Posts with tag pandaria

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

The Jade Serpent circled the Vale, and spoke to the beleaguered Emperor. "Pandaria is more than just the Pandaren Empire," she told Shaohao. "Your enemies to the west are as much a part of this land as your empire behind the wall." Seeing that all things were connected in an eternal whole, and that his beloved land was more than just the Pandaren Empire, Shaohao at least understood.

We know from the writings in The Emperor's Burdern that all of Pandaria is connected. But is it just Pandaria, or all of Azeroth? This week's Tinfoil Hat Edition leaps off of the theories presented by Matthew Rossi in Wednesday's Know Your Lore. If you haven't read it, I suggest you do so, because conspiracy theories abound in today's edition of Know Your Lore.

Today's Know Your Lore is a Tinfoil Hat edition, meaning the following is a look into what has gone before with pure speculation on what is to come as a result. These speculations are merely theories and shouldn't be taken as fact or official lore.

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My server is a PvP server. It's one of the more balanced populations with a relatively healthy amount of players on both the Alliance and the Horde. Even before this expansion, you had to watch your back because you could be jumped at anytime by 3 Horde players (at least, that's how many it took to kill me). With the release of Mists of Pandaria, world bosses have made a return.

Back in the old days, there was generally an unspoken etiquette among competing raids looking to take down a world boss.

But this generation? Not a chance!

Now we have these filthy backstabbing Horde (or Alliance) players looking for every advantage they can get to wipe Alliance players and take over their efforts. Back in my day, they had the courtesy to simply let Ysondre, Emeriss or one of those other Emerald dragons wipe the raid for them!

My friends, if the Horde(or Alliance) want to fight dirty, then we can only respond in kind! Today I'm going to let you in on a few battle tactics to both defend yourselves and crush the Orcs and their allies!

There are a few purposes for fish in Mists of Pandaria. You can cook them to eat for a Well Fed buff or to give to a Tillers NPC for personal reputation. There's a fish for alchemy oils and even the "vendor fish" this expansion is pretty useful. You can bag extra stacks of fish together for a currency.

The catch is (pun intended) that many raiders aren't used to fishing their own Well Fed buffs. This leads to many questions on where to find which fish. Jump behind the cut and I'll summarize for you the pools and catch rates of open water fishing in Pandaria.

"And that night, her mom said that the two of them and the now-dead guy were the only 3 people who ever lived in Las Vegas. Everybody else just arrived, ate their complimentary shrimp cocktails, and left."

Blizzard's focus is, as they've repeatedly professed, "to create the most epic gaming experiences ever." But for all the world-ending threats we've encountered in the last few WoW expansions, Azeroth just isn't that big. The entire Eastern Kingdoms are about the size of the island of Manhattan. We're made to believe that hundreds of thousands to millions of people of various races inhabit the planet, but examining the amount of residential space in each zone shows us room for far, far fewer.

Now, yes, the Azeroth we see could simply be an abstraction of some other, larger, "real" Azeroth that doesn't tangibly exist. But this one is the one we get, and it seems sillier and sillier each time when you ponder things like where exactly King Wrynn managed to find a hundred thousand troops to send to Northrend, or where night elves have lived for the past ten thousand years. The same goes for Azeroth's endless supply of doomsday villains and the cultists they inevitably find to do their bidding. They had to come from somewhere. And they definitely don't live in Stormwind.

But the problem isn't even really where they live. It's how they live. It's where they come from. Outland presented a unique opportunity to show us the how and why of the many strange alien races on an entirely new planet, but we learned more about how they died than how they lived -- the fate of most non-player races in World of Warcraft. Their homelands were a theme park, a casino, and we run through pulling levers, grabbing drinks, buying t-shirts. Nobody lived there.

Pandaria, though? People live there. The continent feels more like a brand new planet than even Outland ever did.

Have you had the dream again? A black goat with seven eyes that watches from the outside.
- The Puzzle Box of Yogg Saron

We did not bring them to this land, they were there all along. But we unleashed them from their prison, allowing them to run rampant over the verdant hills and fields of Pandaria. Our arrival on Pandaria's coast was nothing more than a catalyst that sparked a chain of disastrous events the likes of which Pandaria has never before seen ... at least, not in written history.

The Sha are a unique villain, the first in Azeroth's history that we alone are responsible for. We've dealt with the horrors of the Burning Legion, we've fought the armies of the Lich King, we've even brought down and vanquished the fallen Aspect Deathwing. But we've never before had to fight something that was spawned not from the evil of the universe, but the evil within ourselves.

Which makes the Sha utterly fascinating ... and their origins even more so.

Please note: The following post is chock-full of spoilers for Mists of Pandaria.

It's another expansion with a new class, making it a perfect time to kick back and reflect on our auspicious naming conventions. After all, certainly the most popular monk names are steeped in lore and dignity, right?

Our good pals over at GuildOx have sorted through huge, mountainous stacks of data to find the most popular monk names. These are the same folks who told us about popular warrior names like Cleaveland and Sunderwear, as well as common paladin names like Layonhooves and Unstopbubble.

So, what are the most popular names for monks? Are they roleplaying names or original creations? Well, let's take a look and unveil the top 10 most popular monk names.