Blizzard’s recent experimental streak on World of Warcraft has brought about two huge shifts in content through unique modes of play – Plunderstorm and the upcoming Mists of Pandaria Remix mode. Both of these take interesting and different approaches to World of Warcraft – in the case of Plunderstorm, by not being very WoW at all short of asset usage, and in the case of MoP Remix, by being a twist substantial enough that it is far more than what it appears at first glance. This week, I accomplished two things related to these modes – I finished the Renown track in Plunderstorm for all my rewards and I leveled a character through MoP Remix on the PTR to level 65 of 70 (and we’ll discuss why not cap when we get there). Given that, I have some strong opinions and analysis to present about these modes and what they might signal for WoW. This post is the second of two talking about these experiments, which I am separating just for the sake of them not being too long (welcome to the long post, we’ve got fun and games discussion).

Mists of Pandaria – The Remix

MoP Remix was announced this week as the next major experiment for World of Warcraft, and the basic contours are this – it is a structured alt event designed around rolling new characters as Timerunners, pushing them from a starting level of 10 up to 70 exclusively through Mists of Pandaria content. Facilitating this, you are given an account-wide cloak that collects upgrades from activities in the game (literally any loot event can give a Thread, which upgrades the cape with a stat designated on the thread), and in addition to standard gear stats on the cloak, you also get tertiary stats and a percentage increase to all experience gained. Gear is a little looser than normal WoW, and mostly exists as a socket vessel for gems, tinkers, cogwheels, and a meta gem, all of which enhance your gameplay in different ways.

On the surface, this is kind of neat – it’s a powerleveling event designed to let you get event characters to 70 quickly and then convert to normal characters in The War Within, which you can then play normally, have them in your Warband, and have a grand old time. It’s a way to make the expansion experience of Mists of Pandaria relevant, it perhaps lets you see more of the content than you would in normal Chromie Time, seems pretty cool! Once you play it, though – it actually becomes something kind of special.

I’m going to gush here, so let me say this up front – I played the PTR test this weekend, and what I expected to be an interesting but short jaunt through the content turned into me spending 20+ hours completely sucked into the game, to the point that I pushed my test character to level 66, did a bunch of LFR raids and Heroic dungeons, and streamed a few hours of that experience on Twitch. I expected to be mixed or skeptical a bit, to be especially irritated at the range of FOMO rewards (32 mounts, a handful of pets, gear cosmetics), but Blizzard has actually kind of nailed this one, and let me say why.

Firstly, while you have gear, it just simply isn’t normal WoW gear. Armor largely only gives you armor value, with a sprinkle of a secondary stat, tertiary stat, or even health regen per 5 seconds (an old classic!). As you progress, armor does eventually gain primary stats, but they’re minor and expected parts of the progression. Any piece of gear can be ugpraded, and even drops from the very beginning of the curve can go to the maximum item level of 556. Secondly, everything in the game drops some amount of Bronze, the universal currency for upgrading gear in Remix, buying rewards, and you can convert dropped gear into Bronze at any time through a scrapper-spell you can cast at your location. Quests and queued activities drop a cache of rewards, which includes Bronze, event specific consumables, sometimes gear, and Threads for your cloak. Rewards drop in appropriate content to the original mode of play, so gear from quest caches and quest drops match world content gear looks, dungeon drops match the original dungeon gear models, and raid gear matches the original raids as well. What is different, and quite cool, is that the match is on armor type alone, which means that you can and will collect other class tier sets within your armor class – on a Warrior doing the PTR testing, I got plate drops from raids that matched the Warrior, DK, and Paladin tier appearances.

The biggest tweak to gear comes in the form of the gem system, however. Chests and legs have prismatic sockets, feet have a Cogwheel socket, helms have a Meta gem socket, and everything else has Tinker sockets. Prismatic gems are secondary or tertiary stats, and you can combine 3 of the same gem to upgrade the quality, all the way to Legendary (and at Legendary, you get a stamina bonus alongside the secondary or tertiary stat on the base gems). Cogwheels are movement spells from the base game that you can socket in to add an extra movement ability, including all class and spec specfic spells of the sort, like Roll, Heroic Leap, and Death’s Advance – and you can choose, at your discretion, to even slot your own class ability in and gain the ability to use it a second time on a separate button, as it is a completely unique spell that just behaves the same. Tinkers and Meta gems are where the real depth is, however.

