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.

PATCH DAY!!!

Yesterday, my guild and I downed our first Firelands boss, and much to my surprise, it was the one I figured we would wipe on for weeks: Lord Rhyolith. As anyone in a raiding guild knows, Rhyolith is probably one of the easiest bosses in the instance, so it really shouldn’t be a problem for any group… except if the raid has trouble adapting to stupid gimmicks that Blizzard thinks will be awesome and unique fight mechanics.

Besides certain people always standing in fire, all the mages pulling aggro, and our raid leader being so “outspoken” that we have to keep replacing people who ragequit, I’d consider gimmicky fights major problems for us as a group. Personally, I hate them, not because they are particularly difficult, but because the Vent talk always sound sooo stupid.

“Hit the gong NOW! HIT THE GONG HIT THE GONG!”

“MOAR PYRITE!”

“I told you guys to hit the LEFT foot!”

“But someone else said to hit the right foot.”

“Only I call out which foot to attack! If you had hit the LEFT foot instead of the RIGHT foot, he wouldn’t have run into the LAVA!”

This is usually the point at which I wonder what I’m doing with my life.

We also made the decision of who would be getting the legendary staff first, and… the guild is still intact and didn’t get ripped apart by drama YAAAY! The monarch and his aristocracy chose our boomkin. I’m just glad it wasn’t one of the mages since I like it when the tanks tank things, and that staff doesn’t do much when the wearer pulls aggro and dies.

Damn mages.

-A lock.

A Bone to Pick with WoW's Greatest Villain

Out of all the characters in WoW I could have a vendetta against, the one who I think is the most evil, conniving, and deserving of being blown up by a raid team is…

Alexstrasza.

Yup, the Life-Binder herself. While everyone else may consider her to be the quintessence of good and compassion for life in the Warcraft universe, I see her for what she really is: a warmonger.

Hey, hear me out! I wasn’t always so disenchanted with the Dragon Queen. In the Wrath expansion, I enthusiastically joined the army of heroes in the battle against Malygos at her call. After all, the logic was sound; Malygos’s twisted outlook on magic “abuse” was a danger to mortals on Azeroth, and killing him was for the greater good in order to save a larger number of lives. I felt the same satisfaction I always feel after defeating a major raid boss, like I played an integral part in the future safety of Azeroth. Completing the Eye of Eternity definitely provided better satisfaction than the bittersweet end to the Lich King, when all we did was kill an evil Arthas just to swap in a good guy in his place and trap Bolvar there forever. Goddamnit.

But then Cataclysm came, and Alexstrasza had turned right around, pointed at someone else, and told all of us our next target. Wtf? We just killed someone for you in the last expansion. Suddenly I felt like I was a pawn in her own personal vendettas against her old friends. Why are we, heroes of the Alliance and Horde, peons of the Dragon Queen in her violent yet well-reasoned grudges?

Despite the destruction that Deathwing wrought merely emerging out of the planet, Alexstrasza’s newly redirected battle plans made me suspicious of her motives, and it also made me rethink what I had done in the past under her command. I had so willingly fought against Malygos with no doubt whatsoever that I was doing the right thing, but now I wonder if Alexstrasza was just using me to get rid of someone with whom she had issues. I wonder if she’s using us now in the same way.

So far, the lore gives no hint of malice in Alexstrasza’s character, so for the player, there shouldn’t be any doubt that Deathwing has to die just like Malygos’s death was necessary to save lives. But if there’s anyone in WoW that makes me doubt the sincerity of intentions, it’s her. It’s so easy to use “for the greater good” logic to rationalize murder, and she does it time and again, like so many of our foes have done before, including Malygos. This time around, I feel hesitant at the prospect of being a savior of Azeroth when I’m not quite sure that my enemy deserves the death everyone else says he does.

-Avia.