A few smallish things worth briefly pondering…
Challenge Mode Leaderboards are live, showing the characters doing particularly well in Challenge Modes. It has some neat filtering options for classes and removing the same toon-groups.
Free realm transfers for some realms due to population troubles. If you’re on these realms you might be interested – not so much for most of us. Oceanic players on Frostmourne particularly might be keen.
Blizzard have released a graphic novel – The Pearl of Pandaria, which is getting reasonable reviews so far from what I’ve heard on blogs and podcasts.
Pet battles are proving to be darn popular, which I did not expect. Many guildies are raving about how good it is and the achievement junkies are going spare to get all the battles in. blogs and podcasts too seem to be loving them, somewhat ironically. Good call Blizzard, wow – given that I might try it in a few weeks.
Dark Legacy have a cute comic about the pre-release emptiness in the cities – moot now but still funny.
I’m reading the Tides of War novel to gain some lore background on the setting for Mists. While I can appreciate the books are different from the games (or films, or whatever) there are things in the novel’s timeline which do not mesh with what I am playing in the game.
For example the game lore just released has everyone discovering the moving island of Pandaria. This discovery leads to a few changes for major Non Player Characters and also to the escalation to war between the Horde and the Alliance. The novel by contrast has the escalation based upon the destruction of Theramore, and the ongoing battle using all sorts of non-typical war machines. It is a disparity in terms of I am not sure which is missing on what lore, or which is meant to be right.
Am I at war because of Pandaria, the bombing, or some other reason? “Why do we fight” is a reasonable question, and one that perhaps the more roleplaying focused players have already answered for themselves in spite of the odd contradiction. I’m kind of expecting a RetCon somewhere in the post-Mists round-up to declare that the novel is authorative, but who knows.
There is also the possibility that the segment of story told in Tides of War is removed from the events of Pandaria and these things are all happening in parallel. That would be almost plausible, except for one of the NPCs (who I won’t spoil).
Many distracting things which take us away from the leveling. Must play…must play…
TyphoonAndrew's - Eye of the Storm 