Mists Of Pandaria, first impressions.

Mists Of Pandaria launched last night/this morning depending on your time zone. I've had one of my busy, busy days which began with hauling out of bed at 7am with Small on a running start to go get a blood test (again) that just had to be done at 9am at the local hospital and ended about 10 mins ago when I finished polishing and spraying wet weather protector on my shoes. My, that was a long sentence.
Anyway, I haven't had a lot of time for gaming. I nipped on as my new character and there was no difference for her, so I created a new Pandarian character and played for about half an hour while giving my poor back a wee rest. Not really enough to judge maybe but enough to get a first impression.

Now, I started a new character when I returned to WoW a week ago so I can pretty much judge the difference quite fairly. My Worgen character hit the ground pretty much running and was a lot of fun to play, I was hooked in right from the start and keen to finish quests and bump her up the levels. She also got some cool trebuchet things to play with early on, got to fly a giant bat on bombing raids on her second day... fun.

The most fun I had with the panda was choosing her appearance. She's cute as a button, in a very Princess-Fiona-As-An-Ogre way. Out of habit, I selected her to be Hunter class, because I like being a hunter, so she got a crossbow very early on but where the Worgen started off with a range of shot options and her pet had some interesting battle functions, Panda-girl has a single shot and a turtle pet who doesn't seem to anything much. Oh, it fights but it doesn't have the cool options that my Worgen's pets have. Neither does Panda-girl seem to begin with the ability to tame her own pets. Then they send you out of the training academy to get set upon by killer monkeys who're actually a little tough for such a low level character. When he tried, Big's Panda character got killed by his first encounter with the monkey things and he was only on his first quest! He's also a much better player than me, so it really shouldn't have happened.

I'm not by any means a hardcore gamer, all I ever played is WoW and even then I've not explored the whole gamut of what the game has to offer and as I say, it was only a tiny little taste of the new launch but my first thought was really just that Pandaria is not as fun a game and I will have to think about whether I want to bother giving my panda a proper chance and see if it gets better or just concentrate on my Worgen for a while.