World of Warcraft’s patch 10.2.7 had this interesting item atop the list of features on the roadmap published back in January – Timerunning: Pandamonium. Pandemonium mispelled to Panda, hmm, okay, that’s a clue, but “timerunning?” What does it mean? Is it some new form of timewalking? Are we doing old Pandaria content in some form or fashion? The return of Challenge Modes?!

None of those and maybe a little bit of all of them – it’s WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria.

What is that?

Well, it’s a structured alt experience that works like this: you roll an event-specific character who starts at level 10 in Mists of Pandaria. This character can play through the entire story of MoP to go from level 10 to level 70, with a Season of Discovery-esque content structure that unlocks specific story campaigns, dungeons, and raids at specific level breakpoints, with all of the content being valid all the way to level 70. The gear rewards are recolored versions of Mists of Pandaria gear, and this gear comes with unique effects and gem sockets that can be used to add further powerups to it, with unused gear being redeemable for a new currency that can be used to empower your other items. There is also an Artifact cloak as a part of this which gains huge buffs account-wide, including an experience buff which is actually kinda nuts – Blizzard’s example version is a bonus of 324% experience gain buffs! The transmogs and other cosmetics earned through the event are shared to your Dragonflight collection, and when the event is done, the characters made for it convert into normal retail WoW characters you can still play (and the wording seems to imply that the event will run through the launch of The War Within, so they’ll roll right into your Warband ready to go). As a part of this event, previously unavailable colorways of Mists of Pandaria rewards will be available as time-limited FOMO fodder, including a white/red variant of the Challenge Mode phoenix mount and a yellow version of the Elegon astral cloud serpent mount, along with the recolored armor sets and weapons mentioned.

This event is a bit interesting to me because I think it speaks to a couple of challenges Blizzard still has with content design and what it is that players like.

On the surface level, let me start with this – I am actually excited for this event. Sure, I wish they had announced it before I rolled an army of alts in order to level one character per spec in the game and to cover all races for Heritage Armor earning, but I’ve also debated doing a Mythic-raider style roll up of extra characters in the class and spec I intended to main in TWW, so this makes that easy – I can just push them through the event instead in order to do the event and get rewards. Mists of Pandaria is a favorite expansion of mine (I’d actually rate it top 2, with my top 3 as Legion > MoP > Wrath and oh god that’s a hot take isn’t it) and I think it has a strong central story and content structure that will be fun to experience in a scaled, rapid-fire fashion. I also really enjoyed raiding that expansion and Throne of Thunder is, genuinely, one of the best WoW raids ever, so there’s a solid foundation here for an event that could be really good and fun to play.

Likewise, I think it’s worth saying I prefer something like this over a flat XP buff, at least from a fun standpoint. At a certain point, leveling characters can feel monotonous unless you’re out there doing optimized speedrun strats, and even though leveling in the game today is substantially easier and faster than ever before (some more thoughts on that in a future post), if you do it enough, it can start to feel a bit samey. Adding proc magic effects and crazy XP rates to retail leveling, even as an event, is a step in a more-fun direction and I like that. It also potentially opens the door to more Remixes in the future – every expansion era can be a target with this idea, hell, you could even do Classic Remix in retail and bring back the vanilla world as an event destination you play in, with the lore of the newly-rejoined Infinite Dragonflight helping there. MoP as a first target is an appealing start – it’s modern enough but also 12 years old so some players have legit never seen it, it was kind of dunked on for themes prior to launch even though it went on to be one of the darkest expansions thematically, and there’s much in its design that serves as the predecessor to the modern retail WoW experience – for better and for worse, depending on your perspective.

As an experiment like Plunderstorm, it’s nice to see the team go to the PvE side and do something that fits the bill for what PvE players enjoy, and MoP was actually a perfect target from this perspective too. There’s solo questing, small-group content in the 3-player Scenarios (which are included in the event!), 5-player dungeons (some really great ones too!), and interesting raids with an opening tier that included 3 separate raid dungeons alongside the single-dungeon later tiers. The focus on collectibles and transmogs, while it has a downside we’ll get to, is also a really strong central hook – it’s why a lot of people have been doing Plunderstorm even if they hate it (I finished the grind yesterday and got my 40 Renown!). Mists also has some tantalizing time-locked rewards that would be nice to see back, like Challenge Mode armor sets, and even if they do recolors of those sets, I’d love to be able to get more of them (I wasn’t alting as hard at endgame back then and only my then-main Priest got the Challenge Mode armor for all Golds, which should become a thing I can get across my account in my opinion!).

Lastly on the pro side, I think that there’s a great synergy between having an alt-leveling event on retail going into TWW, where Warbands will make managing and keeping an alt army substantially more rewarding and interesting. While the intent behind Warbands, as stated at Blizzcon, is not to force players into having alts or to make alts a more-rewarding way to play your main through a gear and material funnel, there’s probably still some percentage of retail players who want an alt but don’t want to just level again for it, and a boost is prohibitively expensive at $60 USD. There’s also a new player angle here too – since the event can be done in full with just a subscription and no required purchases of expansions, it means you can easily roll in for a month, check out Plunderstorm and WoW Remix: MoP, and then choose to stick around or bow out. Getting your first impression of WoW via the Remix event may lead to some differing expectations and friction on that front, but it’s not altogether a bad thing.

Now, to discuss some issues.

