Mists of Pandaria: Press tour interviews from around the web
by Anne Stickney 
Mar 19th 2012 at 8:00PM
- Wowhead interviewed Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton about professions in Pandaria, bind on account pets, titles and mounts, transmogrification, and more.
- Wowhead also quizzed Lead Game Designer Tom Chilton about monks, questing, dailies, updating old world instances, and the player community.
- Tankspot interviewed World of Warcraft Product Director J. Allen Brack about the Annual Pass, raiding, PvE scenarios, player models, and the upcoming beta.
- Tankspot also sat down with Lead Systems Designer Greg Street and asked about tanking changes, monk design, the readdition of auto-attack to the monk class, glyph changes, legendary weapon changes and transmogrification, the new looting system, and more.
- Blizzplanet has video interviews with Lead Quest Designer Dave Kosak and Senior Vice President of Creative Development Chris Metzen -- and it has an upcoming interview with Senior Game Producer Ray Cobo in the works, as well.
- Curse Network interviewed Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton with questions about dungeons, raids, PvE scenarios, Pet Battles, the new talent system, the upcoming world event to introduce Pandaria, mount models, and more.
- Curse Network also sat down with Lead Systems Designer Greg Street to talk about the item squish, the new talent system, the monk class, challenge modes and challenge mode rankings, male and female warlock pets, and more.
- Curse Network also chatted with Lead Game Designer Tom Chilton about new character models, character slots, AoE looting, and the all-important question of void storage space.
- AusGamers interviews Lead Game Designer Tom Chilton as well, this time with questions about the feel of the expansion, voice acting, UI changes and more.
- Gameplanet New Zealand talks to Product Director J. Allen Brack about 25-man vs. 10-man raid design, account-wide achievements, professions, the Orgrimmar raid, and lessons learned from Cataclysm.
It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!Filed under: Mists of Pandaria
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Pyromelter Mar 19th 2012 8:22PM
Cory Stockton on professions: "Cooking got a lot of work here. There's different types---steaming, frying, broiling, for example."
hoo boy! Really glad I was sitting down when I read that one. (That was sarcasm in case it's hard to discern without a voice inflection.)
The curse interviews are pretty neat. Most important regarding character models:
Greg Street: "We definitely are slowly in progress with the revampings of the races, the reality is at best we would get the Dwarves for the Mists of Pandaria, and even that's kind of on the bubble. But it is something that we are planning to do, something that we will want to get to, and something that we believe is valuable."
Seems that wowinsider has covered most of the rest of what is entailed in those interviews, I've browsed/skimmed through most of them. i would recommend to those looking to soak up more audio/video to head over to gamebreakertv, they've got some cool info and analysis too.
Noyou Mar 19th 2012 8:53PM
Interestingly, about character models- They had a blonde haired human male performing a kick on the monk page a few days back. It has now been replaced with a belf female and an obviously older model human male. The one they had a few days back looked like it was a newer model. Either I am going crazy or they are running a shell game.
Scunosi Mar 19th 2012 10:33PM
I wonder, since they say only one set of models will maybe be ready by then, do we have a consensus on when they'd release them? I mean would they wait 'til all were ready, then do one big update? Or just release them as they were finished?
On the one hand, these have been a long time coming and we'd like them ASAP (for the most part anyway). On the other, having to watch from the sidelines as half your guild gets an upgrade would really suck.
Maybe they could at least show us the finished ones, like when they updated the Druid Feral forms. They released previews over a few months I think it took, but released them all on live together.
sulkar Mar 20th 2012 12:39AM
The idea that raiding could be changing a good bit seems to me the most interesting thing I haven't seen covered much so far.
Gameplanet: Throughout Cataclysm it's been noticeably harder to maintain 25-man raid teams. Using Oceania as an example, many guilds with a lot of history have folded, and now out of the top hundred raiding groups only around eight are purely 25-man. At what point will you decide that 25-man raids are unsustainable, and switch development to only focus on 10-man?
Brack: That's a really good question. We actually have not decided what our raiding philosophy, our raiding design will be. We have a lot of different ideas in terms of where we're going to end up, but I really can't say because we basically haven't decided just yet. But we have changed our raiding philosophy very significantly with every single expansion, and I don't expect this expansion to be any different, so we'll have a lot of thought, and a big write-up, and a blog will go out when we've decided how it will all work, and the forums will explode and it'll be amazing! [laughs] Then we'll enter beta and make all these tweaks based on how it should work according to what we've been thinking of. It's a complicated, complicated problem that has a lot of different opinions and different facets.
sulkar Mar 20th 2012 12:53AM
A little more words on possible raiding changes.
