Mists of Pandaria Remix has been out for just over a week and a half now. How’s it going?

Uh…both really well and also with a lot of problems, depending on what point in the curve of levelling, gearing, and cosmetic-acquisition you’re in. For something tested on the PTR and based on 12 year old content fused to modern systems and design, it is simultaneously surprisingly functional and fun and yet also frustratingly broken and rough-edged.

To actually start with, I need to say this – I have been greatly enjoying Remix. Mists of Pandaria is one of Blizzard’s best-ever expansions, in my estimation. It has a contrasting storyline that marries light-hearted themes and cartooniness with serious dark under and overtones, creates one of the best faction conflict storylines the game has ever seen while also unifying the factions against a common enemy by the end (while also not pretending the prior conflict didn’t happen), and is one of the Warcraft franchise’s most complete looks into a fictional world ever, with a Pandaria that feels alive and settled by multiple races and rich with thousands of years of history that we aren’t just told about, but shown and given the chance to experience in play via all the ways that history weighs upon the present. The faction conflict is gritty and disturbing at times, the Pandaren are far from the caricatures a large part of the community expected with the annoucement back at Blizzcon 2011, and the tie-ins to the Zandalari, broader WoW history, and the ongoing faction conflict all really hit here.

But at the same time, Remix also takes the current Retail ecosystem of talents, classes and specs, and overall philosophy and brings it to this content. If you want to play MoP as it was – well, wait a year. If you want to experience MoP without stepping too far out of the Dragonflight wheelhouse, this is your chance. The experiment here feels like a suitable replacement to Chromie Time – instead of just mindlessly farming quests and being done early, you can…well, mindlessly farm quests until you’re done even earlier, but you can also do the raids, dungeons, scenarios, and get more of the overall experience in a way that folds in post-patch content well, unlike Chromie Time.

Let’s recount the good, the bad, and the ugly and talk about why I have both enjoyed and been irritated with Remix as it exists on live servers.

The Enjoyable

Tinkers Are Crazy Fun: The experience of Remix is that a majority of the gameplay is shaped not by just being a weird version of Chromie Time, but by the fact that a large amount of your power doesn’t even come from your character directly, but by the socketing of Tinker gems. Each Tinker does some crazy thing that loosely aligns to a holy trinity MMO role, and the tinkers are far and away the greatest proportion of power you gain overall, as they scale with your stats and become far, far more powerful even as your base WoW abilities also scale. The tinkers have a wide array of interesting effects, and a lot of unique interactions – damage to healing, but also healing to damage, health sacrifice effects, defensive effects like Grounding that aren’t just strict damage reductions – it’s all pretty cool. Tinkers could be annoying if acquiring them was hard, but the game gives them out pretty well and has a limited roster from which it will never give you a duplicate, plus a gem gamble vendor that sells random tinkers for cheap and those random draws can only ever be a tinker you don’t currently have. As a system, tinkers add a suitable amount of interesting new gameplay to Remix to keep it from just strictly being a powerleveling experiment.

Pandaria Is Arguably One Of The Best WoW Expansions: Mists of Pandaria, at the time of its announcement, was met with a certain amount of what I think was idiotic speculation that the expansion would be too cutesy, too derivative of Kung Fu Panda movies, and just generally not appropriately interesting. However, I think Pandaria shows a level of craft the WoW team has, in my opinion, not met since this expansion – Pandaria, as I noted above, feels like a real, breathing, living place. Pandaria has established history we are shown in gameplay and in cutscene, it has established races and central disagreements between them, and it has such a contrast of themes that any cutesy moments like the kazoo inn theme are offset by brutal war crimes, evil bug people, and the darkness of our own thoughts as confronted via the Sha. Mists is also the faction conflict done excrutiatingly well – both factions commit war crimes against each other and wage conflict on a land they have no right to, and a large part of the central narrative of the story is not that fighting is inherently evil or bad but instead about the direction of that conflict to productive ends – hence turning from a faction conflict to a full unified front against Garrosh. In that process, though, the faction conflict doesn’t lose any teeth, as characters on both sides of the conflict do not forget they were at war and do not so easily set aside the deep hatreds and motivations for war.

