My spellcheck is telling me "clusterfuck" isn't a word. Like hell it isn't.

After years of raids and dozens of boss fights, there's a reason the tired phrase "Don't stand in fire" is still the single best piece of advice any player could attempt to follow, forget while tunneling a boss, and then die stupidly while ignoring. Once one learns the timing of mechanics, any boss encounter is easy enough to maneuver, but during progression and especially if someone messes up an aspect of the fight that imposes punishment, such space-encompassing effects can just look like unmanageable clusterfucks where standing anywhere is impossible. While it may not be so fun to work those bosses and die to their puddles of bad, it's definitely amusing to reflect on how ridiculously excessive their mechanics look while tanking the floor.

Imperator Mar'gok's infamous runes

Previously featured in my post about how pretty this encounter's mechanics are, beauty doesn't make up for how helpless one can feel when surrounded by a bunch of runes with no gap and the boss is across the room.

Mythic Operator Thogar's track fire

Look at that perfect positioning.

I don't think he's supposed to set train tracks on fire when there are trains still coming through them, but hey. He's the boss.

The Iron Maidens' Omega Pattern bombs

Aw. It's so sweet of the Maidens to give us safe spots in which we can stand. As long as other mechanics like Penetrating Shot or Rapid Fire don't fuck us over, we can do this dance forever!

Mythic Iron Maidens' Convulsive Shadow debuff

To be fair, it's not supposed to look like this, but part of progression is seeing all the possible iterations of how badly we can handle a mechanic and how comical it looks when we completely botch it. While this is what happens when everyone gets the debuff and nothing is dispelled, we also managed to dispel people too quickly and instantly kill them. However, it looks nowhere near as glorious as this.

Blackhand's Siegemaker fire

It's not supposed to look like this either.

Phase 3 Tectus

This is exactly what it's supposed to look like.

-Avia.

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.

Progression Raiding and the Holidays

Apparently, my guild hasn't been following my amazing advice on how to get Mythic kills, because we've been stuck on M Tectus for a week and a half. With the holidays forcing less than ideal comps and a lot of off days, our ranking has fallen precipitously from how well we were faring at first. It's come to a point where we're becoming disheartened, faced with the harsh reality that after all the work we've put into beta testing every boss and splitting main/alt raids for the first time, our place is still firmly situated in the semi-hardcore bracket.

While there is yet an adequate amount of time to turn this around, we're still left with the post-Brackenspore depression from our pace of progression not meeting the high expectations we held at the start of the tier. By the time everyone is back from celebrating New Year's, we need to have learned to cope with this potentially crippling disappointment like many guilds experienced at the end of Firelands or on H Siegecrafter. Surely, a night of transformative revelry full of new hope and resolutions for a better year will be enough to inspire our raiders to come into Highmaul once again with a strong determination to perform like world-class players. Or it could just end up the same kind of situation in which we don't quite meet the level of success we anticipate and fall into despondence again.

Thus is the inherent danger of New Year's and all its hype of fresh beginnings only for people to succumb to the human failings of lack of discipline and perpetually procrastinating change, but I don't give a crap, because I LOVE NEW YEAR'S!!!

<3Avia.

RP Your Life! Guide to Mythic Raiding for the Semi-Quasi-Antepenultimate-Hardcore

I let my resources pile up! >_<

The past couple of weeks have been a crazy mess of packing, moving, and frantically trying to find an apartment, but don't worry, guys! I have my priorities in order, and I have been raiding Mythic Highmaul all the while. Sitting at 3/7M so far, I have analyzed what exactly it takes to get those coveted Mythic kills.

Gear

Obviously, gearing out of those ilvl 630 pieces will make any raid encounter easier, but it's not enough to just raid normals and heroics. Merely raiding is not a guarantee that one will get drops, and the rule of Highmaul seems to be that any gear that does drop will be horribly itemized. What will make those prized trinkets and weapons finally coin-roll is if one spends all the gold s/he has an hour before raid on crafted items that will immediately be replaced and thus turn into a complete waste of money. Not doing this will ensure that the only drops in raid will be hunter gear and healing plate, so don't even try to save up for that Alliance chopper.

