Mists of Pandaria Release Date

Well, the release date has been announced, and it's September 25th.

I don't recall exactly when I predicted it earlier this year, but I think I guessed late August. A month off? Not so bad. So, we have an early-Fall release, meaning that the era of Cataclysm will have been Dec. 7th, 2010 to Sept. 25, 2012.

Honestly, this summer I have really been playing WoW far less than usual. With somewhat more work to do and somewhat low enthusiasm for raiding Dragon Soul, I've practically left my guys in cryo-stasis. I managed to get a decent amount of raid finder gear, including the Deathwing weapons on the dpsers of my Core Five, plus I got an (almost, just missing gloves) complete set of Mage tier 13 on the Draenei, which was a pre-expansion goal.

While I enjoyed the Hour of Twilight Dungeons, running the three of them over and over got a bit old. I do, really, really hope that they can make a "every heroic for this expansion" option in Mists, to widen the variety. Given that heroics are taking the place of level-cap dungeons, I hope that the difficulty will be such that we can breeze through them Wrath-style when we've outgeared them.

So, personal goals pre-Mists? The big one is that I need to finally get my Priest up to 85. Despite being a notorious altoholic, the one class I have never, ever had at the level cap is a Priest. Etharian, Blood Elf Shadow Priest, has just finished the first leg of the Deepholm quest chain, and he's just hit 83, so I'm not far off. A couple sessions working my way through Deepholm and Uldum (while I prefer TH over Uldum, it just seems right to have a Shadow Priest going through ancient tombs and such) and I should have my full set.

My experience of questing on the Beta has been very spotty, partially by choice. I understand that Jade Forest is getting revamped quite a bit, and especially seeing as I never got to see the "big event" of the zone I had heard about, I imagine there will still be new stuff for me to discover. I haven't done any questing there on Horde characters, either.

So for the next two months, other than getting Etharian up there, I expect I'll keep to the fairly limited play I've had for the last few months.

When it does release? Hm. While Monks (especially Brewmasters) are cool, I imagine that this time around I'll focus more on getting Jarsus leveled and geared. Without the call of Death Knights or Worgen to pull me away from my main (well, other than Oterro and Ardten, but they can sit tight) I think I'll be able to focus on getting into heroics and raid finder.

I think the ultimate verdict on the Monk is that yes, I am going Pandaren. As much as I know everyone and their mom is going to be playing a Kung Fu Panda, ultimately it's the way I'm going to have to go, just mathematically.

So, exactly two months. See you in Pandaria.