Pandaria’s aesthetic, musical soundscape, and presentation are all a strong central kit, unified by themes from a mix of real-life Asian influences (and as time goes on, it’s harder for me to not look at it with some side eye of cultural appropriation). Pandaria is also the last time I felt a new continent had a strong idea and was built in accordance with a guiding lore and sense of place in the world. It’s biome switches make some sense given elevation and the general scale of things, the storytelling and lore give us reasons as to why the Pandaren might not fully be aware of the issues their hidden island faces, and from a lore perspective, I really enjoy that we aren’t just welcomed by all of the inhabitants with arms wide open – we have to fight and claw to prove ourselves and early in the story, it seems like we’ll even have an adversarial relationship with the Pandaren based on the Shado-Pan alone. Everything feels suitably well-made and thought through, and if that sounds like a backhanded compliment, it is – but I think Pandaria is genuinely the current height of the WoW team in terms of overall worldbuilding and comprehensive design of a place to feel real and genuine.

Adding Raids and Changing Zone Flow Makes The Experience Great: I hate Chromie Time for one simple reason – the expansion view you get is usually the front 25-65% of the launch story. WoW’s launch stories are the worst part of most expansions – they spend a lot of time doing establishing worldbuilding (and not usually well enough to make it a positive) and setting up why we’re where we are, which then gives way to patch content and the “real” story of the expansion. Chromie Time lets you do the post-launch patch stuff if you can get there and want to do it, but it feels very out of the way and out of reach. Likewise, raid content is never included and so you’re always dealing with a fractional portrait of the expansion in question. MoP Remix changes this formula in a really cool way – by adding raids to the leveling flow and rearranging zones such that going to Timeless Isle, Isle of Giants, and of course the Isle of Thunder, you get a better overall experience and a real motivation to see them. Raids, dungeons, and even Scenarios in Remix are constantly popping and all the zones of the expansion feel alive. Now, I get why this wouldn’t work as well in a normal Chromie Time scenario (it can take an hour to pop a single dungeon queue in neglected CT expansions, much less what an LFR raid would take!) but Remix makes the conditions perfect for those queues to pop and for the world of Pandaria to feel alive and populated in a very fun way.

Veteran Players Get To Engage Meaningfully With Talents: Remix forces you to consider, for at least a moment, how the new in Dragonflight talent trees enhance and influence gameplay. This is actually really neat. On live, when 10.0 launched, most of us pulled up a guide and thought about what build to copy, but the average player just hasn’t given that much thought to talents and their interactions. On Remix, I’ve been talenting without build guides until level 70, and that confers some insights and appreciation for how the talent trees work and the layers of synergies that build up over time. Sure, you could read through the tree and get some of that appreciation, but I think it’s easy to dismiss how much extra power each new talent synergy offers until you have to spend some small amount of time playing without that synergy available and have the comparison points between the two states to think over. This is especially true for Evokers, whom immediately gain access to a flood of talent points when the feature to use them finally opens for those characters on Retail, but in Remix, Evokers start at 10 with the same talent progression as everyone else and thus get to go through the same amount of choice and power gain over the same time window as everyone else. It’s pretty interesting to see talents in this light, even if some aspects of Remix also pull away from the significance of talents…

Remix Is WoW As An ARPG And That’s Novel: Tinkers, meta gems, cogwheels, and the Cloak of Infinite Potential combine to create something that feels like a Diablo season – a central theme expanding upon the core gameplay in a transformative way. Everything about the progression of Remix’ gameplay feels like an ARPG – strong and fun leveling, a feeling of slowdown in the endgame as you start farming hard for ever smaller increases in power, and the tinker powers hit like some crazy ARPG abilities and don’t at all feel like WoW things. It’s a small set of tweaks, but they combine for a substantial overall switch in gameplay feel.