Tinkers allow you to add passive enhancements to your gear, like proccing damage or healing effects, but these are consistent parts of your throughput. As a warrior, I had the Quick Strike tinker, which meant that every 10 seconds, without fail, my use of a melee ability would also cause me to autoattack my target 4-7 more times instantly on top of the ability I had used, which adds up to some ridiculous burst damage. You can gain all kinds of different effects this way and all of them are reliable abilities that go off like clockwork – no fishing for procs or waiting. As you climb the item level ladder, you gain more tinker sockets per armor piece, and at level 65 with item level per piece in the mid-200s, I had 3 tinker sockets on every piece that could take them, which gave me 12 slots to use for them, which opens a dizzying array of combinations. Meta gems each give you a new active use ability that does something substantial, and the throughput scales with the item level of your helm, where they socket into. I used the Chi-ji meta gem for most of my PTR run, and it gave me a spell to turn into the Red Crane, pulsing fire damage and healing around me, shooting feathers out that would shoot damage and healing at random targets when grabbed, and for the duration you get a charge that does no damage (but puts you into range of targets for the pulsing effect quickly) and a backpedal that does a splash of damage and healing while pushing you back (which you can then cancel with the forward dash anyways). They create satisfying and insane combinations with tinkers, to the point that most of your damage (and healing for that matter) comes through these things, at least it seemed that way in testing (couldn’t validate with a meter). The gameplay impact is tremendous too – watching combat start when a sudden violent meteor storm rains on your enemies is a very pleasant and enjoyable experience that comes highly recommended, and a lot of the meta gem spells have huge visual effects that tell you what is happening.

To faciliate the short duration of the event (at least the theory is that it’s gonna be no more than 3 months), rather than needing to build perfect raid comps, you can simply cover shortfalls in buffs and debuffs with scrolls, giving anyone the ability to resurrect dead players, dispel debuffs, grant the full array of raid buffs, and to place target debuffs increasing physical and magical damage taken. While you need to mind raid comp as far as tanks, healers, and DPS ratios (in theory, at least), there’s a lot of incidental extra damage and healing that exists solely through tinkers and meta gems that can be equipped by anyone. A DPS taking Chi-ji will pump damage for the duration of that meta gem, but also heals the raid passively, while a lot of DPS-centric tinkers have healing side-effects and vice-versa for healing-centric tinkers, which leads to things melting rather comically. In fact, on PTR, the only real threatening content I encountered was when I attempted to tank a Heroic dungeon, because even with full mitigations active on a Protection Warrior, I could still sometimes get bustered for my entire health pool in one shot – which feels like a bug, to be honest, but I can’t be too sure, because then I kept getting matched with a premade group for other Heroics that had a Mage tanking everything successfully and a Shadow Priest as the healer just playing Shadow while everything melted. In the LFR runs I did, most bosses could be melted even if half the party got locked out of the boss room, so the baseline experience most players will have seems to be a breezy ride through the content.

There’s one other modifier in the Cloak itself worth discussing, which is that you can farm threads for it indefinitely. There is no observed or datamined cap on how high the cloak can go, so playing content with higher Thread droprates is an optimization you can make to push it higher. While we’re talking about the cloak, something worth noting here is this – the power level of a looted thread increases as your player level goes higher, so the system is meant to have you push characters to level 70 for optimal cloak rewards over leveling a bunch of alts a little bit at a time. For the entire 10-60 journey, my test Warrior got the experience increase to around 70%, but then spamming LFR for 60-65 gave me almost that same amount in far less time, combining to push me over 100% experience gain bonus. Threads are assigned a quality, with normal threads offering +1 stat, green for +3, blue for +7, and epic for +12, and the higher qualities are tied to level ranges, so if you want to level multiple alts with the event, you’ll need to push one character up to max and it will likely make sense to level in sequence, one character at a time.

Speaking of the leveling, for what is supposed to be a power-leveling fest, the initial XP rates aren’t that much better. You’ll take some time to grind out that first character and things only really start to snap together on a first leveling journey around 25 or so, when you start to have gear slots filled out, threads looted, and get the general flow of how to play around the Tinkers and Meta gems. However, in spite of that, the leveling isn’t substantially different from Chromie Time – just doing quests and queueing up a couple of dungeons and LFRs pushed me vastly over the levels of content introduction, such that I was 60 before even doing Kun-Lai Summit, which is the fifth (fourth if you exclude the whole 4 quests in the Veiled Stair) of 10 zones. It also seems like it may be just reheated Chromie Time on the inside too – whether or not it is a bug I do not know, but at level 60, experience gain from quests slows to a crawl, going from 16,000ish experience a quest to 150, which feels very much like the 60-61 slow grind you can choose to do in Chromie Time as it exists today on retail. The accepted community standard for leveling 60-70 on Remix testing was to spam run Heroic dungeons and LFR, where the bosses drop bonus XP tokens worth around 50,000 a shot (at least with my cloak where it was) so the levels come quickly from there, because otherwise you’re doing quests for 150 a shot against an experience requirement of 200,000 or more. Mob kills in the world seem to scale up reasonably at that point, as I was getting around 1,600 a kill, but MoP is a modern-ish WoW experience which means questing in the world doesn’t always or even often involve kill quests. You also just get more threads for spamming instances at that level, especially LFR, where each boss results in around 3 rare-epic threads on average, plus more experience and a couple pieces of loot per boss (you get a LOT off of every boss in every mode of play, haha). It was that grindiness that slowed my progress and dampened my enthusiasm slightly, because I was hoping it would be a comprehensive experience that you could just play what you wanted of the content and hit 70 eventually, but the experience scaling on quests is a huge deterrent to just doing questing in the open world for that final part of the sprint.

