I've been working on the new factions and getting a better sense of them. So far, at least, I'm finding them more enjoyable than Golden Lotus or the other 5.0 rep grinds. Whether this is because of the novelty of it or just good design, I can't say.
Well, as a caveat to that, the design is not really much better, and some of the less conventional rep grinds, like Tillers, were probably more inspired design. The main thing that I'm absolutely loving with these new factions is the in-between quests.
With Mists, Blizzard seemed to realize that they could make one-shot quests that used not only the normal break-points of Friendly, Honored, Revered, and Exalted, but also points in between. For example, you'll make new friends in the Tillers grind, or you'll be able to take new Shado-Pan buddies along.
While I'm not terribly far into the Shieldwall/Dominance grind on either side, so far there's been a welcome number of these plot-development quests. I expect that I will hit exalted with these guys before I do with any of the four 5.0 VP-gear reputations, just to see the story.
I'm a bit farther with the Alliance side of things. After a couple days, you'll be sent to Stormwind to get a dwarf SI:7 agent out of retirement. There's a fun little quest where you learn the very basics of spycraft before meeting with the guy and convincing him to come to Pandaria. The fact that this takes place in Bizmo's Brawlpub is a bonus. While I'm still very skeptical of the implementation of the Brawler's Guild, I love the actual location under the Deeprun Tram.
A couple days after that, I was sent to infiltrate Garrosh Hellscream's camp in Kun-Lai (formerly the tiny Yaungol camp where you burn the guy's banner and he comes at you.) You and the dwarf are disguised as grummles, and you have to plant surveillance devices in the camp as well as steal some archaeological notes literally behind Hellscream's back. So far, that's all I've done, but I expect things will get quite dramatic, given what I heard about Jaina's takeover of Dalaran, and the troubling goals Garrosh seems to have.
After doing the very first quests to get the Dominance Offensive up and running for the Horde, Vol'jin shows up, criticizing Garrosh for taking the war to yet another land. Garrosh sends Vol'jin to investigate what the Mogu have been up to, and sends some Kor'kron along with him. This leads into the scenario Dagger in the Dark, which plot-wise, you should do right after you do those first quests.
You and Vol'jin fight your way into that Saurok cave that leads to Kun-Lai, eventually discovering that the Saurok were built by the Mogu as custom-made monster soldiers. Vol'jin is obviously troubled by this, but the Kor'kron come in and basically tell him the whole reason he was sent there is because Garrosh wants to use this power to make super-soldiers for the Horde. Vol'jin basically tells them they are nuts, and the Kor'kron leader stabs him in the gut. Looks like this was a set-up! The Kor'kron guy wants there to be no witnesses, which means he wants you dead, so you have to fight him off.
This is it: finally, the turning point where Garrosh's downfall at your hands begins. We've been waiting for this since the guy first became Warchief. After killing off the Kor'kron commander and his goons, Vol'jin, who is nearly dead from the poisoned dagger, asks you to swear a blood oath to help him save the Horde from Garrosh's madness. Vol'jin goes into hiding as he tries to recover, and sends you back to be his mole in Garrosh' organization.
So whatever your attitude toward the Alliance, it's still pretty reasonable that you would join in the Dominance Offensive to act as Vol'jin's man or woman inside. I've done fewer days of these dailies. One nice thing about them is that even though they take place in the same locations as the Alliance ones, the goals are often different. For example, defending Dominance Keep, you will eventually be sent to kill the captains of two attacking ships (something my Rogue is especially well equipped to do.)
After a few days of this (having hit friendly) I got my first one-shot quest. You meet with Garrosh and... Lor'themar Theron! Holy shit, are they actually giving him something to do? And they gave him a new voice that sounds less like Adam West and more like Cam Clarke (though ironically, I do not think it is actually Cam Clarke, despite the fact that he voices a ton of things in WoW, most notably of course, the male blood elf player character.) Anyway, the Reliquary is in town, and you go to help them investigate an area in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. After fighting off a stone quillen, you recover a tablet describing the Divine Bell, an extremely powerful Mogu artifact that seems to have been built using the remains of a Titan. It's actually the text of this tablet that Alliance players find at Garrosh's camp, so I think we can be confident that this thing's going to be important.
The Mogu have been portrayed as a kind of foreshadowing for Garrosh throughout this expansion. We see their reign of brutality, and heard about how it was overthrown by the oppressed after they realized that all they needed to do was to stand up to them. So it's not very surprising that Garrosh seems to find these people fascinating. Garrosh wants to learn as much as he can about their magics and methods, apparently wanting to emulate them. The guy has clearly lost sight of the big picture, and doesn't seem to know, or at least care, that the Mogu are reviled by the rest of the Pandarian people and that they were ultimately taken down. We all know that the same thing is going to happen to him by the end of all of this. The question, then, is simply how much damage is he going to do before we can stop him?
The fact that we are now able to resist against Garrosh and not merely tow his line makes it a lot more fun to play Horde again. The strength of the Horde as a part of the story, I've always thought, is the subversion of the typical "bad guy" faction. Much as the Klingons were redeemed by fleshing out their culture and seeing what it was that brought them into conflict with the Federation, it's quite interesting to see the Horde as a group of normal people who were pushed into a destructive way of life. The thing that's been annoying playing Horde recently is that Garrosh is very much a return to the old days of the Horde. It feels as if you were living in Germany and all of a sudden people started wearing jackboots and talking about how western Poland really ought to be part of Germany. Until now, there's been very little one can do to fight back against the Horde's descent into fascism (well, Garrosh's form of fantasy-world fascism,) but with the direction Mists is going, it looks like Horde players will be able to be more like Rommel - serving their people as best they can while at the same time working to undermine the disastrously evil regime that has taken hold.
While the Alliance and Horde are shown to be evenly matched, it's also feeling a bit better to play Alliance. Cataclysm was kind of a series of defeats and retreats. While finishing the Gilneas zone had a bit of a "Dunkirk spirit" feel to it, it was still very much a defeat (like Dunkirk, actually) and we never really got an opportunity to strike back and make the Horde pay. Theramore's destruction was the cherry on top of the shit-sundae that the Horde was serving to the Alliance, but it also provided the Alliance with motivation to really get their act together. Doing "A Little Patience" shows you how effective the Alliance can be when they're working at peak efficiency, and Varian, who seemed so belligerent during Wrath, has grown more thoughtful. Operation Shieldwall might be messy, but its goal really does seem to be to protect Pandaria from being conquered in the name of the Horde.
As I've said before, I don't really RP in-game, but I do have basic personalities to my characters, with backstory. My human Paladin and undead Rogue I consider brothers. Jarsus, the paladin, I've always thought of as being extremely hopeful for a reconciliation with the Horde, and has tried to avoid conflict with them as much as possible. Darsino, the rogue, has no qualms about killing those he is paid to kill, but at the same time he recognizes that war with the Alliance is ultimately a distraction, and that the Horde would be a lot better off if they tried to end the conflict peacefully. The thing is, Jarsus is sworn to protect the innocent. While Thrall was Warchief, the Horde were a potential ally in that cause. But with Garrosh in control, and especially the destruction of Theramore, Jarsus has realized that Garrosh's Horde poses just as much of a threat to the helpless and innocent as any of the other, more supernatural threats he's come across. So, reluctantly, he's taken up arms against them. Darsino actually took the Pandaria assignment to get away from Garrosh (along with Sylvanas' even greater spiral into tyranny,) but now that the fleets have arrived, he's forced to do what he came to do. He's been planning to turn on Garrosh as soon as the time is right, and with the attack against Vol'jin, he realizes that the time is coming soon, so for now he is biding his time.
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