Re-evaluating MoP Content in Remix

All the content people are engaging with in Mists of Pandaria: Remix right now has been in the game for ten years or more, but I reckon with how little reason WoW gives people to go back to old expansions, most players haven't actually seen or thought about any of it in a long time. Or they might never have played through it in the first place if they only picked up WoW for the first time at some point after 2014.

I've seen quite a few "I forgot how good this was" comments around the internet when people talk about Remix, so I wanted to give my own re-review of some of the content. I did play through most of MoP back when it was the current expansion, and I do have blog posts that talk about my initial impressions from back then to fact-check myself when it comes to what I actually thought of it at the time.

Quests & Story

Looking back at my writings about Pandaria's early questing zones from 2014, I was somewhat more critical of them than I remember, in the sense that after I'd just spent the last two years playing SWTOR almost exclusively, WoW's questing felt a bit clunky and dull in comparison. I did think the zones were beautiful though, and it did occur to me in Remix that I was somewhat reminded of Dragonflight in terms of how much the world is just pleasant to spend time in.

I also liked the pandaren more than I expected, though I was rather put off by the way the factions were portrayed. I saw someone say while talking about Remix that Pandaria showed how to do the faction conflict right, and all I could think was "haha, no". I hated how the introductory quest to the expansion has you machine-gunning down enemies from a helicopter, both for stretching the definition of "steampunk elements" to its limits and for making both factions look like horrible warmongers. No, their behaviour is not portrayed as a good thing in the context of the story, but it's not exactly condemned either? You bring so much suffering onto Pandria and except for Taran Zhu, everyone's just weirdly chill about it. Making me dislike my own faction is not great writing in my opinion.

Speaking of not great writing, I'd forgotten how MoP was also the era of... certain other narrative choices, such as Jaina's "I'm gonna be really mad and kill people" arc. Which, you know, is a valid direction to take her, I just never thought it was well done at all, and it still didn't feel that way upon replaying that storyline in Remix either. Mostly it felt like someone saw how people made fun of Jaina's weepiness in ICC at the end of Wrath and decided to make her do a 180 by making her a "badass" instead, even if it felt forced as hell. And oh, I remember all the grousing about the "A Little Patience" scenario and Varian lecturing a night elf leader who is thousands of years his senior about how to be patient...

Still, after recently spending some time in Cata questing zones and realising just how dire they were, Pandaria was definitely a step up in many ways.

Scenarios

On the subject of scenarios, this is another feature that I saw several people comment on with lines like "gosh, scenarios were so fun; I don't know why Blizzard didn't carry them forward into future expansions". Not me! For me it's really just been a reminder of how clunky and awkward they were and that I don't miss them one bit. Though Blizzard did improve one thing about them in Remix: unlike in original MoP, in Remix, mobs in scenarios actually drop loot.

Dungeons 

I apparently never wrote much about MoP's dungeons, and I didn't have any particularly strong memories associated with any of them. On re-visiting them, they are a pretty varied and fun bunch, even if having the revamped Scarlet Monastery and Scholomance in the mix just because they were redone during that expansion seemed odd, considering that they have nothing to do with the expansion story otherwise. I do have a slight dislike for Mogu'shan Palace, because for some reason it's always that dungeon where I end up with an extremely weak group and everything takes forever to die, a problem I haven't had to the same extent anywhere else.

Raids

My experience with MoP's raids back in 2014 consisted of doing a couple of them in LFR, which went fine at the time. I apparently didn't write about it, but I'm reasonably sure that I must've done at least a couple of wings of Throne of Thunder as well, as it seemed quite familiar upon revisiting it. I never set foot into Siege of Orgrimmar.

Now, you can't really pass any judgement on raid mechanics in Remix, considering that LFR quickly turned into a zerg that has bosses dying in mere seconds, and even when we tried to under-man higher raid difficulties, we weren't too worried about mechanics and basically just wanted to see whether we could burst things down before they could kill us. I do think the first tier of raiding being split into three raids was a good decision back then and also makes that tier more enjoyable in Remix because you get to see a greater variety of environments, in smaller chunks. Comparatively, Throne of Thunder and Siege seem impossibly long with their 12-14 bosses, even when you're just zerging through them. I can't imagine how much of a drag that must've felt like when people were actually raiding those places properly.

Also, it's interesting to see how Blizzard clearly hadn't quite figured out how to handle the RP bits in raids yet back in 2014. Some might complain about things like Lorewalker Cho's endless monologuing between encounters in Mogu'shan Vaults, but I think that actually kind of works in Remix as it provides pacing and gives slower members of the group time to catch up, preventing the resident demon hunter from just rushing to the last boss with no care for anyone else. However, boss fights that are hard-coded to take a certain minium amount of time while some RP plays out, regardless of how fast you kill things, do not seem like great design. I'm looking at you, Galakras. Waiting for Lei Shen to finish humping his pillars is another one that I'm particularly un-fond of.

