Patches and Tiers!

Blizzard has said something interesting about Mists of Pandaria. Theoretically, Mists will be "complete" in the box. That's to say, the story of Mists of Pandaria will wrap up with the first tier of raids. Not to worry, though, because there are still going to be additional tiers of content and patches with additional instances and other such things.

I've been trying to figure out what that means, exactly. My understanding is that when we head to Pandaria, the threat of the Sha and the Mogu and the Mantid are all going to be the main things on everybody's minds (plus, the Alliance v. Horde conflict.)

However, the way this makes it sound is that after tier 14, the Mogu and the Mantid, and possibly even the Sha, will all be dealt with. This is fairly contrary to how things have gone in the last two expansions. Yogg-Saron and Loken's forces were clearly a big part of the story in Northrend, and of course the Scourge remained a threat until Arthas was dead. In Cataclysm, Deathwing was torching entire zones until 3.3 hit, and while Ragnaros and his fire elementals were really only present in Hyjal, it was still one of the big stories.

So we're left with a few questions. First off, how many tiers of raiding content are we going to have? Vanilla had 3 official tiers, but Ahn'Qiraj sort of slipped in between tiers 2 and 3 - a bit surprising given how huge the AQ raids are. Arguably Naxxramas-40 should have been considered tier 4. Burning Crusade actually came out of the box with two and a half tiers of content, with all of tiers 4 and 5, and the Hyjal half of tier 6, with Black Temple, Zul'Aman, and Sunwell Plateau coming in patches. Wrath had 4 full tiers, each tier coming with each major content patch, plus a couple of bonus instances thrown in there. Admittedly tier 9 was only 5 bosses (not counting Onyxia,) but it was also their first experiment with true heroic mode raids (as opposed to the "hard modes" they had experimented with in OS and Ulduar.) Cataclysm once again had three tiers.

I don't know what the plan is for Mists of Pandaria, but given the amount of time they have to work on endgame content because of the lack of an old-world revamp, my hope is that we can get larger raids and more tiers of them. Tier 14 is supposed to have 14 bosses, which bodes well.

So if we assume that tier 14 is going to be us finishing off the Mogu, Mantid, and Sha threats, what does that leave us? On one hand, there's not a lot we can say having yet to see the new zones. However, I think it's likely we're going to deal with the Zandalari - maybe not permanently, but I would not be shocked to see a raid dedicated to them. According to Blizz, the Zandalari are old allies of the Mogu, and much as the Alliance and Horde are grabbing land and resources, so are the Zandalari. I actually think that Blizzard is setting the Zandalari up as essentially a third major mortal faction. I doubt we're going to see a third playable faction, but the Zandalari could eventually take on the form of a "team yellow" opposed to the Alliance's "team blue" and the Horde's "team red." If the Zandalari were to recruit the Mogu and some other races to their side, things could get very interesting indeed.

So I'm going to put the Zandalari as a possible tier 15 threat.

We've only seen glimpses, but there appears to be something Titan-made in Mogu'shan palace. I actually think that given the Mogu's stone-like flesh and the fact that A: they were put in charge of what is now called Pandaria and B: had the ability to shape other races, it would not surprise me at all to find that the Mogu are another Titanic race, like the Earthen, Vrykul, Mechagnomes and Tol'vir. It strikes me that something has to account for the fact that Pandaria's remained hidden for so long. Could it be a Titan device, akin to the one that was hiding Uldum? Does that mean that there's a Titan facility hidden somewhere in Pandaria? It stands to reason.

Obviously, whatever the final tier of Mists is, we're heading to Orgrimmar. While we know that Garrosh is going to be sent into forced retirement (though they have not said explicitly whether that retirement will be spent 6 feet underground,) we only have a few hints of what leads the Horde to turn on him (for the Alliance, it should be obvious.) We do know that Ragefire Chasm is getting the Stockades treatment - a revamp, but no heroic mode - and we're going to encounter some "Dark Shaman" and a huge berserker Orc like Gurtogg Bloodboil. We've heard that each patch is going to escalate the war, so it seems like these bad influences should be coming more and more to the forefront. While I imagine any sort of "Dark Horde - not to be confused with the Dark Horde in Blackrock Spire" raid is likely to just be the Siege of Orgrimmar, we might start seeing some stuff about them, or just the war in general, in patches.

So, so far I have: Mogu, Mantid, Sha, and then possibly Titans, Zandalari, Alliance v. Horde stuff, and finally Siege of Orgrimmar, which could account for 3 or 4 raiding tiers. Check back here in two years to see if I was right!