Computer dead. MoP beta live. Completely unrelated topics.

This week, I woke up early(ish) on my day off to get my 85s valor capped and attempt for the 50th time to acquire a Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps for my pally only to find that my goddamn motherboard had died.

It was like the universe was laughing at me. Or telling me to use my time more wisely during midterms. It's debatable.

In World of Warcraft news, the Mists of Pandaria beta is now live, and anyone who signed up for an annual pass can expect access in the near future as Blizzard sends out invites in waves. For some reason, I also signed up for the annual pass, justifying it in my mind that I get all these super awesome perquisites just by promising to play for as long as I already planned on playing. In actuality, what I received was a mount that I never use, a free copy of Diablo 3 in which I have minimal interest, and access to a beta that I can't even install on my ancient computer with no free disk space or even a working motherboard.

Currently, I'm awaiting the delivery of parts and must resort to blogging from my school library's computer lab until a new motherboard arrives on Tuesday. I had to spend all Saturday installing WoW and setting up addons on my dad's computer so I could do an alt raid. For the entire weekend, I was stuck browsing the internet on my phone and watching a hundred channels of cable television rather than sitting alt-tabbed in Stormwind while creeping people on Facebook. I had to make my new boyfriend valor cap for me!

Someone save me from my first world problems, please.

-Avia.

Mists of Pandaria Press Event "Highlights"

Now that I've abandoned progression raiding for the rest of Cataclysm, I'm becoming increasingly excited for Mists, and the bundle of news that came out with the NDA lift of last week's press event is making pandas look pretty badass. Being a vanilla baby who was at one point obsessed with a particular staff with an infamous drop rate, I was the most interested in the revamp of Scholomance into a level 90 heroic. I'm looking forward to spending many more hours of my life in what was my favorite instance in classic WoW, working my way through room after room of different types of undead and defeating unique mini-bosses for coveted blues. Plus, there will be new items for which I can get reacquainted with my old buddy Darkmaster Gandling, like an upgraded Headmaster's Charge that I can mog... to my original Headmaster's Charge. >:)

Despite everyone's glee that MoP's end-boss will be Garrosh and we can finally kick his self-important ass, I'm actually disappointed. It's not because I ever particularly liked him; I was just as surprised as everyone else when the peace-loving and earth-hugging Thrall appointed as Warchief some douchebag that insults the player first thing after s/he steps into Northrend. But then I spent the entire expansion doing exactly what Blizz asked me to do: give him the benefit of the doubt that he's grown older and wiser and is no longer the immature asshole with daddy issues who once accidentally killed the Horde racial leader that never bothered anybody. What the fuck happened to all that, Blizz? What am I supposed to think now?

I might seem a little hard to please with the way I'm waffling about Garrosh, but remember in Harry Potter when everyone originally thought that Snape was evil? And for the next six books, Harry had Hermione reminding him that Dumbledore said Snape was good and that he had to trust in his word? And then, at the end, it turned out that that Dumbledore was right all along and the reader made the correct choice in having faith in Snape for all that time? It felt so. relieving.

Well, yea. The end of Mists is going to be the exact opposite of that.

-Avia.

End of expansion blues (or how I quit progression raiding to take a break and still not have a life)

It's the end of an era, friends. After over a year of wipes, kills, and watching people come and go due to RL or ragequits, I officially left my raid team to go casual until Mists of Pandaria.

How I feel right now.

I know. I know. Only baddies are casuals. But in all honesty, this decision was in the best interest of my mental health. For most of the past year, I have always been able to stay unphased by the raid leader with narcissistic personality disorder, an overwhelming majority of the team being so incompetent that they can't be helped, and boss kills that tend to feel more like happy accidents than the products of strategy and hard work. However, as of late, I've found that all of these negative factors have been slowly chipping away at my sanity, and for ten hours a week, I turn into someone so angry that the thought of strangling kittens arises way more frequently than should be considered normal. Yes, we admit that the sassy female raider on vent that calls out people who die stupidly only to make excuses is always a turn-on in that psychosexual way of people who like fiery make-up sex. But when did I become that jerk who calls people out? I'd guess right about the eighth time that hunter died because of her "cat."

Anyway, due to harassment and drama, I went back to my Wrath guild to hang out with my perennial buddies while waiting for pandas. In a totally unrelated mutiny, a large chunk of the old raid team took the opportunity to jump on the /gquit bandwagon and subsequently formed their own guild. Sadly, this means that after I finally freed myself of the necrotic limb that was my old guild, I have all my former raid members badgering me to start progression raiding again in their fabulous new guild with a terrible new name.

Just let me gear my alts in peace!

-Avia.

That wasn't that hard. Oh wait... it kind of was.

It was an arduous journey, my friends, but I finally reached my goal of 12k achievement points... and then some. O_o In reaching far into the depths of my achievements tab for time-consuming and soul-crushing 10 point gains, I went a little overboard and found that my 12000th point felt like a major victory while the 50 points after were so effortless, I practically pulled them from my felhunter's ass. This leads me to believe that as impressive as my guild master's 13345 points are, a massive amount of nerd points is relatively easy to acquire; it just depends on what a player is willing to do/willing to invest time in/willing to call in favors from the past six years for.

For example, I never thought that I would ever be the owner of an "of the Four Winds" title. On normal, Al'Akir was the biggest cockblock of tier 11 that made me want to throw myself off a literal platform to my RL death rather than subject myself to it. But then one day, I finally sucked it up, the guild let itself be led by a competent strategist, and five other DPS carried me through phase 3 after I inevitably died to a lightning cloud. Suddenly, I was thinking to myself, "Hey! It's ok if people find out I'm a noob at 360° motion. Swallow your pride and thank people profusely!" Bam. 12k achieve points.

My friend says I should try for more to reach #2 in the guild, but there are obstacles, i.e. achieves that I, for many reasons, will not touch. For carebears like me, a major bottleneck is in PVP. Those achieves aren't even difficult, but for someone who /cries while a Horde ganks my alt, the thought of carrying a flag in Warsong Gulch makes me want to curl up into a fetal position and protect my core. I already harbor bad memories of all six mobs in the PVP encounter of Trial of the Crusader turning on me at once. Even in fake PvP, the lock dies first.

And then there are the RP roadblocks. The same friend suggested I switch from Frenzyheart to Oracles so I could get the questing and rep achieves, but I outright said no. In my humble leveling journeys of Northrend, I met the Frenzyheart first and then had to listen to the Oracles bash my new-found friends. Yes, they're a little brusque in their demeanor, but that's just their personalities, and you accept people for who they are. Then, when I had to choose between the two factions and saved Zepik's life, he told me he was so grateful, that he knew he could count on me, and that he'd tell his village to be nice to me from then on. He gave me a vote of confidence! How could I betray that?

There are some things in life that are worth more than a few nerd points. Like being true to your alignment.

-Avia.