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I’m staring into the eyes of the dragon I have never fought before. This isn’t going to end well. The tank stands in the fire and dies. It’s a wipe.

But that’s just the fun thing about having beta, isn’t it? You don’t know what to expect.

The new World of Warcraft expansion, “Mists of Pandaria,” is currently being developed and has numerous beta testers to help Blizzard Entertainment perfect the game. I am one of those testers. And I’m not going to lie, this expansion is going to keep me playing World of Warcraft because of the countless new features that appeal to all variety of gamers, hardcore or casual.

What does it mean to be a “beta” tester? If you’re not familiar with these gaming terms, it means you’re playing a game that is still under developement. I am helping Blizzard Entertainment by testing the features of the game to help them improve their gaming, fix any bugs or flaws that they might have missed ,and give feedback of the gameplay of their work . Besides experiencing lag from playing on a server with over 200,000 people from across the world I’d say the beta is pretty sweet, and so will the actual game be when it’s released, World of Warcraft will definitely be worth the 15 bucks a month along with a expansion that would cost about $50-60 dollars.

But enough of the boring, technical terms here and get to the cool stuff. A broad question I’ve been asked, “What does the game have?” Two words: a LOT. Foremost, one feature that appeals to everyone is that Blizzard is once again going to improve their graphics and artwork. The new models of the NPCs (Non Playable Character) look BEAST. This expansion is highly influenced by Chinese culture due to the fact that the new race that you can play are called the Pandaren who are basically walking pandas. But don’t let Pandas ruin your mental image of the game, the lore behind them is very intriguing and intense. As you are questing and following the lore, you experience Excitement, Betrayal, Honor,Love, Deceit, Loyalty, Hate, and Death.

Moving away from the lore aspect of the gaming, let’s look into detail of some fresh new features they’re adding to the game. Any Facebookers familiar with “FarmVille”? Blizzard is adding a system similar of that to the game where you can optionally have your own farm where you grow materials that actually benefit your character for other things.

Another huge aspect added is pet battle system. Some World of Warcraft players are nicknaming it “Pokemon” for its similar to it. Even before the expansion, WoW players have been able to obtain companions. Up until now, those companions would just follow your character around, their only purpose was just to look cute or awesome. But now, Blizzard has decided to give these pets abilities so that you can use your pet to fight other players pets in a battle. Each pet has its own different ability and I believe there are over 200 pets in the game currently.

And one huge feature being added to the game that I would like to mention is “Challenge Mode” for dungeons. Challenge Mode is basically a gauntlet, if that term is recognised by any gamers out there. Players enter the dungeon and face waves of mobs and must survive as long as they can. If you get the highest score on your server, you are rewarded. Pretty cool right?

So casuals can be satisfied, but let’s get down to the Hardcore stuff. I’ll start with the Raiding to appeal to the raiders, or “PvE Heroes” as I like to call them. Trust me, don’t bother trying to touch any of the raids if you run on a computer that has less than 12 FPS. And if you do have a decent computer to raid with don’t expect to breeze through the dungeon and take all the loot. You will die. When fighting bosses, the player will experience many mechanics to the fight, some old ones such as making sure you stand out of fire, to new and exotic ways to kill the boss. Hard Mode versions of the instances will take a huge chunk of your gaming time for those can be a nightmare. But the loot is worth it.

I believe the gearing system for raids will be the same as they had in the “Wrath of the Lich King” expansion. You will buy your first tier with points you obtain from completing dungeons, but you’ll get better versions of the gear from rolling on tokens that drop from bosses in raids and even better tokens if you get the heroic version. The players who dedicate their time into raiding will actually be rewarded better, an idea which I approve of.

Now that we’ve looked into the PvE part of the game, I can finally talk about my favorite aspect to World of Warcraft and the reason why I play the game. Player vs. Player (PvP).

I’m not going to lie, I’m a huge PvP junkie and I’m here to say I love how PvP is going to look in this expansion. For one, it’ll be more PvP oriented for even the lore shows the mutual pact from the two factions, Horde and Alliance, split apart, where as before the Horde and Alliance were forced to work together in the previous expansions.