WoW Remix shows that the WoW team is, to a fault, over-reliant on Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) as a mechanism to retain players. Plunderstorm has been successful in large part because it is a limited-time event with unique transmogs, pets, and mounts. WoW Remix is at least trying to make it less annoying by making it so that you can earn Bronze, a currency that can randomly drop or be received from trading in items, to buy event cosmetics and mount/pet rewards. Which of the rewards can be bought with Bronze is not yet known, nor is the rate of Bronze to rewards, so it remains to be seen if this currency trade works out favorably or not, but at least there appears to be some thought to it. However, there are a lot of potential rewards on the line – early datamining suggests at least 32 new mount variants in the patch, and while the Timerunner armor sets you earn in the world are recolors of the questing armor from MoP, it remains to be seen if there will be versions of raid tier sets or other raid and dungeon items given through this system. If some of the rewards are exclusively available as random drops, that would feel pretty awful! So far, datamining has mostly unveiled achievement rewards, which do seem to be pretty light work – the challenge mode mount recolor is a reward for just hitting level 20, the yellow Elegon appears to be a zone quest achievement reward for the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, and there are a ton of toys and pets just handed out as you work through zone achievements. I do fear the stuff on the Bronze vendor might be spendy, since almost every other achievement for Remix gives you a Bronze cache and you’re also supposed to be able to turn in items for more Bronze, which leads me to the thought that some of the vendor mounts and item appearances are going to be astronomically spendy, but again – that remains to be validated on PTR, much less live.

As a second component, I think that Plunderstorm and now WoW Remix both teach a valuable lesson that Blizzard would be wise to learn – a lot of WoW players have deeper character connections than they might expect, and not being able to do events on a designated main character is a drag. I’m not sure what limits might prevent that, but I think that given time, they should figure out how to surpass them to allow normal characters to cross over to these events. Even if it just means being in Plunderstorm as my character name with my cosmetic customization dragged over, or playing a copy of my main through Remix, some mode to support that should be allowable. Does it kind of mess with the idea of leveling an alt through remix? Sure, it definitely does! But if a player makes the decision they want to do the event without getting a new character out of it, why not? To some amount of players, this is going to feel like a “forced” thing – you need to do it for rewards, need to play an alt, and while we can discuss the rewards thing in circles (if you don’t wanna put in the effort maybe it’s fine to not get them but also Blizzard is definitely leveraging the force of rewards to coerce players into the mode), I think the alt point has a lot of validity and aligns with what Blizzard themselves puts forward as their philosophy on alting in WoW.

I also really, really dislike this thing Blizzard is doing between Plunderstorm and Remix where the events are “limited time” with no proclaimed end-date. Plunderstorm is allegedly six weeks long or ends in June, depending on who you ask. Remix looks like it will likely end in TWW, although will it end with pre-patch or proper launch? So you have a large, time-consuming reward track with uncertain end dates, of course the incentive is to play hard and fast and to not delay! It feels very cheap and cynical. Sure, you can kind of feel out community contours (I have suspicions that Plunderstorm will be much harder to fill come the launch of Season 4, and if Remix persists deep enough into TWW launch, it will likely also start to be hard to fill raid groups in this mode!), but you shouldn’t need to do that – Blizzard should design a content structure and schedule here that defines clear landmarks on your journey to the rewards you want and gives you a timetable to work from.

Lastly, I think something that is a real hot take is worth saying here – maybe an end of expansion gap is okay. In the past we’ve bristled at 10-14 month long content gaps, but Blizzard is honestly far away from those at the end of expansion (they just put them in the starting two seasons of Shadowlands instead! zing!), and maybe it’s perfectly okay if the last four months of an expansion are a chance to just do maintenance things in the game, chase longer tail goals, or even just log off and play something else. One thing about Dragonflight that I think will have some interesting negative possibilities in the coming months is that stuff like the Trading Post and limited-time events are going to make players feel forced to maintain a subscription, log in when they maybe don’t have a lot to do, and do things they aren’t super excited about for rewards they do like. Sure, we don’t have a long gap between now and TWW (likely around 4-4.5 months) but it would be nice for that gap to be a reprieve for players to try other things. I don’t hate the idea of a content gap that’s small enough to feel like a reasonable wind-down period while it still has stuff to offer players who want it, but it feels very cynical to take the period where players are most likely to suspend subscriptions and jam-pack that window full of experimental new content. On the other hand, this is probably the best time to do it – if I have to do some alternate progression track on an event character during TWW Season 1, I’d probably be irritated as hell, so I guess logically this is the best possible spot to drop this type of thing in.

Now, here’s the kicker – I’m actually really excited for this event, as I mentioned up top. I’ve thought of leveling a couple additional mirror mains to progress on in TWW, and I almost rolled them last night, in fact, so this is good news and a way to make that process substantially easier and less insane-looking (it’s still kinda crazy). MoP is a great expansion that I loved a lot, but I also missed a big chunk in the middle due to real life circumstances and so getting to do it, even in a weird and non-gameplay comparable form, is nice. It’s also clearly a result of learning from Season of Discovery – so many contours of this event are a wink and nod to what has been happening on Classic over the last few months and I think that’s a good thing. The early datamining of the reward track seems to hint that a lot of the best rewards are going to be super simple to get – rewarded for simple leveling checkpoints and zone completion achievements, and so if that remains the case, coupled with reasonable costs for everything else at the Bronze vendor, I’m very onboard.

Will it be a hit with everyone? I don’t know yet – my Twitter timeline has a lot of positive reactions early on, but a lot of my guildies are a little or a lot negative on it, and I think there’s definitely some pitfalls to navigate here. Overall, however, I am actually quite excited for this and eager to see it when it hits live servers.