP is not a bad expansion per say. But its just not good enough in terms of 10 million subscriber based game that should be delivering content regularly and with full focus on improving every aspect of the game.

“Blizzard is not doing that. For the last 5 years most of the money they got for WOW has gone into other games they are making and WOW is suffering because of it. It has been left to rot – just like 8 months of last raiding tier in Cata goes to show. They didn’t even have an active Live content crew on the game to keep the subscribers intrested.

“Instead they created Annual pass so ppl could SUB for MOP beta. Just bad all around. Im playing and leveling – but the bitterness of how BLizzard is doing their buisness these days is hard to swallow”

On the one hand it might be a bit unreasonable to expect Blizzard to pour significant resources into creating sweeping changes for an old game on the decline, but on the other World of Warcraft is much as service as it is a game, one that asks customers to continuously pay for access. From this perspective should we be expecting more from Blizzard and its expansions, even if they’ve probably moved on to bigger and better things?

Mists of Pandaria Now Live! A New Frontier Awaits…

by Blizzard Entertainment

For millennia, the continent of Pandaria has remained hidden, veiled from the rest of Azeroth behind a wall of impenetrable mists. Now the fog is lifting just as warships of the Horde and the Alliance clash off the coast of the lost continent. As heroes from both factions venture onto Pandaria’s shores to explore its ancient forests and cloud-ringed mountaintops, they soon make contact with the mysterious denizens that dwell there… heralding the start of a new era of discovery and conflict for all of Azeroth.

World of Warcraft®: Mists of Pandaria™ is now live and available in a store near you! You can also click hereto upgrade to the digital version directly through Blizzard. Featuring a new playable race (the pandaren), a new character class (the monk), and an exotic new continent to explore, the new expansion offers a huge variety of content for new and returning players.

Mists of Pandaria is available in a standard edition, Digital Deluxe edition, and retail-exclusive Collector’s Edition. For more information, read the press release, visit the Mists of Pandaria info page, or check out thegame guide to learn how to get started on your journey. Returning players might also want to read our recent pre-Mists of Pandaria survival guide to catch up on some of the major changes to classes, talents, and other game systems.

Once you’ve upgraded, level-85 characters will automatically receive a quest pointing the way to Pandaria upon logging into the game. Safe voyage, travelers — a new world awaits!

Mists of Pandaria: First Impressions

Hello everyone! As promised, a small review before I go to bed (school tomorrow). I have played to lvl 14 so far and I am greatly enjoying it and from what I can see on the chat channels, so is everyone else.

*Spoiler Alert*    Let me just start out by saying that the scenery is breathtaking and the art style and colors are beautiful to say the least. The music really pulls you in and you feel one with the world. Blizzard has as usual outdone themselves and the results really show. The story starts out with you training to be a successful monk. Fighting is very fun with many new moves like high swipe kicks and fast punches that daze enemies and deal damage to whom ever is near you. I’ve seen a lot of crazy new enemies so far like giant rabbits, crazy monkeys that like to jump on our head and smack you around and small magical tree folk. After much questing and enlightenment you and your friends are asked to speak to one of the elders.

Your sent on a hot air balloon up into the clouds and away from land. As you fly away you then realize that you were on a giant turtle. The whole island is actually the back of a moving gigantic turtle. After speaking to him, he tells you he is weak and dying and asks that you remove a big splinter he has stuck in his back. As you swing around you see that the splinter is actually  a huge Alliance airship that has crashed into the turtle’s side. It turns out the ship also had Horde prisoners on board as well.

After doing a few quests for each faction, your Panda friend Ji uses a Horde bomb to try and free the ship from the turtle’s side. The ship explodes and the turtle starts to lose alot of blood. Healers from both factions try frantically to stop the bleeding. At the same time they are attacked by creatures that have come up from the sea.

After the final battle, you go before your master and he asks you who you will be returning with, the Alliance or the Horde. This happens at about level 11-12.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I recommend the game to any WOW fan and any who might feel betrayed by blizzard. Give it a go, I’m sure you will enjoy it.

Mists Of Pandaria: Box Contents

 

 

Well it’s finally here! How many are already playing World of Warcraft’s new expansion                 Mists of Pandaria ? What are your first impressions? I bought my copy today and will be giving a review after I play a through a few levels. Since this is WOW’s first neutral character, it will be a tough choice to make since I have characters on both factions and it is always fun to see alternate quests etc.. I’ll probably go with Alliance first just because I’m most familiar with that faction.

On to the contents. I purchased the regular box version but the digital purchase comes with a flying mount. I just like to hold the physical box in my hand, it’s just me.

 

Inside the box you will find 2 DVD disks, 3 Guest pass codes, 1 for Starcraft 2 and the other 2 for World of Warcraft. I do not know if this arrangement differs from box to box. You will also find a quick-start guide instead of the regular instruction booklet we are used to getting. This guide generally tells you what you need to do to add the game to your battle.net account, how to open a new account if you do not already have one and basically how to install the game and join the WOW community. It also contains a Mists of Pandaria notepad so you can write down all those important things you want to remember when you go shopping I guess, but it is nice to have as a collector.

Half Open Box                                                             Back of Box