Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Last week, I mentioned how little we know about the pandaren. This week, we're going to speculate on what that could mean. Like all speculation, this is not meant to be taken as established game lore. This is just us playing around with some what if's based on the few things we do know. We all know how the Tinfoil Hat works by now, yes? So let's put it on and start speculating.

We're told that the pandaren (along with the jinyu and the hozen) revolted against their mogu masters and overthrew them in a long, protracted series of horrific battles that cost many lives on both sides. Eventually, despite the mogu having access to ancient and terrible magic and fearsome weapons, their society (dedicated to slavery and domination) was simply too rigid and dependent on others to perform the tasks the mogu did not wish to and it could not adapt to the new reality of all of its slave races attacking it. As we saw when the mogu created the saurok, their arrogance led them to be unable to perceive how other people thought. Instead, they assumed all peoples thought as they did. Cooperation in a mutual goal instead of dominance baffled them. In the end the mogu lost, and were cast down from their seats of power.

But for two thousand years after that, the pandaren held control over the architecture of dominance that the mogu created. It was not until the reign of Shaohao, the last pandaren emperor, that the true nature of the sha was understood and Pandaria was sealed behind its mists for 10,000 years. What were the pandaren before that?

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.

Harassment comes in many forms. Sometimes it's a one-off, like last week's letter. The bullying was ongoing, but by different people in discrete incidents. Harassment can also be felt from generalized statements made to the public, such as racial remarks in trade chat. But this week, we talk about ongoing harassment or stalking. The actions we say to take are not for someone who was being harassed, but the stalker stopped. Nor are they for someone who just doesn't want to ever hear from another player, but nothing offensive has actually happened.

Stalking = ongoing harassment = a serious problem. This week, we tackle the issue by offering some advice to help reduce -- and hopefully eliminate -- this very harmful drama.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Our first question today is on everybody's mind, so we might as well get right into it.

Alexey asked:

Do we have ANY estimate for 5.1?

Sunday Morning Funnies is your weekly list of WoW-related web comics.

Lots of weddings in the air this week, not to mention blossoming friendships, a tutorial on being a considerate (not accidental murdering) mage, selfless acts borne of love, and ultimate destruction.

Don't forget to send in your What's Shakin' fan art or guest comic by November 25 for a complimentary postcard and to get your art posted! Email to fanart (at) whatsshakincomic (dot) com.

• What's Shakin' Page 106
• Arena Inside Jumping the Shark and Never Again and AllerGIF Reaction
• Coffin Comics Decision 2012

• Fury is twice as popular as arms for PvE DPS, but both warrior DPS specs combined are less popular than either of the popular rogue specs or any of the really popular DPS specs.
• Arms absolutely dominates warrior PvP, and is one of the single most popular specs in PvP at the moment.
• Fury's DPS is absolutely middle of the road in 10 and 25 man normal raiding right now, hovering right around the baseline.
• Fury sees a sudden shift upwards when going from normal to heroic raiding - Fury is a contender for the top DPS spec in 10's, and practically is the top spec in heroic 25's.

Now, there's a lot that we can't say based on the data we have from these two posts - for starters, which fury, TG or SMF? These also don't tell us what talents in particular these crushingly dominant arms warriors are taking for PvP (if I had to guess, though, based on the Avatar nerf in patch 5.1 I'd go with a Bladestorm/Avatar combo) or what talents fury is using in PvE. Still, there's still a lot to talk about here. What does all of this mean?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week we realize there's a significant patch coming out any minute now and we haven't even mentioned it yet. Seriously, didn't we just get a whole expansion like yesterday? I'm still trying to figure out what a Shado-Pan is. I hope it's something I can use to make pancakes.

So the build of patch 5.1 that's currently up on the PTR is tagged as a release candidate, which means that the patch could legitimately drop any week now. It's time we discuss it.

We're getting new factions, which thank God, because I keep saying to myself "Self? I sure wish we had more daily quests to do," which my self responds to by punching me in the damn mouth. We're getting a fight club Brawler's Guild to distract us from all those dailies. They're bringing back Wintergrasp and Tol'Barad! We can solo all the old raids without being in a raid group! And of course, we're getting the requisite bunch of tweaks and fixes and quality of life improvements that always come with a patch like this.

But as always, I'm more focused on the changes that specifically affect mages. And while there's nothing here that will make or break the class, there are some class changes in 5.1 that will have a definite impact on the mage class as we delve further into Pandaria.

When I first started playing World of Warcraft, in late 2004 on the server Azjol-Nerub, I knew the people in the guild my wife introduced me to and that was about it. Via that guild, I eventually met people who brought me to another guild, one that raided fairly heavily. That guild moved to Norgannon, becoming one of its top raiding guilds up until the end of Wrath of the Lich King when it moved servers and factions, and I didn't go along for the ride. I instead moved to Cenarion Circle, then Sisters of Elune. In all of this, my sense of community in the game has always been very heavily guild focused.