Remix Is Tied To Current WoW Lore: Remix isn’t just an experiment in the terms of reality with a game developer trying a new thing. It is also a remix to timeline management for the Bronze, as Eternus, who brought some small number of Infinites with her to the Bronze in 10.1.7’s story quests, is involved in seeing how the timeline plays out. Why we would go to Pandaria, a continent with Old God problems, is anyone’s guess…oh hey wait a minute, who is the main villain in The War Within? Oh, right.

Remix Pandaria adds to the growing category of crossover, ARG-style lore in Warcraft alongside the constant references that hint at Xal’atath being the reason Season of Discovery is happening, and I actually really like that there is some form of in-game rationale presented as to why these things are happening. Remix has a couple of fun things that are mostly Easter eggs for now – the gem vendor on Remix is an Infinite version of the Bronze NPC that teaches Jewelcrafting in Valdrakken, there’s a hooded supplier that roams the Infinite Bazaar and alludes to there being some dark secrets, and the whole idea that the allied, friendly Infinite breakaways might have something they want to see with our help – it’s interesting in that it shows a degree of trust from Nozdormu (assuming he knows) but also that it might lead to something sinister, intentionally or not, by the Infinites.

The Iffy:

The Cloak Is Account-Wide, Except Not Really: On PTR, one challenge I noted is that the one alt I tried to roll had no cloak stat carryover. Blizzard’s verbiage about the cape is confusing, in that the account-wide nature of it was noted in many ways, but there was missing or unclear fine-print – for your cape to carry anything to alts, including skipping the intro quests for it on them, you need to reach Infinite Power X on the cape achievements, and XI for the fullest possible carryover. However, here’s the bad thing – the cape never fully transfers and each character has a cape of their own. When you hit Infinite Power XI, a new alt will start with…+150 base stat, +750 Stamina, +150 Versatility, and 100% increased experience gain. These stats are…fine, in a vacuum, but the promise of account-wide progression and steadily increasing ease of guiding alts through the experience wasn’t really met. It is easier to bring an alt up after the first character, but it never really gets easier than that, short of the familiarity that comes with doing Pandaria quests multiple times in a row. This becomes differently frustrating at level 70, when your character can still earn guaranteed experience boost threads for things like LFR which are…completely useless to them! We’ll come back to this point in a moment, because I have some thoughts about fixes.

Account-Wide Progress In General Was Ill-Conceived: Jewelry slot items are earned through achievements on Remix, which is fine enough, but initially, those were not account-wide, so Blizzard wanted you to spend a chunk of the event reprogging things on new characters, and that kinda sucked! Past-tense, because that’s now been hotfixed. The Cloak is sorta but not really account-wide and only once you push a character high enough for the achievements, and while prismatic gems are not soulbound, you can’t really easily get them to an alt since they apparently cannot be mailed, but can be traded to a friend and then traded to an alt from them. In fact, I think there’s a bigger issue at play…

Remix Is Clearly A Dry Run of Warband Systems, With Issues: You can unlock transmog caches from the vendors on any class, even if they can’t use it! A lot of things are not specifically soulbound in a way that would work really well with, say, a warband bank, but since that’s not here yet, it feels very strange. Achievements have some account-wide components, but also not fully, and it is still built on the backbone of the current achievement tracking levels and not the 11.0 systems. There’s some stuff here that is really forward-thinking and great, like those transmog caches, but then it falls short of the full Warband idea, which then makes the places where it does fall short feel far more annoying.

The Bad

WoW’s Scaling Content Has Always Been A Balance Nightmare, And Now We All Can See It: One of the big fusses about Remix content is that having, say, a Heroic dungeon with a mix of characters from level 10 to 70 is that the lower-level characters will always top the meters and do the most damage, while low-level healers can struggle big time due to scaling. WoW’s scaling, since Legion introduced it, has always suffered this – if you do a BfA dungeon on retail today in Normal mode, and get a group with genuine WoW newbs and leveled veteran players, guess who will do the most damage – the newbs, obviously. In order to make scaling not leave them out with less kit and stats, their contribution scales up more relatively, such that you’ll always see them top the meters, while healing amplification for low-level healers doesn’t often cover the gap as well. Remix just took a big part of the playerbase that doesn’t normally engage with that content and shined a huge light on it for them, so now they all get to see how totally fucked the scaling concept ends up being.

