The proof of a very productive winter break.

Just in time for back-to-school, I got my fucking legendary yeaaaahhhhh!!!

I know I'm months behind, but by the time it was my turn for final stage quest items, it was already patch 4.3, and my guild needed to move onto wiping in a new instance. For the past month, I had to organize 10-man normals on the weekends and carry people's alts to victory while collecting smouldering essences at an agonizingly slow pace. But after calling in a bunch of favors and perhaps doing some things that I'm not too proud of, I finally own one of the ugliest staves in the game, and I can't even transmog it. T_T Oh my first world problems.

However, I did manage to build a pretty sweet outfit around it. Though it's a rather stark contrast to my priest look-alike set, it is now blatantly obvious what class I am when I step into an arena for nerd points. I'm hoping that in my quest to break 12k achievement points, it won't matter too much that I only have 2k resilience and use a PVE rotation as I work through the only achieves that I have left and have been ignoring as Eredar-US's carebear #1 since 2005.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the "if you give me what I want, I'll stop killing you" argument will be less effective when I'm talking to another player. On the other hand, it never really worked on any mob either. Oh well.

-Avia.

Mature Language Filter and the most fun I've had all patch.

When patch 4.3 broke the Mature Language Filter to make it constantly turn itself back on, I moved quickly past the initial irritation of not being able to understand half of what my potty-mouth friends say to amusement and amazement at the everyday discoveries of what Blizzard considers "offensive" language. Even though a blue post has since given us a way to keep it from switching on again once we log off, I have yet to implement the little self-hotfix in favor of the enlightening glimpses into the mind of Blizz, who apparently thinks the word "porn" is so dangerous to the internet-savvy little eyes of WoW youth that they even filter the words "p0rn" and "pr0n." Whoever was leading the MLF team, give him/her a gold star for thoroughness.

Some of their choices for filtered words are either confusing or just nonsensical. For some reason, a small percentage of players, including myself, can see the name "Hitler" while it's filtered for everyone else. Ignoring the fact that it's just someone's name and not an actual racial slur, why the fuck does Blizz think that I should be able to see it and not the majority of others? Either they think I'm a Nazi or they are absolutely certain that I'm not a Nazi. Also, I'm genuinely annoyed and slightly peeved that words like "penis" and "vagina" are censored while "dick" and "pussy" are not. Come on, Blizz. "Penis" and "vagina" are medical terms. They're what people would call genitalia when they're not being vulgar. You can't even use them while cybering without sounding like a creeper.

"I put my penis in your vagina."
"... what?"
"Um... I mean... I put on my robe and wizard hat?"
"Hot."

Anyway, my guild and I found an awesome game to play with the MLF. Everyone leave it on, one person type a word into gchat, and have everyone else guess what it is. Four-letter words are plentiful but easy to guess, so try longer ones. I stumped one of my guildies for twenty minutes before he finally guessed "masturbation." Good clean fun, all thanks to Blizz. <333

-Avia.

I'm either really good at bragging or just really bad at flirting.

Besides my widely-popular and world-famous WoW blog that you are reading right now, Ms. rhymes with Moldavia a.k.a. Avia a.k.a. "the lag lock" is also a New York City creative writer who happens to have a reading tomorrow January 20th at Happy Ending Lounge. Yes, it's a bar called Happy Ending in Chinatown. People used to get happy endings there, but now they just get drunk while listening to up-and-coming fiction writers and watching burlesque dancers take their clothes off. That might have been a little redundant, but I wanted to emphasize the fact that if you come to see me read, you will also get a strip tease while drinking in a former massage+ parlor. Details here.

A new officer in my guild is now posting WorldofLogs for us. Admittedly, I never really cared about logs and rankings before since I consider it a job well done if the boss dies and I did an adequate job at dealing damage and staying alive. Don't get me wrong; I'm no casual. I research the theorycrafting as much as the next loser with a skewed conception of priorities, but I'm pretty satisfied with my performance as long as I'm not getting outDPS'd by mages or dying to easysauce mechanics like every tunnel-visioning idiot on Ultraxion. However, our poor performance in Dragon Soul has prompted guild management to perform an audit on all the DPS to ensure we're not doing anything stupid like forgetting cooldowns or using the wrong spells, and it has led to an increase in the already rampant epeen swinging among the classic epeen swingers, the raid DPS.

Apparently, it is necessary after every boss kill for someone to whisper me and talk about how he beat someone else in the meter, to which I casually reply something along the lines of "I don't give a fuck." Except... lately, I'm starting to do the exact same thing. When I'm in the top 3, my usual sense of accomplishment also possesses an inlaid feeling of conquest over others, and when I do terrible damage, I find myself feeling wholly unattractive and inadequate. Somehow, my performance according to Skada has merged itself with my self-concept of sexual prowess to the point where I was on a date this week and I tried to impress the guy by telling him that I was 90th in the world. He was really confused.

Someone save me from my own psyche. Plzkthx.

-Avia.

2011: The Year in Cataclysm!

2011 is over, and your girl at RP Your Life!, the ultimate source for obliquely relevant WoW news, has the rundown of all the biggest trends and most important highlights of the Year in Cataclysm!

The award for "Biggest Pain in the Ass Boss Encounter" goes to... Al'Akir. You thought I was going to say Alysrazor, but no amount of time can erase the early Cata memories of trying to get the "Defender of a Shattered World" title and having some asshole elemental with shit loot standing in my way. Not since C'Thun did a raid need to position each player so precisely, and after thirty minutes of running around a platform and placing Tol Barad Searchlights and lock portals as markers, some idiot would die to a tornado in the second phase anyway. It was such a time-consuming ordeal to even get to the point where one could ascertain that the group is incompetent that I eventually stopped actively looking for groups, and thus I haven't even wiped to him very much at all. Bragging rights for boss that has killed me the most this year goes to heroic Halfus since fail kicks are fail. My most beloved boss is Yor'sahj because the random color-changing that forces the raid to adapt reminds me of Chromaggus.

2011's most mispronounced words for my guild: Alysrazor, fieroblast, Chimaeron, preemptively.
Grand total of ragequits: 4.5 (one stopped hearthing midway).

My #1 most hilarious moment of WoW 2011 happened right at the end of the year. While watching the highly anticlimactic cutscene after the defeat of Deathwing, I realized that Blizzard randomly changed Alexstrasza's voice, which isn't weird per se since voice actors can switch around. The odd part was that they completely threw out the wizened "grandmother of the world" persona that she sported during the quest chain in Twilight Highlands and made her into a lower-pitched, stoic, Arwen-type instead. Blizzard must have realized they were ruining people's fantasies when they put the Dragon Queen in Azeroth's slinkiest outfit and then gave her a voice to match her actual age of many millenia. Obviously, the customer and his erection is more important than continuity. Thanks for the lesson, Blizz!

Stay tuned for 2012!

-Avia.