JAB:We also have a new raiding philosophy that we haven’t finished designing yet and haven’t really talked about. How lockouts are gonna work, how are valor point caps going to work, that type of stuff. We haven’t really spent all the time we need to really figure out what that’s going to be for this expansion yet.
TS: So you are in discussions about possibly changing how the raid lockouts work?
JAB: Sure. I think we’re gonna look at how the 10/25 person lockout worked as a shared cooldown. Was that the right decision, or do we want to do something different? I don’t really know what the right answer is yet. We haven’t decided.
Snuzzle Mar 19th 2012 8:40PM
Thanks for this! It was kind of overwhelming being told "fan sites will be getting press interviews" and not knowing who was posting a unique interview and who was reposting from other fan sites.
Matthew Mar 19th 2012 8:52PM
Ya I can not wait to play MOP beta . I love all the new talents,pet battles and I am so looking forward to the scholomance and scarlet Heroics.
Twill Mar 19th 2012 9:26PM
I hate that RNG is returning to Legendarys. UGH.
Revynn Mar 19th 2012 10:56PM
It won't be all that bad. It sounds like they're going with a model closer to Valanyr rather than something as full-blown RNG as Thunderfury, Sulfuras, Warglaives or Thoridal. Dragonwrath and Fangs were way too predictable and any time that you can guarantee a legendary (especially without even killing the last boss in an instance), then they're no longer "Legendary".
Pyromelter Mar 20th 2012 3:04AM
The Val'anyr model with slightly improved drop rates would help.
I also firmly believe that there should be raid quests where the legendary quest-goer has to do something truly heroic in concert with the raid-team to progress the quest line, be it throwing the shards in an old god's mouth, infusing power into your weapon ala shadowmourne.
Twill Mar 20th 2012 11:03PM
Personally I think Shadowmourne was the best.
Coolest Rewards.
Best pacing.
Felt Epic doing each quest. No stupid collect X random things that don't actually make a lot of sense in context if you think about it (daggers!).
Not RNG crazy, mostly.
Revynn Mar 19th 2012 10:27PM
"Nerf a warlock by like 50% and you might get one post or two posts, but nerf a paladin and the forums explode."
Best part of the Curse Network Ghostcrawler interview.
Durandal Mar 19th 2012 11:01PM
So it has been confirmed in one of the interviews that the Pandaren mount is a dragonturtle. Is this the cloud serpent which is talked about elsewhere or is it a different mount altogether?
VioletArrows Mar 19th 2012 11:46PM
Judging by their silhouettes in one of the Blizzard videos, they're similar to the Heart of the Aspects mounts.
Durandal Mar 20th 2012 3:05AM
Thanks! Then the dragon turtle will be the ground mount.
Bossy Mar 20th 2012 4:24AM
Congratulations !!!
The news coverage and overview of wowinsider has been E P I C these last few days.
Much better than the competition and it is always nice to see things like ... writers who CARE about our game instead of going to sites where even their editors can't stop on hating WOW in every inch of its design. I won't mention them because I hate these sites with a vengeance.
Keep up the good work lads.
I already had hours of browsing your news and overviews.
But Blizzard did an excellent job and you showed it to us ... the active PLAYERS.
Tx.
Luke Mar 20th 2012 6:18AM
This is just what I was looking for. Thanks!
zaele.arttemis Mar 31st 2012 7:14PM
Greg Street was hired and promoted shortly before World of Warcraft took a dramatic downturn for me. It was a game (my first) I turned to, to take me away from some really harsh realities of some health issues I was facing. It is hard to be saying goodbye to WoW...more than I can put into words. But unfortunately, it is so imbalanced, so poorly designed and so mismanaged that I can't stay. I'm not complaining, nor do I want people to troll me for my comments. I just want the development team to know that a game which used to be fun and brought joy to people is now just an un-epic, imbalanced and upsetting game to play. My heart is broken, Greg. But narcissists get off on that, and I'm glad his team is enjoying THEIR game. It's certainly not the players' game anymore. Grats.