Got a slew of things done before closing bell on WoW Cataclysm

The Cataclysm chapter of the World of Warcraft saga began to draw to a close last night.

At 3 a.m. California (Blizzard HQ) time, 6 a.m. east coast time, Blizzard closed the curtains on Cataclysm in preparation for the opening act of Mists of Pandaria — the upcoming WoW expansion which will go live September 25, 2012.

In four weeks, World of Warcraft players will be able to create Pandarian race characters.  The Pandarians are humanoid pandas.

While the night elf characters have a strong oriental influence to their architecture, MoP takes things a step farther.  The new race's environments seem decidedly Chinese.  And what could seem more Chinese than a race of panda bears in the game?

The flip side of "in with the new" is "out with the old".  Today, after hiatus that will last most of the daylight hours, Blizzard will be getting rid of some things which directly and indirectly affect a lot of players; their characters, their gold-making, and so on.

Here are some highlights of what are going away:

• fade to gray, relics going away — no longer something you can equip, these pieces of armor for paladins, death knights, shamans, and druids will be phased out
• you ain't got that slot; no, you not not not — there was a slot no every character's 'profile' window that showed all of his gear; armor, weapons, and a slot next to his 1 or 2 weapons for relics (toast!) or ranged weapons (guns, bows, crossbows, wands, thrown) … this slot goes away and non-relic weapons will be moved to the regular weapon slot if they are to be used at all by a character.

Relics were kind of expensive to make but it was possible to make high level ones using inscription, then disenchant them into a Heavenly Shard.  That enchanting material could then be sold in the auction house (AH) for what used to be about 100 golds during most of Cataclysm.  Seems like that will no longer be possible.

Here are some highlights of major boons for players starting either now or when MoP goes live:

• all these companions shall be yours — all of your characters on the same battle.net account will be able to summon the pets that any of them have learned [not sure if this happens today or in a month]
• non-combat pets shall be able to do combat against each other [in a month, I think]
• huge world event will pit Horde vs. Alliance at Theramore Isle on the continent of Kalimdor — Theramore is destroyed 

Alliance mages are going to be a little inconvenienced by the destruction of Theramore.  It is one of the not so many cities to which they can create a teleportation portal to from anyplace in the world, or simply teleport themselves to if they are not in a party: Teleport Theramore (spell).

The things I wanted to do this month were:

• disenchant the unbound (BoE) relics I had lying around (done)
• do battlegrounds (did some though more would have been better) to farm honor/conquest points
• do instances (did some though would love to have done tons more) to farm justice/valor points
• level some characters (raised a priest from 70 to 81, a couple mages from WoLK levels to mid-80s, a hunter from mid-60s to low 70s)
• bought more tabbed pages in my banker characters' guild banks (latest one just two minutes before the server shut down)
• created at least 4 more bags for one of my characters to use (he needed bigger bags badly)
• rescued items from in game mailboxes (only have 2-3 characters with any items in mail which will "expire" [auto delete] within next couple of days and no mail is expiring within next 24 hours
• updated some addons (unfortunately, vast majority of addons seem to not yet have been updated to MoP WoW 5.0 game client that goes live today)
• free up a ton of disk space on my computer (at one point I had over 25 GB free this month which is more free disk space than I have had in years) so that the game client can unpack/install itself today
• find out if anything other than relics was going to turn into a pretty valueless, unusable "gray" item (was unable to find any mentions of this but I am kind of uneasy since with most expansions I had stacks of items suddenly 'go bad' in my bank)

All in all, it seems like Blizzard takes its game franchise very seriously, fun as it is for them and their fans.

Each 'expansion' of the game has been accompanied by a month or so of something really special going on a some place(s) in the existing world of the game, prior to the introduction of a new place and the inception of a way to reach that place.

Blizzard seems to carefully plan not just the transportation mechanisms to the new area added by the expansion, but also carefully design and script a storyline addition and setting change that will act as a transition from the old way things were to the new place and way to get there.  They are magnificent storytellers and artists, not just programmers or game designers.

What amazes me is how much effort they must put forth to create a not so small amount of content that will exist for just over a couple dozen days.  I imagine that creates a drumbeat of urgency and practicality for the entire creative and technical staff during the project of creating a new expansion set.

It must create a little sense of nostalgia for the staff that when the new expansion fully goes live, something not incredibly tiny that they breathed some effort into will be retired forever after only one month on the job, so to speak.

I kind of know how they feel.  Just getting moderately ready for this new expansion (MoP) in terms of unloading/transforming things that I wanted to protect from becoming grays, getting enough bank slot space and bag space to hold not just current items but as yet non-existant items that I would need to accumulate this autumn as the effort to raise character levels and crafting profession levels from 85->90 and 525->?.

I have not really seen a lot of information about crafting professions' new recipes/patterns being introduced in MoP.  I did find a general preview of some Inscription additions.  Like a lot of people, I am waiting to see what is published at CraftersTome when the time is right, so I can study it properly.

As for the economics of the new professions' items, The Undermine Journal is going to be one of my stops.  I read this week that there is going to be a MoP edition of WoW-popular web site.  And I just now discovered a MoP edition of WowHead!

It is amazing how people put such real world skills into play when describing what the status and changes are n World of Warcraft.   In a small way, I find this kind of a big laugh — in a nice way.

A lot of people beta tested Mists of Panderia and the corresponding WoW 5.0 game client this year.  I was not one of them, for several reasons.  I did not want to fill up my hard disk with two versions of the game, worry about managing two populations of addons, and level characters in the temporary beta world while still trying to accomplish things in the real non-beata world. It is funny, but a lot of people apparently do not mind all of those drawbacks.

With WoW 5, the beta and the live versions of the game will have much less redundancy.  So, I might try the beta of some point releases out at some point this year or next.  It certainly makes the prospect less daunting.