Ghostcrawler Gives Vision Of Buffs For Mists of Pandaria

Written by: Scott Hawkes (@jarimor) | March 9, 2012 3:00 pm

1 Comment

Ghostcrawler is a very busy fellow at the moment. Hot off his blunt review of Cataclysm, Greg Street took the time to outline the direction of buffs and debuffs for Mists of Pandaria.

There is a fine balance to be struck between making buffs available and making certain characters necessary for successful raids – a repeated problem in the past. Although it is interesting to see the ideas on how buffing will be handled in Mists of Pandaria, the reason for this sudden steady stream of information is obvious: Beta is coming.

With the MoP press event embargo being lifted on March 19, we are being prepared for the response from those who get their hands on the expansion. The messaging is being prepared and framed ahead of time, with these updates being part of that.

April is going to be a busy month for Betas – Guild Wars 2, DUST 514, and more – and it seems more and more likely that Mists of Pandaria will add to the tumult.

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Ghostcrawler Gives Vision Of Buffs For Mists of Pandaria

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Old Ben

> the reason for this sudden steady stream of
> information is obvious: Beta is coming.

There has been a fairly steady stream of information about MoP since BlizzCon 2011. Blizzard released videos and even instance maps before final boss in the previous expansion (Deathwing) had even been put in the game (something that would have been unthinkable in previous expansions).

While it’s unarguable that beta (and release, and the future in general) is getting closer, this release of information seems more about keeping people interested in WoW than about MoP itself. If Cataclysm (and, specifically, 4.3) had been more popular and more successful, Blizzard would probably have tried to keep information about the next expansion a secret for as long as possible, not only to increase the impact of its release but also to avoid giving too much away to the competition.

Why would Blizzard not want people to talk about the buffs after the press event? Surely that would only give game journalists a reason to write more articles about WoW. That’s why we’ve seen so many updates on the talents; each time they release an update, they know it’s not final, but they also know they’ll get a lot of press coverage.

“You don’t have to report on it” would only make sense if they thought that reporting on it would be harmful to Blizzard (and, in that case, they wouldn’t be releasing information about it now, either).

This isn’t about what might happen after the press event or the beta, this is about what’s happening now.

They want to keep WoW in the headlines, and they don’t want those headlines to be about the layoffs or the nonsensical changes to the scroll of resurrection (which essentially reward people who left WoW with a free copy of Cataclysm, free levelling and free game time, instead of rewarding the ones who kept paying their subscription).