However, while I call this bad here, I want to draw a fine line and say this – I don’t necessarily care that lowbies are top performers by voodoo magic. What does matter and feel bad is that this scaling model makes leveling up feel bad – because you get weaker in a relative sense in the queued content you can do as you level up. At Remix launch, the scaling was also double-busted for fresh level 70s, starting at a higher point of gear progression that most players would not realistically hit, and that made it feel extra bad, where level 70s were often the highest-level and worst-performing parts of any group. That has been edged down significantly, but the overall progression of power is still a negative relationship that sees power decrease as level increases, and you can only start to really “fix” that for yourself by empowering gear at the endgame. Speaking of…

The Gear Upgrade System and Drops Fucking Suck: Okay, so I’m not opposed to WoW having gear progression, obviously. I play Retail primarily and Retail’s whole general deal is nudging your item level up in ever-smaller increments so you do bigger number. However, Remix fails at this front spectacularly because gear doesn’t drop higher than ilvl 346. Rarities mean something here, so you want as many Epics as you can get, but you can only really guarantee blue drops by doing Heroic dungeons and Normal raids, so once you get a full 346 blue gear loadout, you have to grind out hundreds of thousands of Bronze currency to buy those gear upgrades. There’s a compounding problem with this though – Bronze is also the only event currency and the one you use to buy all the fun rewards that will persist past the closing of the event. If you want to theoretically maximize your ability to earn Bronze on a single character, you need gear upgrades, but upgrading your gear in full with normal levels of Bronze income is a task that will take weeks, during a three-month limited time event. That’s a pretty big problem!

Blizzard’s been buffing Bronze income in multiple hotfixes now so that more players have more access, and that’s fine, but the actual design pacing of the upgrades is the real root problem, because it will still take around 500,000 Bronze to fully upgrade your gear on one character, and for that amount of Bronze, you could buy almost every reward that will stick around – but, without the gear power, you can’t push Heroic raids or Mythic Siege of Orgrimmar, and that reduces your Bronze income slightly, which also starts to naturally plateau and decay as you knock out achievements and reduce the number of reward Bronze caches available to you. Realistically, for a limited-time event, Blizzard should have tripled Bronze income and at least halved upgrade costs, but their approach to this event fits with a trend we’ll discuss in a moment.

Raid Lockout Design Sucks For Modern Raid Teams: My raid team opted out of pushing Season 4 raids past Normal, so we could get our mounts and do whatever we wanted, which, for the majority of the team, was playing Remix and raiding together in it. It wins the vote, I’m a democratic leader, let’s do MoP raiding in Remix! Awesome…until we attempt to zone in as a team of 18. 10 player doesn’t support a team that big, but my thought is that we’d do 25 player and tough it out since tinkers and scaling should help. Well, 25 player outside of LFR just isn’t available on Remix. Okay…so my group either has to split into two normal raids at or under 10 players each, or we have to group-queue LFR until we can do flex raiding in Siege of Orgrimmar, which excludes us from being able to help each other finish the Normal raids prior to Siege and get everyone their necklaces. This really fucking sucks and took the wind out of my sails personally. I didn’t even need full flex raiding, I was perfectly willing to do 25 player and deal with rough edges and potential prog problems – but they took that out. So it’s neither authentic to original MoP raiding nor an interpretation of the modern game through MoP – it’s some Frankenstein abomination that means a lot of retail raid teams just can’t raid as they usually do. Genuinely, I hate that, and it means I had to pivot our entire Remix plan around it, which feels bad and puts extra pressure on the people enjoying the process in slow, measured pushes through content, because now we can’t normal raid together until everyone is level 60.

