Mr. Wiggles, I Choose You.

Unless you've been under a rock for the past few months you will know about the new pet battle system introduced with Mists of Pandaria. Well, I did my first pet battle this weekend.

For those of you not in the know: the pet battle system allows players to use previously non-combat pets to battle each other using a turn based battle system. You level your pets, capture new pets, battle other players and work towards being a "Pet Battle Master." Does that sound familliar? It should. If there were gym badges it would be Pokemon.

If you thought WoW was addictive before... just wait until you pet battle. I made the mistake of trying it out before I hit 90 and my priest has been sitting at 86% through level 89 all weekend because I could not stop long enough to do some quests. I did; however, capture enough pets to put me over 150. I've been systematically going through zones and capturing all of the unique pets I need in each zone. I'm more interested in capturing them all than I am on the quality at the moment.

Also: I cannot wait to catch a Bandicoon... and call him Socks, that's just how much The Jade Forest still resonates with me

My Collection : [X]
Warcraftpets.com Guide to Pet Battles : [X]

Warcraftpets also has a handy tool to display wild pets by zone, which I have been using.

Mists of Pandaria, a talent system

People often ask me, am I excited for Mists of Pandaria. Until recently, I would have said "Yes, I'm just not sure about that talent system." Two weeks ago the new talent point system was implimented, the one that gives you six talents instead of 31. While I am sure that there was mumch thought put into this new talent system, I have to admit that it falls kind of flat for me. Intead of being something that brought in new, and exciting options for customization it feels more like the illusion of options to me. Yes, you get to pick one of three things; however, those three options are all relatively the same for the more part. For example, the first set of talents you get as a priest are all forms of crowd control. To me, that says "Blizzard wants you to have crowd control, pick one." All of the talents feel situational. None make me feel like my priest is more powerful, because none make her more powerful. This lack of power really just makes me feel like talents have become oversimplified, oversimplified to the point of becoming nearly obsolete.

Another thing that I don't like about the newly implemented changes are the changes to the spell book. I liked the way that the old spell book looked. It is harder for me to find my spells while swimming in a ten page disc spell book.

I want my spell book back. Also, my disc priest wants her Divine Hymn back.