Coming Back to WoW in Mists of Pandaria

Previous to coming back to WoW this time, my last experience was a short-lived stint in Cataclysm. Prior to that, I was running a 10-man guild in Wrath of the Lich King with some real life friends and some other acquaintances from in-game. We were progressing through ICC when, my wife and I had to shelf the game to prepare for the birth of our first child. (Yay for real life bedroom raids.) Several months later when I was confined to the house, I thought that I could play Cataclysm casually during nap times. It didn’t play out as I expected. I could never get immersed into the game, and when I did have time to play I was too tired or felt like I should be doing other things. After getting to max level again at a slow pace, I decided that I just didn’t have time for the game.

I thought that I would never play WoW again. This is a thought that I’ve had many times. I mocked the last of my friends that was still playing while everyone else moved on due to real life issues. I teased him about the expansion and that all of us were going to come back for Pandaria. I had no intention of doing this. I had played Starcraft 2 and then Diablo. I think the gameplay of Diablo made me crave the WoW gameplay. In addition to that, I also started listening to various podcasts (The Instance & This Week in Blizz)which discussed Diablo in addition to WoW. As I burned out on the grindy playstyle of Diablo, I started to be intrigued by the new features in Pandaria. There seemed to be a vast array of new options to make a casual playstyle easier to accomplish.

After a couple of months of listening to the podcasts, I was in. I decided that I was going to make a Pandaren Monk my new main. My previous main was a Druid that I had done some light tanking with. Part of my burnout issue was due to the fact that in bear form, my character always looked the same regardless of new armor upgrades. I had stared at the same outdated bear graphic for hours upon hours. Uggh. I needed a change. I loved the Pandaren starting area and the feel of the game. After I left there, I loaded up my Monk with all the +experience gear that I had from leveling my Druid in Wrath. Once I hit 15, I started doing instances as a Brewmaster. It was very common to level twice in one instance from the kills and the dungeon quests. I hit 40 very quickly from there, and was really enjoying the Monk tank.

At this point, I thought I would jump on my old druid to see the new 85-90 content. This is getting long. I’ll pick up on my impressions of 85-90 tomorrow.