I get that the limitations of Flex raiding are authentic to how the original Mists of Pandaria handled it (post the Warlords pre-patch at least), but this is one place in particular where I wish Blizzard had changed things up and pivoted away from the original design paradigm, or at least embraced the original raid design completely and just left 25-player as an option. Chopping off 25 but also not extending or opening up flex raiding across the board feels like a mistake and it reduced a ton of the hype my group had for playing Remix together.

The Ugly

Taking Action On Farms Without Immediate Rollbacks and Fixes Was An Awful Idea: In the first few days of Remix, players figured out that Gulp Frogs on the Timeless Isle could be farmed quickly. They hyperspawn, drop high Bronze and Lesser Charms which can be turned in for rep quests which give the Remix caches with more Bronze and Threads, and it was a perfect farm. It got nerfed, but only after a couple of days, and it took another week past that for players who used it to have their giga-cloaks suitably brought down. Let me say something controversial – I think that farming like that is dull, boring, and a sign the game’s core loop isn’t working well enough for players, and I think such things should be removed from the game, but it should also be replaced with suitable changes to how empowering your character does work in the mode. Blizzard took forever to think over how to solve the problem, leaving a caste system that emerged – the froggers and the peasants. People were cloak-checking group applicants and rejecting otherwise suitable players because they wanted the easy carry – it fundamentally broke the game for a week before Blizzard deigned to fix it.

There have been more hyperspawn farms since, and Blizzard has moved faster to reign those in, which has reduced reocurrence of the frog dilemma, but the core issue is a bigger one…

Blizzard Cannot Design Limited-Time, Limited-Restriction Events In A Thoughtful Way: Let’s go for a walk real quick.

Remember Torghast? I know, you might have wanted to forget, but let’s refresh. Torghast was announced as and said to be intended as this roguelike mode of play where, because its design constrained power within its walls, would allow you to go nuts with added powers. Anima powers were hyped as these huge, transformative things that would shape a run – and sometimes, they did (hell, I wrote a whole post about a Torghast Twisting Corridors run where a single power choice on the first floor defined the run and made it some of the most fun and engaging WoW gameplay I ever had). Torghast suffered from externalities to it, mostly that it was a forced gameplay mode to earn legendary crafting currencies, but it also suffered from Blizzard Balancitis – the idea that, even in this roguelike, limitless gameplay mode, Blizzard had to insist upon tuning the fun out, nerfing most anima powers and making it so that an average Torghast run felt just as constrained as any other WoW gameplay. There were tier lists of the best specs to do it on, you’d switch if you had a better option to get it over with faster, and everything flowed out from there. The fun police had tuned out the fun.

Remix reminds me of Torghast in that way. Remix is advertised as this fun, limitless mode of insane powers, account-wide growth, and the only constraint is the time limit, asking you to do all your powerleveling and reward buying before August 19th (the expansion’s global simultaneous release date? That’s my bet, btw). In practice, Remix is incredibly constrained – the experience rate is faster but not hugely so, the Cloak of Infinite Potential is crushingly not fully account wide, and the game turns quickly into optimizing Bronze farming rates, which exacerbates negative exploits like frog farming and that kind of bullshit over just playing the game, enjoying it, pushing a bunch of alts, and having a good experience. Gear upgrades pull players away from farming mounts and appearances in favor of pushing higher gear for some gains in temporary content, which hopefully buys them enough power to superfarm Bronze via content, but the upgrade path takes way, way too long for an event that started with a countdown of 93 days. Why are we upgrading gear from an arbitrary drop cap in a time-limited event, on a path that some estimates based on daily quests speculate would take 2/3rds of the event timeframe? Why was the design intent fully character-specific so all those alts I’d want to level would be pushed to reprog heroic dungeons, heroic scenarios, endgame story quests, and normal raids all just to get their gear slots filled out and with a cloak that demands its own reprogression?

