I have to say, I loved the new talent points. I say that as a max level character, though, it seems like it will be very depressing not getting talent points for a very long time.
That said, I felt like I had decent choices, at least. Ultimately on my DK I chose mostly passive abilities because I have enough situational buttons to press as it is and didn’t want to add even more.
Thanks - I finally noticed the “What’s Changed?” tab in one window or another.
I’m just excited that Cata is finally going to die, and all my guildies who unsubbed will be coming back. It’s been 9+ months without a single iota of new content on live, so I’m pretty fuckin’ antsy to get the wait over with. Account-wide mounts and pets are pretty huge for me! I got to rescue the white hawkstrider and three-seater VOA mammoth sitting on long-since abandoned toons. And now all of my characters can show off my violet proto. 
It doesn’t grant alts 310% flying, but I’m okay with that. It still functions at 280% flight speed.
I played on a friend’s beta account for a few weeks, and really REALLY enjoyed the monk class, the panda race, and the new zones. I got my monkda there to 90 by healing a bunch of dungeons, and did a few heroics and 2 scenarios before I decided not to spoil the rest for myself. The mistweaver playstyle is super-cool. Roll/chi torpedo is hands-down my favorite ability EVER in this game. EVERRRR. And some random thoughts: Cooking got awesome with the ways of the pot/steamer/etc. It takes more ingredients to make stuff (like vegetables AND meat/fish AND soy sauce). Which, in one way that’s a hassle, but it’s much more realistic. I really like the icons for the new cooking mats. Leeks look like real leeks! The farm thing is a bit confusing, but it goes along with cooking and is awesome–the panda farmer dude’s story is so sweet. Make sure to get yourselves a yak ASAP! They are the freaking adorablest ground mount I’ve ever seen. I don’t understand how cloud serpent rep works at all yet, but they look pretty cool. I’ll probably head back and finish my netherdrake rep while everyone is busy with cloud serpents, though.
I’ll spoiler the rest of my observations since they might technically be considered spoilers (not wrt plot, just game hints). [spoiler]There is no neutral city like Dalaran/Shattrath in MoP. Because they’re re-emphasizing the faction split with this expansion, there are 2 separate main cities for horde and alliance. Don’t run into the wrong one! (ask me how I know :p) You can’t just walk up to a trainer and learn level 90 flying, it requires a questline to open up that zone (although maybe you could get summoned there, I didn’t test that). But if you start the quest chain early, you can get to your faction’s main city and flying trainer at level 87. This is the breadcrumb quest you will need before you can get to Vale of Eternal Blossoms and train your flying. I *highly *recommend questing in Kun-Lai summit (particularly Temple of the White Tiger) so you can just hearth and get flying right away upon ding.
Make sure to note that motes/spirits of Harmony are soulbound, but not the items you purchase with them. Harmonies are the new volatile, and the ONLY volatile, and can be used to purchase high-end crafting stuff before you even hit 90 (leather, cloth, herbs, dust, and ore). The crafters going for server first are going to be bottlenecked as hell by these mats, so you can trade harmonies for mats, sell the mats, and make a crapton of money if you don’t need them yourself. [/spoiler] Incidentally, I’ve already told my GM that I wanted to be our guild’s token mistweaver, and he was cool with that. I’m so excited! My current healing main is a priest, and they’re shaping up pretty weakly at the moment, so changing mains was an easy argument to sell. Well, that and we’re super-casual about raiding anyway. So yes, I’m excited for MoP. I’ve got a name picked out, too: mine! A female panda monk named Rachel, heheh (deleted my old rogue that I never played anyway, to free up the name). Fun times will be had! Although leveling a monk at 80+ on a PVP server so soon after MoP’s release assures that I’ll be perma-camped in the overworld. ;_; I may just heal dungeons to level, as soon as I muster up a high-enough gear level.
Yes. Already got my 80 levels saved up and ready to grant. I won’t be able to take time off work to level (I *hate *that expansions drop on Tuesdays instead of the weekend), so it’s the only way I’m going to have a raid-ready monk in any kind of a timely fashion. I’ve got 4 embersilk bags, head and back 80+ heirlooms for both WW/MW specs, and a full set of green/blue level 80-81 agility gear to ease the transition to Hyjal. Leatherworking has a few pieces in that level range, which are handy, but most of it was BoE off the auction house. Buy now if you can, because the closer we get to MoP, the higher prices are getting for leather cata greens. And you don’t want to take a nekid level 80 panda to Hyjal, unless you have help.
