Information Overload

There's way too much new information for me to sum up here, so I'm just going to leave this here on the table. Go on, take a look. Or not.

Anyway, much as we suspected, Mists is pretty far along. We're going to get the Beta very soon, though we don't have an exact date. I would guess within a month.

We now have an idea of how Monks will work - apparently they will use Energy like Rogues and Cat Druids, but have a sort of Holy Power/Rune kind of system, with Energy abilities building up Chi. Unlike Holy Power, abilities will cost a specific amount of Chi, so you can pool up to 4 and then, say, spend 3 on  one ability and 1 on another. Also, they have auto-attack back (lack of auto attack was probably insane to balance against the other classes, so I'm not terribly upset about that.)

One last thing about the Monk: Being designed from the ground up with "active mitigation" in mind, Monks have a huge number of damage-reduction abilities. I'm not even sure they get an armor boost with their stance, though even with the abilities they have I'm not sure how they could get away with that.

Probably the biggest shocker of the Press Tour is the announcement of the Siege of Orgrimmar. This is going to be the final raid of the expansion, and it looks like none other than Garrosh Hellscream is its final boss. I'm actually a bit conflicted here, because if you ever did the big Garrosh quest chain in Outland, you're basically responsible for Garrosh setting aside the guilt of what his father did. If you'd just left him alone, he would have just sat sulking harmlessly in Garadar, and maybe we'd have Saurfang as the interim Warchief during the Cataclysm. (Oh holy shit, can he be the Horde-side leader in that raid?)

Like I've said before, Garrosh is a terrible Warchief, betraying the "mission statement" of Thrall's Horde by pursuing conquest and casting aside the wisdom of the shamans. That said, terrible people can make awesome characters. Garrosh is actually quite complex. He does have a code of honor, but he doesn't really know how to apply it. Sure, he shows up to punish Krom'gar after the events of Stonetalon Mountains, but ultimately it was his super-militaristic philosophy that allowed the Horde to think it was ok to bomb a civilian target in the first place.

So killing Garrosh kind of makes him a tragic figure. Not quite MacBeth (because he didn't murder anyone to become Warchief - at least, not intentionally,) but I see the Siege of Orgrimmar as his kind of Birnham Wood moment.

That said, we don't necessarily have to kill him. We don't know what he's going to do to cause even the Horde to rise up against him, but assuming that there's still some redeemable value in him, buried deep, I think it would be interesting to, after defeating him, merely exile him to Outland. We've toyed with the idea of redeeming various villains. There was an entire quest chain in Icecrown whose conclusion basically explained why we wouldn't be able to redeem Arthas. Deathwing was too far gone, but in a way, Wrathion is a living redemption for the Black Dragonflight (though he does have you murder all of his relatives, and he's kind of terrifying himself.) Garrosh is the first expansion-ending villain who is just an ordinary mortal. Hell, we were able to rescue and redeem his dad in Warcraft 3 (well, rescue him for about five minutes until he got blown up when Mannoroth exploded.)

There is so much information here that I don't think I can cover everything in this post. So I'll just leave it here and pick it up a bit later. Just as a final thought: Mists looks pretty amazing. I'll admit I was a bit unsure when I first heard about it, but the enormous amount of new endgame content bodes very well. Also, 14 bosses in tier 14! That's more like it!