IRL update amidst sparse WoW happenings.

I like pigs. They are cheering. So here are some.

I've been set up at my "sweet" New Jersey pad for a few days now, but as the tier has been winding down, my life has become even more demanding than my garrison. While my places both in and out of game can be described as intermissions, the usual post-progression lull and its lazy farm raids, lack of urgency, and general boredom as one searches for little things to fill in time greatly contrasts with this interim period full of job-hunting, rejection, and self-loathing. Trust me when I say that self-loathing takes up a lot of time.

With patch 6.2 coming up sooner than I expected, it doesn't look like I'm going to have as long of a break to work on my unemployment and neglected local personal relationships before the push happens again. Obviously, it's a busy time even though progression is over, but while I work to rebuild in a new/old location, I can at least take comfort in the fact that I'm closer to a place of happiness. I'm not just referring to proximity to my favorite city either though that's definitely a huge perquisite. This weekend, I'll be heading to Union Square to watch the Manhattanhenge sunset, take stock of my life, possibly shed a tear, and then comfort myself afterwards with a vegan cupcake.

Yes, I have a date with myself.

-Avia.

The birthday girl reports Blackhand progression.

Since I had to raid Thursday night and then catch an early Friday morning flight to LGA, I tried to save time by writing up a blog entry about our Blackhand progression while we were working it. Unfortunately, our performance varied so much over the course of the night, I was having trouble deciding on an angle.

445pm
Today is my birthday, and I couldn't have asked for a better present that my guild's Mythic Blackhand kill.

545pm
It would have been nice if we could have gotten a M Blackhand kill for my birthday, but sadly our progress has been riddled with attendance issues and constant relearning.

630pm
After expecting us to kill Blackhand every raid day for the past two weeks, the boss went down surprisingly easily. I'm now convinced that pep talks are what a guild needs to be successful. Oh wait. Just kidding, because we wiped again.

705pm
Thanks to Blizzard's massive wave of bans in the middle of our M Blackhand progression, we've had to completely reorganize our core team. Oddly enough, we're still failing at the same point we always are in phase 2 even with new people and losing all of our former god comp boomkins and hunters. Is "bring the class, not the player" a myth at a certain level of skill?

830pm
While early kills are all about min/maxing and class comp, relatively later kills like today's is all about not being terrible at this game.

920pm
Omg my flight leaves in a few hours, and we're going over time. I need to pack!!!

955pm
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!! US TOP 100, BABY! CLUTCH STEEZ!

See you soon, NYC!

-Avia.

There's really no pleasing raiders.

Traditionally, the last bosses of WoW raids have always been epically long, multiple-phase, battles for survival. Progression ultimately requires players to suffer through 10+ minutes of Garrosh or Imperator only to get f'd in the a in the last phase and have to go through the entire encounter again. When raid time is limited, it can be fatiguing to repeatedly execute the monotonous yet still punishing beginning parts just to see and learn the all-important and usually most difficult final push. One begins to wish for a shorter fight that compacts our skill and strategy into less time or moves the phase that matters earlier instead of tacked on at the end. With Mythic Blackhand, we get exactly that.

I put on Glyph of Metamorphosis so all the locks look different in demon form.

Yet, M Blackhand only demonstrates what Blizzard already knows of its customers, which is that we can find anything to complain about, because here I am bitching about eight-minute pulls and how equally fatiguing they are. There are no lulls or semi-relaxing intervals of mindless DPS between important mechanics. Downtime between attempts is minimal, and it's a constant res, buff, pull timer cycle. The fight is all about phase 2, and if we could consistently get out of it without any missed balconies, this boss that probably should have already died yesterday would be down. As opposed to perfecting execution of early phases to see the last phase, the encounter is a series of short DPS pushes while trying to mitigate RNG, and the deaths of any of a number of key players leads to a call for a quick wipe and regroup. Four hours and fifty attempts a night of this can be quite taxing.

But more importantly, I'm going through consumables like they're mage water! Seriously, every early wipe is a painful stab at my miserly soul, and whoever is selling augment runes and buff food right now is making bank when I'm popping them just to lose them to bad Demolitions in the first phase or having to call a wipe because a siege tank decided to make love to a healer. Every random disconnect makes me groan when I think of the 70g I just spent to buff myself for two minutes when I could have spent it on two hours of game time instead or just held onto it forever like I do with all my gold anyway. Botched attempts hurt me physically, and when our res is down, I stare at the dead tank on my raid frames with the same despondence associated with watching a beautiful stranger on the street walk away and out of one's life forever.