Make sure to get your monk as close as possible to dinging without actually dinging, because that full bar of xp will translate up and get you that much closer to 81 (you probably already knew that, but just in case!). I don’t know if you’re going to make your monk a panda, but I am going to. I actually went as far as to create a panda monk on beta and leveled it to test this. By killing absolutely nothing beyond exactly what was necessary for quests (and without heirlooms, of course), I was 5 bubbles away from level 12 once I landed in Dranosh’ar Blockade. After doing Garrosh’s quest in Orgrimmar, I was 3.5 bubbles away from 12. At level 11 with no heirlooms or rested, killing a level 9 enemy grants 64xp. A level 10 grants 81 xp. And a level 11 grants 100 xp. So, with a little napkin math and careful boar-killing in Durotar, I easily managed to get within 50 xp of dinging level 12. That’s exactly what I’m going to do on live when I make my monk, because after level-granting I’ll be a gnat’s eyebrow away from 81. /brofist
I only played the beta up until post-starting area. I have to say I really wasn’t impressed with the Panda starting area. It really felt like a huge step backwards to me from the Goblin and Worgen starting areas. Nowhere near as good as the DK starting area either, but that’s a given.
I specced my monk into DPS at 10 and really wasn’t feeling it, I do like the Monk class in general though. I’m thinking this may be my first dedicated healer or tank (or both, but I suck at getting offsets and get bored of it well before I actually accomplish anything). I haven’t decided whether Mistwalker or Brewmaster seems cooler. I’ll probably end up going with Bremaster because Chen Stormstout is the best character from WCIII.
I hate that they drop right in the middle of my job’s busy season when I have no time to play.
Spent some more time yesterday getting more of my toons updated. To a certain extent, I think they changed too much. My taking a 6-month break meant I was going to have to refamiliarize myself with my characters anyway, but in some cases so many things have changed that I can hardly find a starting point. Instead of looking over my action bars and trying to remember what my attack rotation was, I’m looking at action bars with empty holes that held spells/abilities that no longer exist or got renamed or whatever, and wondering, “What was in that spot before, and what should I plug into it now?” It’s like my problem with DKs all over again - too many [new] abilities all at once instead of being able to learn them one at a time.
I’m especially baffled by the apparent removal of Rend from the Arms warrior’s skillset. It was always the “opener” in my Arms warrior’s attack chain after Charge, and I’m kind of at a loss as to what to replace it with.
Look under the “core abilities” tab to give you an idea of what the key spells/abilities should be for your class and spec and go from there.
Yes, it’s a big change. We’ve had big changes before, it’s just been awhile. I usually go out and grind some trash to re-learn how to use my toons when it happens, then gradually work up to more complex things: quests, 5-man’s, BG’s, etc.
It’s gone and good riddance if you ask me. It was one of those skills that was barely worth using on trash mobs and on boss types you used it once at the start of the fight and relied on Mortal Strike to refresh it, now it’s simply included in Mortal Strike(and Thunderclap). Besides, with the removal of stance requirements on all warrior skills the extra action bar space was needed.
Yeah, I’ve pretty much just been doing the “easy” dailies that I’m very familiar with while I try to get used to the new stuff. I did some regular questing on a handful of lower-level toons — my undead warrior and gnome rogue were both level 56 and questing in Burning Steppes when I took my break, and yesterday I picked up where they left off (it turned out that they were both at the exact same point in the Burning Steppes quest chain - I hadn’t realized that) and they both dinged 57. My orc warlock was parked in Orgrimmar at level 59, and I was surprised when all it took was doing the Org cooking and fishing dailies for her to ding 60. Though I was actually glad it happened there, since it was convenient to immediately train flight and purchase her Old Weather Flying. I took her to do a bit of questing in Hellfire Peninsula, and started to get the hang of all her changes. Playing my level 16 dwarf rogue was pretty simple, since his skillset was still small enough that not much had changed.
As far as my 85s, I ran some dailies on my tauren paladin and my nelf hunter. The paladin required some relearning, but the hunter was still pretty straightforward.
Well, I play exclusively Arms on my warriors, and as a dedicated solo player I’ve pretty much never left Battle Stance 
But speaking of action bar space … ugh. My bars are a mess. I’ve used the Dominos bar replacement for a long time, but shortly before I took my break I’d started experimenting with nUI, a complete UI replacement. That required moving a lot of my icons around to fit into nUI’s setup. So when I came back I decided I wasn’t liking nUI and turned it off and went back to Dominos, which of course means that my icons are now shuffled all over the place. I had a fairly consistent “action bar philosophy” across all of my characters - primary attack abilities go here, utility abilities go here and here, professions here, food, potions, and hearthstone go there, wardrobe changes there, mounts over here, etc. I think I’m going to just have to completely empty my bars and rebuild everything.
