2011: The Year in Cataclysm!

2011 is over, and your girl at RP Your Life!, the ultimate source for obliquely relevant WoW news, has the rundown of all the biggest trends and most important highlights of the Year in Cataclysm!

The award for "Biggest Pain in the Ass Boss Encounter" goes to... Al'Akir. You thought I was going to say Alysrazor, but no amount of time can erase the early Cata memories of trying to get the "Defender of a Shattered World" title and having some asshole elemental with shit loot standing in my way. Not since C'Thun did a raid need to position each player so precisely, and after thirty minutes of running around a platform and placing Tol Barad Searchlights and lock portals as markers, some idiot would die to a tornado in the second phase anyway. It was such a time-consuming ordeal to even get to the point where one could ascertain that the group is incompetent that I eventually stopped actively looking for groups, and thus I haven't even wiped to him very much at all. Bragging rights for boss that has killed me the most this year goes to heroic Halfus since fail kicks are fail. My most beloved boss is Yor'sahj because the random color-changing that forces the raid to adapt reminds me of Chromaggus.

2011's most mispronounced words for my guild: Alysrazor, fieroblast, Chimaeron, preemptively.
Grand total of ragequits: 4.5 (one stopped hearthing midway).

My #1 most hilarious moment of WoW 2011 happened right at the end of the year. While watching the highly anticlimactic cutscene after the defeat of Deathwing, I realized that Blizzard randomly changed Alexstrasza's voice, which isn't weird per se since voice actors can switch around. The odd part was that they completely threw out the wizened "grandmother of the world" persona that she sported during the quest chain in Twilight Highlands and made her into a lower-pitched, stoic, Arwen-type instead. Blizzard must have realized they were ruining people's fantasies when they put the Dragon Queen in Azeroth's slinkiest outfit and then gave her a voice to match her actual age of many millenia. Obviously, the customer and his erection is more important than continuity. Thanks for the lesson, Blizz!

Stay tuned for 2012!

-Avia.