On the one hand, there is a suitably high power level in the event so far and I cannot imagine what day 92 will feel like for someone who has done most of the dailies and gotten hundreds of stat threads per day. Boss kill times in LFR are shrinking by the hour and week 1 normal raiding felt so much harder compared to week 2, where tinkers proc and simply explode bosses into chunks. Yet at the same time, the progression path is still much too restrictive – a big part of why hyperspawn farms are such a thing is because doing the content on-the-level and as intended is not rewarding enough, and Blizzard has been incredibly slow to make bigger philosophical changes here. They’ve deployed hotfixes to up Bronze rewards, to reward those who didn’t hyperspawn farm with more Bronze, and to change scaling behaviors to avoid needing to super-prog a set of gear to raid, but the core issue is still that the gear upgrade system, ilvl drop cap, and rate of reward against those factors all combine to make Remix feel too constrained. To be fair, this is also only really a problem at the endgame of Remix – the leveling experience mostly feels really good and for all the alts I’m working on pushing to 70 via Remix, the adventure is more fun because I can just blitz my dailies with high power and have fun for an hour per character while moving towards my goals.

Like, short of actual mathematical code constraints, I don’t understand why this event cannot just be a constant speedrun. Account-wide cloak progress would mean each alt gets faster and faster, and it would be fun to try and see how short you could get 10-70 leveling time to. Gear upgrades being substantially cheaper or on a unique currency would allow players to engage with content on more alts and ensure that queues remain populated and groups are constantly running right up to the finish line. Why can’t it be set up so that I can roll a fresh level 10 alt that will start with 2 million HP and be able to one-hit a pack of 10 with their basic AoE ability? Why the fuck does it matter, Blizzard – the event is 93 days in totality and will see characters be immediately slapped with a giant nerf bat as they get sent to general population in retail! Why can’t this just be a fun and wacky thing with ridiculous numbers and crazy speedruns until The War Within hits?

I totally understand that Blizzard, by default, is trying harder to make evergreen features and things that can persist and live on, but this event is explicitly a limited time and has other constraints. Who cares if I level a billion alts? I can only ever have as many alts as I have character slots, which means the most possible characters someone could gain from this event is 65, and that would take a fair bit of determination to accomplish. I can also only level as many characters as I have time for within the constraints of a 93-day event – so I have two major limiters pushing down on me already! If cloak level is a concern, then clamp the stat gain on it – players have already found that a Stamina cap exists on the cape at 200,000, so why not just put a similar limit on every stat to keep the game sane and then open up account-wide progress?

So, while I normally try not to do what I am about to do, I’m going to put forward a list of things that I think would make Remix land a bit better.

Fixing?

Make Bronze Rain From The Sky: Every source of Bronze should be at least doubled. Daily quest rewards should be tripled. If I put in the modicum of effort needed to earn that level of Bronze, who cares that I can buy all the stuff easily? Sure, I’d make one exception – you could keep Bronze near to where it is now if gear upgrades moved off onto their own upgrade currency or methodology, but assuming the Bronze economy remains where it is today, if you massively pump the gains, a lot of the negative friction of the system peels off. It’s very deflating to chase Bronze orbs in the sky only to realize that they, even post-buffs, give less than 20 Bronze a piece and have a chance to seldom pop a single, level-appropriate cloak thread. The full assortment of daily repeatable content quests at level 70 gives enough Bronze to buy, at most, 4 Remix mounts or 1-3 gear upgrades. This isn’t a satisfying pace and it means that there is constant negative friction between gear upgrades and purchasing the limited-time event cosmetics. I don’t think that friction should be there, frankly. You could even improve this further by making the experience gain trait on the Cloak give max-level characters that percentage gain in Bronze instead, since they stop earning experience!