We are so close to a kill now, and my in-game wallet wants it as much as my guild and I do. All I can say is thank Draenor for my treasure hunters carrying back loads of gold from who knows where.

By the way, after a mere five months in Los Angeles, I'm moving back to the East Coast. Sorry, California. You had good vegan food and a much cleaner beach than NYC's, but I must return to the concrete jungle and surrounding suburbs whence I came. No hard feelings, and see you at Blizzcon, maybe?

<3Avia.

Consider this an experiment in karma.

 

Mythic Blackhand is upon my guild, and as we're talking strategy and how to down him in a reasonable amount of time, the discussion reaches the issue of class comp and how certain people have to make sacrifices to ensure we don't make the fight any harder than it has to be. Be it certain melee making room for rogues or melee making room for any ranged class at all, the core roster is working itself to conform to proven effective compositions, and we're pulling all the undergeared alts from the bench. In this final push for a decent rank, a select few players who care about the good of the raid over personal attachment to their classes or characters they've played for years are putting on a stoic face and honorably stepping up to a new challenge...

BUT NOT ME HAHAHA!

I GET TO CHAOS WAVE BALCONY ADDS!

WARLOCK FOREVER!

HALAAAA!!!

-Avia.

The Stages of Progression Raiding

 

1. Wipes in under a minute

What the hell is this unmanageable clusterfuck of damage? How does anyone live through this? Is this boss even possible?

Characteristic phrases:
"Uh..."
"What the shit?"

2. The learning process

Now that we have some kind of understanding of mechanics, it turns out this boss is indeed possible. Time to make incremental progress and adjust our strategy whenever we encounter something new while patting ourselves on the back every time we get the boss down lower than we have before.

Characteristic phrases:
"Ok, so we know what to do now."
"This isn't how Method does it."

3. Hitting hurdles

Our strategy is solid, but we will spend the bulk of our wipes banging our heads against two or three specific places in the fight where people make stupid mistakes/RNG screws us over and everything falls apart.

Characteristic phrases:
"Guys, we've seen this a million times already."
"That was a shitty pull anyway."

4. Single-digit wipes

It takes everyone a full thirty seconds to release because we're all staring in disbelief at the spot where the boss despawned at 2% when the rogue's Evasion ran out. If people weren't dying and we weren't going into the last phase with half the raid down, we could kill this.

Characteristic phrases:
"We got this, guys!"
"Just LIVE!"

5. Lucky alignment of stars/Perfect play

Great work, everyone! You all finally stopped playing Hearthstone or Skyping with your significant others and got your shit together for one perfectly executed pull. Nevermind that Beastlord breathed fire in the best possible direction or that Iron Maidens picked a pally for Penetrating Shot almost every time. We nailed it!

Characteristic phrases:
"I knew it was a kill when I missed my pre-pot/my trinkets didn't proc/the shaman died."
"No conq token."

-Avia.

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.

The thrill of a new relationship... I mean raid.

It took three weeks of attempts and raiding until past our usual time the night before the release of Blackrock Foundry, but we finally got M Imperator. Check out our kill video below.


Now that Highmaul is finished, everyone is excited to be learning and executing new fights in BRF. However, now that we're 9/10H and have completed almost all of the encounters in the new dungeon, comparing the two raids objectively and without either the negative memories of wiping or the sheen of brand new content makes it apparent how monotonous BRF mechanics can be. The defining characteristic of many of these encounters seems to be the "rinse and repeat" mantra of identical cycles whether it's the completely predictable sequence of events in Flamebender Ka'graz or the long, drawn-out tasks of Blast Furnace, a.k.a. Spine of Deathwing 2.0. Even the Iron Maidens, with their choice of strategy depending on which targets we whittle down first, have the least threatening and most easily managed pattern I have ever seen in the history of bomb mechanics.

It's just a jump to the left... then right... then left then right.

While I can't say I miss an end-boss that takes fifteen minutes, the un-fondness with which many in my guild look back upon Highmaul and the sense of relief associated with this week's content release are bound to be short-lived. As OG Priest referred to it, BRF is like rebound sex after breaking up with Highmaul. Our relationship with the old raid was full of struggle, and now that it's over, we're super thrilled to get any action that's different. Then after a couple of weeks, the excitement wears off, we look at the new raid and how boring and demanding it is, and we wonder, "What the hell did we just commit ourselves to?"