I also remapped my movement keys. I’ve gotten really used to City of Heroes’ setup, and like it better. Not a big change, though, just swapping “Turn Left” with “Strafe Left”, and “Turn Right” with “Strafe Right”. So instead of ASDW, it’s now QWES (I never strafe anyway).
I’m always really interested to hear how other people move in WoW. I rebound movement to ESDF a long time ago (where S and F are strafe, since keyboard turning is so slow). And I turn with the mouse instead of the keyboard, which is much faster. It also frees up keybinds to the left of my left hand, which rocks since I keybind so many things.
Pally tanking got very interesting. There’s some stuff that isn’t on the GCD anymore (like wog and the shield slam that costs holy power), or maybe they’re on a separate GCD? It was a little confusing to pick up, but fun! Definitely upped my APM. I’ve never liked tanking on any character before, but it’s pretty cool.
Yup, I do that too. There are just those times, though, when I need to take my right hand off the mouse — hit a key on the number pad where I have some things bound, scratch my nose, take a drink — but I don’t want to stop moving, so it’s good to have some left-hand steering for a moment.
I was disconcerted to discover that Retribution paladins have lost all their healing powers except for Flash of Light (and Lay on Hands, but that doesn’t really count). Also Divine Storm now requires Holy Power (3 charges) instead of generating Holy Power.
I do like that my level 85 paladin can now have up to 5 charges of holy power instead of being limited to 3. I didn’t see where that was a level 85 ability, but my level 82 pally doesn’t seem to have that ability yet.
Well, we still have Word of Glory, too, the one that spends Holy Power.
And it heals you for a bit, too, even if you use it without a target, apparently.
Is that what’s happening? I wondered why I kept having 2 charges left after spending 3…
Happened with all of the hybrid classes. My elemental shaman can now only cast Healing Surge, Healing Rain, and Chain Heal (no more Healing Wave/Greater Healing Wave), my shadow priest can now only cast Renew, Power Word: Shield, Flash Heal, Binding Heal and Prayer of Mending. My Balance druid can only cast Rejuvenation, Tranquility and Healing Touch. I don’t really know why they went this route. On the plus side, they gave both Balance Druids and Shadow Priests a glyph that allows you to use certain heals without dropping Moonkin/Astral or Shadow forms.
They’ve been going the “if you’re going to specialize, specialize damnit” route for a long time, this is simply another step in that direction. How long has it been since they changed the previous spec mechanics to where you needed 31 points in one tree before the others opened? Same thing.
Spoiler regarding Garrosh
Garrosh is the final boss of this expansion according to the devs at a press event, we have to raid Org to take him down. I expect the Sha are involved in taking him further down the path to warmonger maybe even madness.
Anyone else noticing lots of new players? Our guild is getting new members every day. With the normalisation of the Guild XP (and rep, hurrah for teleport cloaks on alts!) we are levelling quite quickly now.
martu’s spoiler is the first thing I’ve read about MoP that makes me think about getting back into WoW :).
My new baby shaman was revered with my guild by level 30. 
I love this change!
Re: martu I’m horde, and oh my god I’ve wanted to wipe the floor with Garrosh forEVER. I hate that smarmy bloodspattered fuckass, and I hope that Aggra (Thrall’s girlfriend) becomes the new warchief.
Really? I looked all through my spellbook, and couldn’t find Word of Glory on either paladin when I first logged in after the patch went live.
It would be great if we still do have it – if I had any unused Holy Power after a fight, I would hit WoG to heal myself up before the next one. Without it, I feel lost!
Guess I need to take another pass thru the spellbooks and see if it’d hiding somewhere.
Well, I’ve used it repeatedly on the three paladins I’ve logged in so far. You get it fairly early - my level 30 paladin has it.
Wild speculation: I think it’d be cool if it involves the Flesh-shaping or Spiritbending magic of the Mogu in some way, especially since the Mogu are allied with the Zandalari. We know that Garrosh and Vol’jin hate each other’s guts, so what if a Mogu-taught Zandalari representative shows up offering to bring a more loyal tribe of Trolls into the Horde and offer him untold personal power through the use of their allied Mogu brethren’s “new” magic, resulting in an incredibly powerful but even more dangerous Garrosh? Bonus if an extra Sinestra/Algalon raid boss turns out to be the mysterious Prophet Zul of the Zandalari tribe
I haven’t noticed a lot on Cairne, but I’ll grant you I play mostly at night (midnight-8am) when a lot of folks are in bed.