Give Gearing A Facelift: Why does gear dropping end at 346 item level, requiring you to push an absurd number of upgrade ranks to get it to the maximum of 556? If I want to be the most powerful I can be in this mode, I need that gear to be upgraded – a max item level weapon is worth as much main stat as a well-ground cloak – but if I want to upgrade my gear, I am constantly scrounging for Bronze with which to make those upgrades. There are a couple of things I see that could work to make this feel better. The first is for gear to drop with a high watermark, akin to the system that was used in New World (remember that game?) at launch. If I’m wearing 346, drop 360, make it so that the daily content grind allows me to constantly push my item level higher through drops. There’s random luck to it, but the volume of drops should offset the RNG in a satisfying-enough way. Second, gear upgrade discounts should be made account-wide as it is on retail. Right now, you do get a Bronze discount if you have a higher item level item in a given slot (which helps when switching greens to blues or blues to purples), but that is locked in Remix to just being on the one character. It should be account-wide, and there should be a force multiplier for having more characters in higher item level gear – each character with a slot over a given item level should cut the costs of that upgrade further for subsequent characters, giving me an incentive to push more alts down the gearing path. Third, I would like to see gear upgrades moved to their own track of either a unique currency or some other form. I think about how the cloak uses Threads, and it would be killer to be able to use Threads to either upgrade the cloak (for an account-wide benefit) or use them on gear, granting a number of upgrade tiers corresponding to the quality of the Thread item. Imagine the interesting friction of using that legendary-quality Thread from your raid daily to either boost your cloak by a huge amount of stats or to push a piece of armor or weapon up like 5 ranks – seems like an interesting choice I could make that would make the game have a positive friction!

Account-Wide Everything, Just Pull The Trigger: Why isn’t the Cloak fully account-wide? It should be, and hell, make me earn Infinite Power XII as an achievement on one character first to like, unlock that, but it would be nice! Progging the cloak feels bad at two ends right now – on my raiding main for Remix, her cloak is constantly getting LFR experience boost threads that are worthless to her, and my alts have to reprog their own cloaks beyond the silly minimal starting point you get for the Infinite Power achievements currently which means that putting effort into content on my main also feels bad because I want my alts to have more stuff. If you made experience gain turn to Bronze at 70, made cloak progress account-wide, and just let players cut loose, I think that would be pretty fun. Right now, thread gain is tuned around the same rate for everyone with the quality tiers by character level being the only big distinguishing point, so if someone wants to farm up 50 alts, their cape will be weaker, but who cares? The event is over in August and all of this becomes meaningless at that point save for what is left!

Allow Flexible Raiding, Or At Least Put Back 25-Player: I respect, to a point, the idea of maintaining some semblance of the original Mists of Pandaria raid content structure. However, this isn’t Mists Classic, and so we don’t really need to respect the original that much, do we? If you opened Mogu’shan Vaults, Heart of Fear, Terrace of Endless Spring, and Throne of Thunder to be flex raids on Normal and Heroic, it wouldn’t damage the event in the slightest, especially since the intent is that we can already stomp them with powerful enough tinkers and gear. Just figure out the scaling and make it work (and I don’t intend to downplay how difficult that could be as a design task, but it doesn’t need to be built for longstanding balanced gameplay). If that feels out of reach, at least just add back in the 25-player mode so that most flexible retail raid teams can zone in undersized, struggle a bit, but still play together and figure it out. Hell, to me, the idea of having a slight bit of progression in Remix and getting that feeling of accomplishment for doing it undersized seems like it would be very fun!

Overall, I want to revisit what I said up top – the tone of this post, while negative at moments, is a reflection of frustration with how close to being a near-perfect, fun pre-expansion gap filler the Remix event is. It is very fun to play most of the time, and that just puts the moments where it is less-so into sharp relief against the overall feeling of joy I get playing it. Long-term, I’d love to see Remix for expansions introduced as a part of seasonal content, designed and built specifically to be used during a season to funnel leveling players into a single-expansion experience with full content saturation to keep queues popping and the place feeling lively. It’s been a real kick so far seeing Pandaria again, doing it as Horde for the first time ever, and yet having it be this new and different thing to standard leveling or reliving it via Classic. While I do have some irritation as described here, I also want to be clear and say that I do give Blizzard some leeway for finding their way through this experiment – it was such a good overall idea that I’m glad they did it and even if the finished product has some rough edges, I think those edges can be sanded down in hotfixes and then further improved upon through some tweaks and redesigns in time for whenever they decide to bust out the concept again.

And that is what I hope for from this most – that we will see Remix again, both Pandaria and other expansions, as a way to keep players engaged with the long history and deep content base of World of Warcraft.