Multiple reasons and systems being changed are why PvP in this expansion is going to be so much better and enjoyable. The talent system is currently being reworked completely so that players are encouraged to play a variety of specs, short for “specializations”, rather than every class being forced to have its own cookie cutter spec, meaning everyone having the same exact spec and talents. Each class has three specializations. You can only chose one, and once you chose the spec you automatically obtain spells and effects that are associated with that spec, but that’s not where it ends. You then have to deal with Talents and Glyphs.

Talents in this expansion has been changed to where you have five rows of three talents associated to your class. But in each row of three spells you can only chose one, and it makes me want to hit my head against a wall because you want all of these sweet spells but you are limited. Because of this reason, there is going to be a lot more variety which makes fighting other people a lot more challenging because you won’t know exactly what they have until you are engaged in combat.

Glyphs are just a spell / talent enhancement system. Players used to get nine glyphs, now there are just six; three major glyphs and three minor glyphs. Major glyphs enhance three major spells, for which spells are enhanced depends on the glyph associated with it, same thing goes with minor glyphs.

With that system being changed, PvP is definitely going to get amped up. But that’s not the sole reason why I’m going insane about waiting for the actual game to be released. World PvP is being brought back to the game. Players will be encouraged to fight outside of arenas or battlegrounds.

But wait, World PvP has always been in the game right? Not necessarily in my opinion, especially with the current expansion, Cataclysm, having negative effects on World PvP. But Mists of Pandaria will make amends to the mistakes of Cataclysm content.
Here are some examples:
In Cataclysm, level 25 Guilds (A band of numerous players) had the perk, Mass summon. “Mass Summon” was a spell any player in that high level of a guild could use to summon anyone in their group or raid to the summoner’s location. It had a four hour cooldown period, meaning it could only be used every four hours, but because guilds can hold up to numerous people, it really didn’t matter. If one player’s Mass Summon spell was on cooldown, don’t worry another player will do it. This affected World PvP because it would constantly enable players on one side of the faction to leave the fight without taking any beatings.
In Mists of Pandaria, however, they are removing this spell from the game. That means a whole raid of players can’t disappear from a fight or randomly show up in another place. Fights would last longer, and people will have to manually run to the place of combat. People will also have to manually run to locations of an instance or raid which promotes PvPers to stand infront of instances to gank any PvE hero that tries to run in.
In Cataclysm, and previous expansions, leveling zones with towns would have guards that engage when players of opposite factions would drop by. Cataclysm content buffed these guards so that could they literally kill a small group of the opposing faction alone. In one zone that was supposed to be dedicated to PvP, Blizzard decided for some whatever reason to add guards that would do damage that caused 45% of your health to drop. These guards would get pulled if players on their faction would run to them as long as they were in combat. Where is the sport in that? Other games have been known to share those similar principles BUT…
In Mists of Pandaria, THOSE ANNOYING GUARDS…are getting removed.
Yes, that means players can wreak havoc across towns without getting owned by one guard. This promotes the idea of town sieges and town defense, which can only mean a lot more PvP fun time.

But you are infact a fool if you think that’s the only thing related to World PvP. This expansion proves how much world PvP is being emphasized with one of the critical things they’re adding. For those of you that haven’t played World of Warcraft before, each faction has a leader in each of the major cities. There are four major cities for each faction, and before when these cities used to be attacked the leader of that certain city was open to be killed. You didn’t really get much for killing the leader besides a bear to ride on, which in my opinion the bear looked really lame. But now PvP players will want to attack the cities because Blizzard decided if you kill the leader of the opposing faction, it will boost your conquest cap. Conquest points are used to buy superior gear for PvP, but these points are limited, for you can only get a certain amount per week. Players would do anything to get their cap boosted; the more conquest the better. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it takes a minimum of 80 players that listen and follow directions to crush a city. Talk about intense?
So pretty much Mists of Pandaria is going to be one heck of a expansion for World of Warcraft, possibly one of the best. It doesn’t matter if your heart is dedicated to slaying dragons all day or having a show down with an opposing player because he killed you while you were in the bathroom. Maybe you just like the Farm system or the Pet Battle system? There’s just endless possibilities with the game. It’s definitely worth playing.

by KALEEN SINGH