The latest expansion from WoW may keep players glued to the screen for another 3 months, but offers nothing innovative.
Following the trend of previous expansions, more of WoW's complexity has been "streamlined" in this expansion. For example, many of the talent tree abilities have now been turned into class specialisations, where you're given different abilities depending on which role you choose for your class. You then get to choose one out of three talents after every 15 levels. Prime Glyphs are gone, and minor glyphs are for eye candy effects only so effectively there are now only three glyphs you can have active. Pandaria also introduces a Pet Battle system, which lets you capture, train and level companion pets and use them for Pokemon-style turn-based fights against other pets. This is essentially a pokemon rip off. It's not original, and seems to me to be a childish diversion. Pandaria introduces 10 new dungeons, two new PvP battlegrounds, and a new feature called "Scenarios" of which there six. The scenarios are like dungeons, but easier.
While cataclysm dungeons actually forced players to think, and use CC abilities rather than just spamming and nuking, it seems that Blizzard has eased up on this with Pandaria. The dungeons now seem easy and you can get through them quickly.
The changes to the talent tree, in particular the awarding of new talents only after 15 levels, makes levelling-up an anti-climax because there are no rewards. Once upon a time, when you levelled up, WoW used to tell you all your stat changes, and give you a talent point to spend. It felt good. Now we're not told or given anything, which is somewhat unsatisifying.
The new race - big cuddly panda bears - again seems childish in comparsion to the other races, as if it were designed to appeal to 8 year olds. May be it was. Monks is the new class offered to all races, the story being that the Pandarians shared their skills with the other races. Monks are masters of bare-handed combat, who can draw weapons for devastating finishing moves.
Pandaria has also continued the trend of homogenization, that is, moving away from class specialisations and giving all classes similar abilities - including healing abilities which further reduce the role of and need for priests. This lessens the importance of and need of teamwork, which was a great aspect of the original WoW and BC.
Blizzard have added more tools to allow random players to come together, which now includes even a raid finder and a guild finder! It now takes no effort to belong to a guild, and it seems that many people join only for the guild benefits, rather than the social and strategic aspect. Hence there is very little guild chat and friendliness, compared to how it used to be.
Mists of Pandaria is a good expansion, with beautiful content, but it offers nothing innovative, choosing instead to follow the trend of pandering to casual players. It is also very addictive.