It seems the NDA for all things Pandaria is up and a wave of information has hit the web. I'm not going to copy and paste all of it, because holy hell it is a lot, so here is a link to MMO Champ's main page: http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/ 
Info is plastered all over it from top to bottom at the moment. Btw, some spoilers are in the link and most likely the rest of this thread.
 
I just want to say that all this stuff looks amazing and I'm actually really interested to see how this whole Alliance vs Horde storyline plays out. It seems that Garrosh finally reveals himself to be the kind of guy we all think he is and does some rather nasty stuff. Enough for the Horde to turn against him.

I wonder how many features will be cut from this when it comes out. Wrath of the Lich King had quite a few that still aren't in there.

Won't be playing it either way, I do want to level 1-60 one last time because I haven't done that in the new old world yet but I doubt I'll ever get around to that. Vanilla WoW / TBC were brilliant!

Sounds great, really stoked for it.

Most of that stuff sounds incredibly smart and fun.

Me and my wife are excited for MoT and so far it only seems to be getting better and better as more info is released.

We had said before that this expansion isn't defined by having a huge villain, but the box product has a huge central storyline. The villain comes into play with the patches. The final patch of this expansion does not occur in Pandaria. The war between the Alliance and Horde heats up as they roll into Pandaria, and it will serve as a major battleground, but things get so gnarly and out of control, and war crimes are committed by one side, it begins to spiral into crazyville. The final patch of Mists of Pandaria will be the Siege of Orgrimmar! Both factions, for various reasons, lay siege to the city to bring Garrosh down and end his reign of Warchief.

This sounds so fucking good in so many ways. Are the Horde gonna have to head out of Orgrimmar entirely? That's gonna be a huge change for WoW.

Only problem is that it means another expansion where Thrall is essentially the main character. If you're aiming to take down Garrosh, Thrall can't not be at the centre of the action.

that female pandarin is pretty fucking terrible

Color me excited. I think I'm most excited for the pet battle system and the new talent system. Call if Pokemon or whatever the fuck you want, but it still sounds fun so I'm definitely gonna be all over that. Plus, I haven;t played Pokemon in a while so yeah lol.

As for the new talents, all I have to say is thank-fucking-god. I'm so fucking tired of people debating and crying over what talents you should have. This has actually been one of my biggest problems with the game. I'm sick of there being a 'right' and a 'wrong' way to spec your character just because a few overzealous assclowns whipped out a calculator and decided it would be so. This is not only great for people who want to see some diversity, like me, but it's also great for people (I don't want to use the word casuals but fuck it, might as well lol) who just don't know what to choose because they have no interest in browsing forums or looking up guides. I think eliminating 'required' resources outside of the game so people can spend more time playing and less time reading is a fucking godsend.

Bravo Blizzard, you will continue to have my money.

I'm in.

@Animasta said:

that female pandarin is pretty fucking terrible

lolwut? Looks pretty good to me. Far better than the faux-sexiness of the majority of the other females. You can't get much worse after the worgen, anyway.

I think the most interesting things from all this are: 

•  Desire to make exploration a huge thing again. We already knew they were not letting us use flying mounts in Pandaria until near max level but from the sounds of it they plan on removing group summon as well. The addition of world bosses will have people out in the world camping for them again. There are other things as well but they really want people back in the world exploring, which is awesome.
• The raid structure is going to be similar to Vanilla where it's a different conflict every time instead of the progressing stories we saw in TBC, WOTLK, and Cata. This is already evidenced by the final raid being the siege of Org which has only minor ties into all the upcoming Pandaria stuff. Seems that after the first raid tier it will be going off in other directions as well.
• Pokemon system sounds really fleshed out. Over 100 "wild" monsters to capture across Azeroth and NPCs to fight to level your dudes.
• Pokemon, Scenarios, Challenge mode, Proving Grounds (if this proves to be real? It's only showed up in a random blue post), and the new gardening system are all very needed things to WoW. As someone who has been playing since launch at this point I just log on 9 hours a week to raid and that is it. PVP does not interest me due to how time consuming rated BGs are and how Arena will never ever ever ever be balanced. Achievements were a nice diversion for a few years to keep me playing outside of raids but I am well over 10k at this point and there aren't many left I care to go after (other than finishing lore master).

@GunslingerPanda said:

@Animasta said:

that female pandarin is pretty fucking terrible

lolwut? Looks pretty good to me. Far better than the faux-sexiness of the majority of the other females. You can't get much worse after the worgen, anyway.

when "oh, there was something else in the game that was way worse" constitutes your defense...

I mean sure it's not as bad as the worgen, but it's still bad

@GunslingerPanda:Yeah, I'm not too thrilled about Thrall getting more screen time. I like him and everything, but yeah, he'll most likely play another huge roll. Personally, I'd like to see some other horde leaders step up. Now that I think about it, Vol'jin might step up since he fucking hates Garrosh. I don't know much about Bloodhoof or Theron but I'd imagine they'd be on the 'good' side as well. Who I'm really curious about is Sylvanas. I'm slacking on my WoW lore, but reading the forums, it sounds like she's just as fucking crazy as Garrosh is. TO WOWWIKI I GO!!!!! lol

While I enjoyed my time in Azeroth, I would waste many days in a comatose, mostly traveling from place to place and doing fetch quests. It's huge commitment, the traveling and professions take hours/days, so even if I wanted to just get on for a couple hours after work, most of my time was spent doing those things which I don't particularly enjoy... in turn spending more hours than I would like on the game, in order to do something fun. So one day, I just stopped playing.

