We didn't kill it yet. Soon™ though.

Damn F&B WeakAura ruining my screenshot.

I was really hoping that I could round out January's posts with an Imperator kill and all the associated fanfare, but unfortunately, everyone in our raid team seems to be taking turns popping runes each pull so we spend all night doing to same three phases over and over. No matter, because the experience of raiding is the fun of raiding. Though killing bosses might be rewarding, it is only a small part of what can only be described as an entirely unique environment, because in progression raiding, one can be a part of a combination friendly get-together/disciplined and structured team. Of course, these two aspects are constantly affecting each other in the dynamic of the group, which leads to our venerable GM having to pull lines like...

"Do I have to beg you guys to not be retarded every time? I have to beg my kids to not be retarded. I have to beg you guys too?"

And conversations between the leadership and raid members like...

"We said don't burst AoE! I see what you hunters are doing."
"That was NOT hunters. Jesus fucking Christ. I don't know how many times we have to explain this to you."

Then there is always the end-of-the-night, super-hyped pep talk.

"Just one more pull, guys. Just one more pull, and then we have all weekend... either to celebrate or to think about what we did wrong."

The poor guy. I feel like I should send him a fruit basket with a very apologetic note and a coupon for a happy ending in Chinatown.

-Avia.

Watch a Mythic Imperator video and just don't give a crap about what's happening in it.

While I recover from a hangover, I will review how our M Imperator progress is going.

Very very slowly.

We are currently at the point in progression where we spend nine minutes executing the fight near perfectly only to have everything fall apart immediately once we hit phase 3. Such is the nature of multiple-phase, battle-for-survival final bosses, but I always wish Blizz would just drop us into the fight when it mattered with the healers at half mana so we wouldn't have to do the same beginning part over and over. It's like doing 80% of a jigsaw puzzle, and every time I try to put two pieces together that don't fit, I have to take apart the entire puzzle and restart from scratch. Or an NES game with no save points, and it takes forever to get back to Bowser where I ran out of lives, and no one misses that about early video games.

However, after 170 pulls, I finally noticed something that I was previously too occupied with not popping runes, avoiding chaos orbs, and running through force novas to see: all of those runes, orbs, and novas are super pretty. Perhaps their instant deadliness was always distracting me from how graphically stunning the mechanics of this fight are. After all, the ultimate directive is to dodge, which makes me automatically treat those arrangements of pixels in an avoidant way and always recoil from them as dangerous and generally negative. I am predisposed to viewing them in an unflattering light.

This is a pretty funny video.

But when I'm already dead on the floor and not focusing on avoiding that one chaos orb that is making its way into my area, I can take a look at how all of the orbs look when they explode out of the marked tank, and it is a freaking beautiful divergence of glowing fluorescent balls of lightning spreading across the room. Force novas make shimmering waves over the entire fight space, but I'm too concentrated on my health level versus an oncoming horizon of potential death to appreciate the display. And those dreaded runes, the most important things to avoid in this encounter, spawn as intricately designed circles, change appearance as they activate, and shoot gleaming spirals of brilliant light as they replicate. And everything has different colors!

I wonder how many other visually outstanding encounters there have been in my raiding career during which I missed out on a sense of amazement because of being too focused on my job as DPS and mechanics responsibilities. I imagine it's similar to the how often I've failed to be amazed by the world around me while focusing too much on the generally negative mechanics of life.

-Avia.

First World WoW Problems

There's suddenly an empty slot in my inventory. What used to be there?!

It's still driving me crazy.

 One of my specs got buffed. Now I have to change all my enchants.

There's no way in hell I'm re-gemming.

 I got a bunch of new gear, but I can't put it on until I transmog it.

Look at those leggings. What a hot mess.

My Mythic cache mission had a 97% chance of success. It failed.

How they constantly break math is beyond me.

Every time I think I'm done, it just pulls me back in.

There's another level of this crap?!

-Avia.

Things like this make me realize I can measure how long I've played a game in years.

Despite spending the past few weeks bashing my head against Mythic bosses, I have just now officially lost it. My roommate better get out of the way, because I am going to start flipping tables over the most aggravating aspect of this game that I have ever encountered.

How convenient that the Flippable Table toy is so close.

This is some Neopets-level RNG frustration, because I did those Winter Veil dailies every day, eventually bumping up in desperation to ten different characters including my level 80s on PvP servers, and I never got the Foot Ball that comes from the Stolen Present. Now, I have to cope with that empty spot in my toy box reminding me that I missed a time-sensitive drop for an entire year. Considering I was playing in 2012 and received this item from under the tree and then destroyed it not knowing it would eventually become a toy, this is terrible news for my inventory, because from now on I am going to hoard absolutely everything. Spirit of Shinri? Hoarding it. Fractured Sunstone? Hoarding it. Transmog for armor types I can't even use? Hoarding it! Supreme Manual of Dance? Hoarding every single one. Maybe one day they'll release a feat of strength that requires me to create my own KPop ensemble with garrison followers two expansions after they are already obsolete. At this point, it wouldn't even surprise me if those bastards released a vanity item that only drops from Vanilla mobs and then destroyed the planet of Azeroth. Yes, I just called Blizzard a bunch of bastards, because nothing has made me want to trek over to their office building and flip over the desk of a dev more than this damn Foot Ball!

Oh wait. Blizzard headquarters is actually pretty close to me now.

See ya.

-Avia.

P.S. Please post bail.