WoW: Mists of Pandaria Preview – Monk Levels 1-5
Sean W. Gibson / Mar 24th, 2012 No Comments
Mists of Pandaria - Preview
For starters, you’ll notice that the Pandaren race do not have an allegiance to either the Horde or the Alliance. That’s because through your actions and decisions, you’ll decide which side of the fence you’ll sit on for the rest of the game. When the Beta was first announced as being live a few days ago, it was noted that this first phase of the beta focuses on levels 1-10 which is the starting experience for this race. High-level content will become available in future beta updates but players can copy over their own high level characters if they want to test out the new talent system.
First, you might be wondering how you can join in on the beta. You’re encouraged to sign up for it at Battle.net and troll around the World of WarCraft site for tips on how to get in. It looks like they sent out the first wave of invites to press, annual pass holders and others. If you are picking up Diablo III, you might just want to buy the annual pass so you can get the beta invite for Mists of Pandaria AND get the free copy of Diablo III. Anyways, let’s get on to what we saw.
Starting out, the create-a-character has received a bit of an update. Rather than a slider that changes things around you’ll see little icons that are supposed to demonstrate what the feature change would look like, be it for your face, body type, whatever. Unfortunately at this time, the icons are all the same. Here’s us creating a Male Pandaren Monk for the first time …
Jumping into the game you are sent to the new continent of Pandaria and begin your training. The Monk character has a lot of potential in our eyes, as karate and panda bears have combined before for lots of fun and laughs. Before you start spouting off that this is some rip-off of a Jack Black movie, us old school WarCraft III players will tell you that kung-fu fighting pandas showed up at Blizzard way before they were on the big screen! Getting back to the game, you’ll find yourself in, as we always do, a gorgeously designed zone themed after Chinese tastes. The music too lends itself to the Kung Fu ways of tranquility, elegance, grace and power.
The character’s movements are about what they should be for a giant panda bear bumbling around. While in this first run through of the beat many of the fighting animations simply didn’t happen half the time, from what we did see they looked pretty good. The first missions you’ll find yourself in will teach you the fighting style of the Monk. Basically, punch punch super punch then kick. Fun! You’ll then run around, learning the ways of the Monk and proving that you are one with Monk-ness. Along the way you’ll find weird tiny tree imp thingies as well as plenty of evil monkeys. Here’s a nice video with some commentary of me playing through from Levels 1 through 5:
These missions will take you up until Level 4, when you’ll be asked to go into a cave to meet up with another Panda Monk Master. There, he’ll challenge you in a fight (probably the second or third between you and a master at this point) and if you win, allow you pass on.
Getting to Level 5 within an hour was easy and pretty fun as a WoW veteran and a nice departure from grinding dungeons. While I don’t consider myself a hardcore WoW gamer, I have been playing this game since Day 1 and have multiple level 85s. Within that context, running around a new zone and seeing a new class of character was decent enough fun. Playing around through Level 5 probably won’t totally excite anyone but this is a early beta test and so far, we’re liking what we’re seeing. We’re curious to see the new talent tree and how that simplified edition is supposed to work out, so we’ll report on that in our next beta report.
Sean W. Gibson
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