But, this post is not about knocking the game, it's a question to the wow players on this forum. Due to the upcoming changes, I'm wanting to get back into wow, but I don't want to play it like I was. Do any of you feel similarly about the game but still play it? Do you approach the game differently and not do the mundane tasks? I enjoy doing dungeons and getting gear, but I don't like the long traveling, professions and boring quests. Could I get to max level and raid without doing these things?

Yeah but, the siege of orgrimmar will just be instanced to hell. and most likely one of these:

Media Presentation - Scenarios

• To enter a scenario, you'll queue up for it a lot like you would a dungeon. Each scenario is designed to take roughly 10 to 30 minutes to complete.
• Most are some slice of the world that has been carved out, to give you things to do as a group that you normally wouldn't be able to do while questing.
• People were not doing group quests because they couldn’t find people in the past, so now group quests are something you can queue for.
• The instancing provides the ability to make that there aren't different groups competing for the objectives and causing problems for each other.
• The UI will present a number of objectives once you enter the scenario.
• For example, you can help the Brewmaster create her Lightning Lager that can only be brewed while it's raining and in the middle of a thunderstorm. This is done by defending the brewery from the saurok while putting out fires.
• Scenarios don't use the traditional tank/healer/dps set up, which would be slower. Combat is more similar to questing than dungeons.
• There should be at least five ready for launch, but there may be more.
• Scenarios will reward Valor points.

Sounds like they are basically trying to do the Dynamic Event thing that's been adopted by a few MMORPGs recently. More specifically, Guild Wars 2. WoW will only have at least five, where GW2 will have probably hundreds, and they're not instanced outdoors either. The scenarios will also reward reputation, the most unbearable system in the entire fucking game after the importance of gear. Really, really sucks that reputation is a thing and it's easily the biggest turn off in WoW. Remember reputation in Vanilla? It was for attunement to Molten Core and some long term cosmetic and gear rewards, but you couldn't grind it. Now it's a time sink requirement and it destroyed The Burning Crusade for me and I quit shortly after its release.

The challenge mode system was already in the game too. Completing raids quickly has been a factor since vanilla, just now it's getting some metrics attached to it to compare with others.

I do approve of world bosses, though 2 is hardly anything to write home about. Vanilla had 6.

@duggshammer: You will have to do these things, it's a subscription based game so they have to stretch the game out some way or another.

I played Vanilla, and I've only been back for 2 months so I'm really not burned out on WoW at all. This expansion sounds sweet. I love the Scarlet Monastery. I also love how it seems like there's gonna be less teleporting and flying around, and more actual exploration. That was something that was quite obvious in its absence when I came back. Hell, they even added 10x the amount of flight paths.

Pandas.

@duggshammer said:

While I enjoyed my time in Azeroth, I would waste many days in a comatose, mostly traveling from place to place and doing fetch quests. It's huge commitment, the traveling and professions take hours/days, so even if I wanted to just get on for a couple hours after work, most of my time was spent doing those things which I don't particularly enjoy... in turn spending more hours than I would like on the game, in order to do something fun. So one day, I just stopped playing.

But, this post is not about knocking the game, it's a question to the wow players on this forum. Due to the upcoming changes, I'm wanting to get back into wow, but I don't want to play it like I was. Do any of you feel similarly about the game but still play it? Do you approach the game differently and not do the mundane tasks? I enjoy doing dungeons and getting gear, but I don't like the long traveling, professions and boring quests. Could I get to max level and raid without doing these things?

You can pretty much get to 85 without stepping foot outside of Stormwind or Orgrimmar or whatever. Just queue on Dungeon Finder till the end of time.

@Zenaxzd said:

@duggshammer: Without doing them? Yes but No. Cataclysm sped up a lot of stuff and revamped all the leveling so it's actually fun and not a chore. Questing is now setup so that you only pick up a few quests per hub then do not walk far to do them, and almost every zone has some sort of story line tied to it instead of the random mundane tasks you were doing prior. To give an idea how fast leveling is now I will put it this way: during my summer break from college last year I woke up one morning and decided to level a warrior. By the time the sun went down and I was about to go to sleep he was already level 60. In addition to this the latest patch added the LFR feature which allows you to look for raids through matchmaking and tune down the difficulty so nearly anyone can do it regardless of skill. You won't find anyone telling you to have professions, enchants, proper gems or reputation there. It's essentially a way for people who don't want to dedicate a lot of time to the game to see the content and even get gear from it.

Thanks for the info... btw, how did you level that fast? :O

watching the video of scholomance i had flashbacks of wipes. that place could be killer back in the day.

PUT YOUR IMP ON PASSIVE!!

@gakon said:

An 11th character slot will make a lot of people happy.

21 85's, I could certainly use that shit.

@Zenaxzd: very interesting, thanks