Mists news heating up

We're still about a week away from the Mists press tour, and another week from the NDA-lift (apparently they're prefer well-composed articles to announce the changes rather than a live-blogging event, prone to typos and ideas being misconstrued.)

Ghostcrawler has been more active as of late, talking about changes to buffs and debuffs and before that, stat changes. In all honesty, these changes are not huge-looking, but that's ok because in most cases, I think that system-wise, the Cataclysm arrangement has worked out ok (it will never be perfect, but even in Wrath, my favorite expansion, we had things like the 969 rotation and a lot of specs that were just useless at high levels of play (By late Wrath I saw basically only Arcane mages at the top of damage meters. Now it's almost always a different color depending on the group, and even specs like Arms are competitive. Not sure if I'll ever be able to go back to Subtlety on my rogue, but I have seen some Sub rogues do decent dps.)

Nice to have a buff directly affect Mastery (and by a fairly huge amount, actually) and it's probably ok that we got rid of the "+bleed damage" debuff.

One of the interesting things about the buff/debuff post is that it actually gave us a second, tiny peek at Monks. There's probably nothing I find more exciting in Mists of Pandaria than adding a new class (and a tank, at that, even if we got another one last time as well. In fact, if healing on a monk really lets you just target the boss, I might finally roll up a healer.) So, tiny tidbit though this is:

Monks will provide an equivalent to Blessing of Kings/Mark of the Wild, which no longer affect resistance (which is just gone) or stamina (which I guess is reserved for Fortitude, Blood Pact, and Commanding Shout,) but is just a 5% boost to your all three throughput stats (Str/Agi/Int.)

Windwalker Monks (the melee dps spec) will also provide +5 Mastery, which is a new buff that will also be provided by Shamans (not their totems, which are now all situational/active ones like Earthbind or Searing,) as well as Paladins via a redesigned Blessing of Might. Presumably this does not show up until after level 80.

Brewmaster Monks (the tank spec) will also, of course, provide "Weakened Blows," the standardized tank debuff, provided by any tank (Similar to the current Scarlet Fever, Vindication - which is essentially being rolled into Hammer of the Righteous, as well as the effects of Demoralizing Shout/Roar, except that they are now applied by Thunder Clap and Thrash. Apparently they want non-DK tanks using aoe abilities on single targets.)

Anyway, they're clearly getting to a point where they're comfortable to tell us more about Mists. All of the information that's coming up now is mainly for the number-crunchers to look at. Soon, however, we're going to see new information about the content, and that's where I think Blizzard has an opportunity to let things really shine, assuming they have the goods to back it up.

I refuse to call Cataclysm a bad expansion, because they really did do an excellent job revamping the 1-60 questing experience. That was their primary goal, and in that regard they were successful. However, I know I am not alone in my disappointment at the amount of late-game content. 5 raids in a whole expansion, especially given that none of them had over eight bosses, required a squeeze in difficulty between the beginning and the end, both of the expansion and the individual raids. Now, I'll grant that with Raid Finder available from the beginning, they will probably be able to get away with more punishing normal modes, but a large raid like Ulduar allows you to make simpler fights to start with, and give more casual guilds a foothold to start gathering gear while the hardcore race to the finish to start in on heroic mode.

So I'm a bit apprehensive, but I think I'm going off on a tangent here. Long story short: let's have big, winged raids again! Those were fun.

By late March, we will probably know a whole hell of a lot more about Mists of Pandaria. Expect the beta to come some time in the spring (hopefully earlier rather than later.) Assuming an early-to-mid spring Beta, I think we can be Panda-ing it up some time in the late summer or the fall.