Isle of Thunder

I didn't write much about the Isle of Thunder back in 2014, other than to mention that I found it kind of disappointing after the way a friend had advertised it to me, and that I hated the chain of solo scenarios required to unlock it. At least I was mentally prepared for the latter this time, though I still wasn't a fan of the mechanic. The Isle itself was... fine, though? It's weird that fighting the forces of the Thunder King is made to be so much more annoying than fighting the enemy faction, but in general, the level of OP-ness in Remix makes it a much more chill place than it was back in the day. Back then, the mob density made it kind of dangerous, but in Remix that's not really a problem. While I haven't spent any Bronze on upgrading my shaman's gear, thousands of threads in her cloak still make it a breeze to waltz into the enemy camp and AoE everything in sight. I also got to see the Trove of the Thunder King scenario through to the end for the first time.

Timeless Isle

The Timeless Isle was somewhat interesting to me in 2014, and I praised it back in the day for encouraging grouping and providing an amazing loot rush for newly minted max-levels (among other things). In Remix, I've admittedly found it a lot less compelling. It's nice to finally have a cloak for easy access to Ordos, but in terms of Remix-specific rewards it doesn't really have much to offer. Similarly, it's convenient to be able to solo all the mobs with ease, but it makes hunting for rares even more of a futile endeavour than it was back in 2014. If a star mob doesn't spawn right in front of you, you'll basically have no chance of ever tagging it, and even then it can fail if someone else manages to one-shot it before you can even get your own instant cast off.

Obvious gameplay differences aside, I've got to admit that Remix has done a pretty good at letting people relive the general "vibe" of late Pandaria, encouraging you to zoom around a beautiful landscape to hunt down rare mobs and grinding endless dailies for rewards. I wonder whether another expansion would have worked quite as well with this framework.

Dailies, Dailies Everywhere

I saw people refer to MoP as "the expansion of dailies" soon after launch, and with several more content patches added since then, it's only become "worse". We've been running (what seems to me like) an absurd amount of dailies ever since we hit ninety, yet it feels like we've barely scratched the surface of all the different rep grinds.

The main one we've focused on so far have been the Tillers. Now, I'll hand it to Blizzard: these guys are fun. Growing your own little farm is fun, and by extension it's fun to work with the Tillers. Many of the tasks they give you are pretty mundane (getting a gift for someone, returning lost chickens, stomping marmots), but with the addition of personal reputation for several NPCs on top of the global faction reputation, you really feel like you're getting to know all these characters and it actually makes you care. Getting to improve and expand your farm as you get more involved with the Tillers community feels like a great reward and you can hardly wait to hit that next reputation level.

Second on our list have been the Anglers dailies, mainly because we like fishing. We ended up finding their quest hub early on as we kept fishing up some of the special fish that you can give to Nat Pagle as a daily and we couldn't wait to unlock the actual daily quests. If you get a good set they are also really quick to do, something like five minutes for three. Of course, then there are also days when you get asked to fish up eels, which can take fifteen minutes on its own, even if it does have the benefit of giving you an excuse to gather up some random fish.

The third hub that we've been trying to visit daily is Lion's Landing, for Operation: Shieldwall. Mostly we were intrigued by the fact that the map showed a flight path there which doesn't actually appear until you get started on the quest chain, so unlocking that was one incentive to have a look at it. The quests themselves aren't particularly inspiring, but they are nicely grouped up and we're keeping at it in hopes of seeing some worthwhile story advancement soon.

The only downside to the Shieldwall dailies that I've seen so far is that they give you a currency that doesn't go into the currency tab for some reason and thus takes up bag space. Oh, and we fell into the trap of spending some of said currency on those animal traps that start quests, and they ended up being horrible. I didn't think Blizzard even made quests with such atrocious drop rates anymore. And these are a daily? I don't know why anyone would bother.

The August Celestial dailies are something we haven't done every day so far, but we have done them occasionally. We have yet to get sent to help out the tiger, but so far our favourite is probably Niuzao's temple, as you basically do one round around the courtyard killing mobs and clicking on things and you're done.

A friend and ex-guildie also recommended that we go to the Isle of Thunder because it was supposed to be fun. Unfortunately unlocking the dailies there requires a whole chain of solo scenarios, which put quite a damper on our duo play. To be honest I don't get the point of solo scenarios, as I didn't see anything in there that would've made it a problem to do it in a group. It just resulted in an off-putting experience, forcing us to play apart instead of together for over an hour. And when we finally unlocked the dailies, they weren't that great either, making us do a lot of running back and forth through densely populated areas. To be honest, that whole island is just a depressing place, what with all the ruins and the perpetually terrible weather. Who'd want to hang out there for any length of time? We haven't been back since that first day.

We haven't even touched the Golden Lotus, the Shado-pan, the Klaxxi or the Order of the Cloud Serpent yet, and there are probably more that I'm forgetting (or haven't encountered yet). It honestly feels a bit overwhelming. The individual daily hubs we've seen so far are mostly very well designed, with just a small handful of quests that are close together and pretty fun to do, but after doing three or four of these hubs I've honestly had enough of them. In fact, I may already be doing too many dailies as it is, as I can kind of see the shadow of burnout looming in the distance. There is only so much daily-running that I can stomach, even if they are good dailies. Unfortunately alternative endgame activities seem to be kind of limited from what I can tell. I can definitely see where some of the criticisms of this expansion came from and I'm glad that I'm not in a position where I actually "need" any of these reputations for anything.