With the word grindiness in the conversation, let’s talk rewards.

Firstly, the core component of player incentive here is an alt (or more!) at 70 you can use in retail. Aside from anything else, the core thrust of Blizzard’s messaging is that this is a new and fun way to get a character or two to level cap without the same-old stuff you’ve done before. On that front, it is a powerful motivator (60-70 scaling on PTR aside). Aside from that is the absolute truckload of MoP cosmetics the event rewards – a couple dozen mount color variants, armor sets and weapons you can earn in the content itself or from a vendor, class-agnostic versions of every MoP tier set in every available color, and the ability to pool Bronze to buy rare-drop mounts and items that are currently still available in the live game. Since Bronze is the only currency here, how are the rewards earned?

Well, so far, it’s actually rather nice. On PTR at least, you earn the highest-ticket event cosmetics through…simple achievements. Hitting level 20 gives you the challenge mode phoenix mount recolor in white and red from the marketing materials, getting yellow Elegon as a mount involves doing two achievements in Vale of Eternal Blossoms, which are just options between questing in the zone, finding treasures, or killing rares (off memory at least). Every zone has an achievement of that sort that gives some special event item, and they’re all similarly low-investment. For the purchaseable cosmetics, Blizzard has made the wise decision to make the event specific items relatively cheap – mounts start at 2,200 Bronze (about an hour’s worth of even low-level gameplay in the MoP Remix will earn this) and the upper end of costs for event items is around 6,000 Bronze. The rare-drop live mounts, by contrast, are all starting at 38,600 Bronze and some go higher to near 50,000 from there, so if you make the choice to invest in rare-drops over the event items, it’ll cost you. You can also buy full tier set transmogs usable by all classes on the same armor type at 5,000 Bronze, the class cosmetics that were recently put on the Trading Post (in a different color) for 5,000 a piece (provided you’ve completed the Isle of Thunder on the MoP Remix), and you can buy a bunch of toys that drop off of rare spawns all over Pandaria for prices between 8,000 and 50,000 Bronze. What appeals to me and eases my FOMO concerns is that Blizzard has specifically priced the event cosmetics to be so cheap that you can easily, on a single Remix character, earn enough Bronze to buy them all without struggle. You just need to be smart with gear upgrades and gameplay-facing stuff for Remix (generally just wait for a piece to drop at higher item level, gear comes easily), but even then, Bronze is easy to get and you can convert every unused piece of gear you have to Bronze without any restrictions.

With the time I poured into the testing this weekend, I still made around 40,000 Bronze on just a basic leveling journey without doing any big dumb farms, so it seems pretty likely that most people will have more than enough to buy all the event cosmetics they want, the achievements will ensure you can get most of the special stuff that’s not on the vendor, and then that leaves a choice between gameplay on Remix (upgrading gear to max track for pushing Heroic raids and Mythic Siege of Orgrimmar) or chasing the rare-drops that you can still get in original, frustrating fashion on retail.

But there is one other issue I have with the reward structure and content – the lack of time-limited content from Mists’ original launch.

The legendary cape questline is excluded from MoP Remix, as is the ability to complelte Challenge Mode dungeons and earn Challenge Mode’s original mounts at Silver and armor sets at Golds. This is a bigger post I keep putting off, but a comment from Pallais on my post about the announcement of this mode largely capture my sentiment here as well – at a certain point, gatekeeping these old cosmetic rewards serves no one, because few players know the prestige they carry and even then, you still have the original achievement with the datestamp and everything, so it leads to the question – why do people care? I earned a Challenge Mode gold set in MoP, I have all the Mage Tower weapons, and yet I feel like they should be open and available to players now, even if they’re just straight-up available. Blizzard limiting the cloak and Challenge Mode rewards in MoP Remix feels like an unnecessary step away from the authentic-ish MoP experience they’re selling this as, just to maintain the unhurt feelings of a few people who want their pixel rewards to have some sense of ficitonal integrity. If they also withhold the Ahead of the Curve amount from Garrosh, that will also be a bit of a misstep in my opinion, because I think it is fair and reasonable to just let people earn the stuff in this experience – tune towards it, make it a goal, but why not? It limits what this experience can be for the sake of a small and very whiny minority of the audience.

Also, in general, I am a bit disappointed that we don’t get to do the experience with the original Vale of Eternal Blossoms and original, untouched Pandaria. I wouldn’t be opposed to a phasing structure that pushes the updates as you progress the story, provided that such a design aligns with the experience curve in such a way that you’re not grinding 150 XP quests for the sake of getting to see the original, undisturbed Vale, but shipping it as it is just kind of reiterates that it’s Chromie Time on steroids – a fun idea done mostly well, but with some points worth improving upon.

Otherwise, what sounded at announcement like a powerleveling game is actually a fun and interesting Retail version of Season of Discovery – game-changing augmentations attached to new and unique gear to push through repurposed versions of old content. It’s genuinely quite enjoyable in spite of the issues I mentioned here and I am eagerly anticipating the full launch given how much time it stole from me this weekend!