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.