This means that when people talk about having developed a sense of server community via pugging Stratholme or Shadow Labyrinth back in the day, they're talking about a game I never played. When I was pugging in early BC, before I started raiding again, I was miserable dealing with non-guildmates who often wouldn't listen, demanded a tank with more AoE than a warrior, refused to CC or refused to do so on the targets I asked, and were otherwise often awful. This isn't to say I didn't have any good pick up groups in those days, but if I wanted to get anything done I often had to wait for guild groups. One of the reasons I heralded the advent of the Dungeon Finder was that instead of bothering my guildies so I could get some runs in, I just queued up. No more "LF Tank and 2 CC for Shattered Halls, Paladin tank preferred" or whatever the flavor of the month is. Not that we were running Shattered Halls anymore by that point, of course.

One of our readers, Bowzer, wrote in the other night about dropping a group instantly on seeing a homophobic slur in party chat. As he observed, running across questionable-to-cruel comments in the Dungeon Finder is certainly nothing new, but he asked, "Am I wrong for being sick of the 'It's the internet, have a tough skin and get over it argument?' Is it so wrong to be a decent person?"

I'd be lying if I said I hadn't had similar thoughts. Thankfully, running into a genuine jerk is uncommon, but each one can ruin your day. I think what bothers me most is the sure knowledge that the offending player is not only entirely unrepentant, but may also be getting a kick out of making the group uncomfortable.

Worse still, there's no surefire way to deal with it. Try to address a nasty or bigoted comment in party chat? You're just giving them the opportunity to troll you further. Kick them? You may not have the votes. (If it's a guild group, you definitely won't.) Stay silent? Drop group? Submit a ticket? Or maybe just hope that the Loot God smites the offender at some point in the near future?

Lately I've seen some forum posts that confuse me. Perhaps it's because these posts themselves seem confused. Posts like this one, where Librily the worgen mage accuses Blizzard and World of Warcraft's development team of soliciting feedback that they don't actually look at. I find this especially odd on a forum where community managers regularly engage with posters, and I wanted to address what feedback is, how it works, and why it matters now and going forward.

Frankly, it is impossible to look at the design of Mists of Pandaria and not see how much player feedback has influenced the design of the expansion. The 85 to 90 game is everything Cataclysm was not -- it all takes place in a seamless new land, it removed flying in order to provide player immersion, it works the Horde/Alliance conflict into the storyline. It is in every way the result of player feedback being constructively weighted and utilized responsibly. By that, I mean that the game's developers clearly looked at what players were saying they liked and disliked and worked to find ways to address player concerns.

What they didn't do -- what they have never done and cannot ever do -- is simply go to the forums, see who yelled loudest, and give them everything they wanted. That would be absurd design by mob, it would produce an unplayable game full of broken classes and most importantly of all, it would not be fun to play. Games require a ton of work to produce, especially a game like World of Warcraft, and the amount of effort behind the scenes to bring what we get to see and experience does not allow for that kind of design even if it were desirable, which it is not. Game design is not about giving the players everything they say they want, nor is it about doing everything they say as soon as they say it.

Let's talk about how good feedback works, the difference between opinion and fact, and why taking the time to make a well constructed argument is worthwhile even if you don't see any signs of it changing anything.

Are you ever curious as to which specs are the most popular for raiding or PvP? Well, GuildOx has you covered. Both for PvE and PvP in fact. There's a lot of interesting things to pull out of this data. For starters, just looking at the PvP data, where are the rogues? Seeing rogues so low in PvP (an area they've dominated as recently as Cataclysm) is kind of a shocker. Frost mages, shadow priests, arms warriors, beast mastery hunters and frost DK's are the most dominant non-healing specs in PvP right now.

Over on the PvE side of the fence, (drawn from the top 5% of raiding characters) we see that Blood DK's and Guardian Druids are the most popular raid tanks, but that all tank classes are fairly close together save for brewmaster monks. I don't know why but clearly they're not taking off as tanks yet, perhaps due to entrenchment. Most raids tend towards established tanks, after all. For DPS classes, fire mages and shadow priests are the most popular, followed by beast mastery hunters and affliction warlocks. This is interesting when contrasted with the actual state of DPS classes in normal and heroic raiding atm. Rogues are interestingly split between assassination and combat, keeping them from challenging any of these classes. As for healing, restoration shamans and druids and holy paladins seem to be on top, but discipline priests look strong as well, with mistweaver monks trailing behind.

You can head over to GuildOx and dig around for yourself.

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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