The Pull

Since it's vital for a DPS to execute a perfect pull in order to end the fight with decent numbers, it is important for one person to maximize his/her own DPS by casting way too early and screwing over everyone else's pre-pot. If the entire raid isn't yelling "goddamnit!," then they might as well start over.

Execution vs. RNG

When it comes to killing bosses, there are two tactics a raid can follow. The first is execution, which my current guild employs rather adeptly, i.e. not standing in bad, planning for upcoming mechanics, reacting to the ones that force people to adjust on the fly, and pushing throughput. Or a raid can go the RNG route and just try again and again until the stars above Draenor align and any mechanics that can kill people end up not bothering anyone at all. Sure, it's annoying when someone is standing where they're not supposed to be and Tectus puts a pillar right underneath him/her, but it's awesome when everyone is running around like an idiot and the mountains happen to get perfectly placed anyway. If every attempt was that ideal, then it'd be a Mythic kill for sure!

A Banging Soundtrack

While voice chat and boss mods should be the primary focus of one's auditory attention during raid, there's no denying that having music playing in the background is a great way to keep up energy and stay hyped during what can arguably be described as a somewhat monotonous activity. It's easy to get drained when going through pull after pull of unforgiving yet predictable mechanics, and having that appropriately soothing raiding soundtrack will help offset the boredom and/or frustration of spending four straight hours watching people take inordinate amounts of fire line stacks. Occasionally, listening to music a little too loudly might cause a particular warlock to miss important instructions and then end up blindly following a mage that blinked into a corner to iceblock through something that she definitely cannot survive. But hey. Beats.

Fuck All

And then, sometimes, all of the planning, execution, and perfect play of one's class becomes completely irrelevant, and all it takes to get a kill is for a single person to die to something incredibly stupid and sacrifice his/her DPS to make everyone else look great.


*sigh*

-Avia.

Let's talk alpha notes.

It's an exciting time right now because of Warlords of Draenor alpha notes. There is plenty of speculation, badgering of devs' Twitters, and crying about precious removed spells. That doesn't mean I'm not crying, because I definitely am. However, in RP Your Life! fashion, let's take a step back and look at the trends that these changes are indicating for the development of WoD.

- It now takes a lunch break to read mage talents.

- Healers are panicking about Cata-style healing when it was AWESOME.

In the Convert to Raid and FinalBossTV interviews, Celestalon assured healers that healing in WoD would not become the fight against OOMing that it was in Cata, but that period of time when healers had to think about which spell to use, not only to match the situation but to also preserve their mana, was the most engaging. The WoD movement away from critical burst healing back to triage seems like the perfect opportunity to bring that cerebral kind of healing back, but it's not looking like they're willing to push healers that far.

- The devs can't decide what to tell us their ultimate goal is.

If the new Mythic raiding is balanced around having at least one of each class, then why remove utility like healthstones and Innervate? If they want to remove unique utility so a raid doesn't require a specific class, then why leave in things like Gateway? If they leave things in like Gateway because they want to balance around having at least one of each class, then why remove utility like healthstones and Innervate? If...

- The devs might not even be talking to Mythic raiders.

Even after their big claim that the move to 20-man raiding would be the epitome of balanced raid tuning, it doesn't even look like many of the changes that they're making are geared towards Mythic at all. The homogenization of classes and making sure that certain class abilities aren't required are definitely safeguards for 10-man Normal and Heroic raids. Plus, when a shadow priest asks whether or not s/he needs to carry separate sets of gear for multi-target and single-target fights, the answer that I gleaned from Celestalon's appeasing "No, but..." was actually "Yes, but not for casuals," which he could have just said outright. I was hoping that FinalBossTV's interview would be more enlightening for end-game raiders, but there were very few instances in which the crew pushed the devs to a point where they were forced to defend their choices and explain their reasoning in a deeper manner. Why indeed is a certain DPS class retaining a raid-wide CD while others are having theirs taken away?

Watch your raid spot, everyone. The mages are after it.

-Avia.

Edit: Added a link to the FinalBossTV interview.

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.