They must be better at cleaning up than succeeding at 95% missions.

Twenty-one mine work orders go through the roof of this lean-to.

This past weekend, my boyfriend came to visit for six days, and I pretty much took a mini-vacation from logging into WoW since I was busy shopping in Hollywood, going to the beach, and watching him eat his weight in gourmet hamburgers and vanilla fudge while wondering by how many years exactly I'm going to outlive him. When I finally logged in for raid on Tuesday night, my garrison was in an eerie state of decency. My work orders were neatly piled up and waiting for me to retrieve them, and my followers were doing their usual rounds of the property and waving hello as I discretely scanned their necks for hickies and tried to discern any hints of alcohol wafting from their seemingly sober persons. The barracks were free of any toilet paper strewn around their towers, none of the gold gathered from missions was missing, and the outhouse wasn't knocked over. After six days without their commander constantly coming and going with super serial concerns about war and ambiguous but necessary resources, I half-expected to find the center fountain playing host to a clothing-optional pool party/bubble bath with Ziri'ak stuck holding a tray of champagne. Yet, as I leaned over my missions table with Lieutenant Thorn greeting my return with a smile, it looked like my charges had kept everything in complete order.

What a bunch of squares.

-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.

Blizzcon 2013 Round-up

I'm going to sound like a negative nancy, which is a bummer since last year I was so excited for all the MoP changes to the talent trees and specs and was really looking forward to their development. But Blizzcon 2013 is now over, and almost none of what they have announced has impressed me much at all. Let's do this as compliment sandwich.

Compliment: The new character models are pretty cool.

Criticism: I'm getting pretty sick of time travel and alternate dimensions. They are great concepts to wrap your brain around, and every time that they are introduced, it adds layers to Warcraft universe in a unique way. However, they seem to pop up constantly, and by now whenever patch notes mention the timeways, I can only think, "What got messed up this time by who?"

Yea yea, the devs said that it's not a "time travel expansion" and that we don't have to worry about affecting the past. Then why do it? When I heard the name "Warlords of Draenor," I actually though we were going with the draenei back to Argus to take their planet back. Going through some loophole to the old Draenor seems to me like a way to rehash old content without worrying about continuity.

Also, I'm not too pleased with the new Mythic difficulty. Though the four-tier gradation of difficulties will be exactly the same as it is now, a big difference is that raiding guilds will have to progress through Normal, then Heroic, then Mythic. So rather than keeping Flex, they're making it so that the content lasts for a longer period of time before they're pressured to release more by the speed at which top guilds progress. That's a cheap tactic to me. Mythic difficulty has to expand on the mechanics of Heroic in meaningful ways for it to be worth it, and that doesn't mean that Heroic can merely be a higher DPS requirement version of Normal either.

Compliment: The garrisons look pretty cool, too.

-Avia.

P.S. Since everything is based on what information has been released so far, all of this is subject to change. Thankfully.