Bitches, right?

-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.

The Week in Highmaul

 

After the frenzied rush of leveling for two days followed by an unnerving raid-less calm for two weeks, I am once again entrenched in the middle of almost nightly group content. Currently, I am hanging out alone at the Darkmoon Faire, finally taking the time to relax with a mug of what is probably disgusting tasting alcohol and reflect on my week running two alt/main split raids in Highmaul. With 6/7H bosses down and Imperator still to go tomorrow, my guild has been performing... as expected. No need to hype it up, people. It's only "heroic" after all. Come Tuesday, we're going to start getting our asses handed to us by OP class stacking, bench drama, and oh yea Mythic mechanics. But for now, it's just a lot of hours and the feeling of accomplishment when we finish encounters for the first time. After all, regardless of how satisfying the actual fight was, in the end, a nerdgasm is a nerdgasm.

Check out our kill videos below for what we've cleared so far, and stay tuned to see if we have as much trouble with Imperator as other guilds did!


-Avia.

People who say they like this boss are LIARS!

It's been a seemingly nonstop few weeks of beta testing, and despite the inevitable bugs and a surprisingly large number of fights that feel exactly the same, it wasn't until yesterday that I ran into a boss that I actually think is awful.

a.k.a. Conveyor Assholes

So the entire raid has to move on a conveyor belt for half the fight? Well that's ok. If casters can't DPS, then the melee will take care of damage. OH WAIT! The boss jumps around like a wallaby on amphetamines, so they can't hit him either. I guess that's fine since the bosses don't have much health to make up for the fact that the entire raid is playing Frogger the whole time. That makes it ok.

Next tier, why not just make a boss that has 5 HP and have every player dodge fire for six minutes?

-Avia.

P.S. I love Frogger.

Crisp Presents... A Night You Will Never Forget...

Hey, everyone! I know you guys love hearing about my raiding antics, but wouldn't you rather be a part of the boss-killing and loot-whoring action? In celebration of our 7th anniversary, my often eccentric but always funzies guild, Crisp of Baelgun-US, is holding a community event and contest to give away a free full run of Heroic Siege of Orgrimmar to one lucky winner!

Click for full view

All you have to do is tune in to my guildie's Twitch.tv show FinalBossTV on Tuesday, August 26th for a secret password. That will get you entered into a lottery drawing, and one person will win the grand prize of a full clear of H SoO, complete with priority on loot and a mount off Garrosh! People usually pay guilds hundreds of thousands of gold for runs just like this, but you can experience fourteen bosses of heroic-mode raiding with some of the most unique encounters ever made FOR FREE! Click here for full details.

Remember that the Kor'kron Juggernaut, like all other heroic-only mounts, will change from a guaranteed drop to a less than 1% drop chance when the content is no longer current. Taking advantage of this opportunity and making sure to acquire this mount now can save months or years of farming later. Plus, you get to hang out with us in Mumble while we ramble about weird fetishes during the eternity it takes for Galakras to land.

Over the past few months, we've carried quite a few guests through SoO, and they always have a great time with us. Enter for your chance at a fun-filled night of virtual shenanigans. Make sure to check the forum post for all of the fine print, and watch the show on the 26th for the password and how to join the lottery and possibly win!

See you in raid!

-Avia.

I have many skills, none of them profitable IRL.

My guild is taking a little mini-vacation from main raiding, which means that for the week of the 27th, I am available for rent.

Need help downing some new heroics? For the right price, you can have a 581 ilvl warlock making berserk timers and mechanics less relevant for your raid! Can't solo a mount boss? Voidwalkers can solo everything! Hopefully, the hunters in my raid aren't selling themselves this week as well. Are you a PvPer instead? I'll carry you in 2s and shoot you up to 2200 500 rating no problem! Or did your usual roleplaying partner go M.I.A. and you need someone to cyber with in the Deeprun Tram? ... We'll negotiate.

Now taking offers!

-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.

It might not be annual.

It's time for the 1st Annual RP Your Life! Awards, when I call attention to some of the most notable aspects of this soon-to-be-ending expansion! Now before you report me to the committee for rigging the elections, please note that these are all personal choices, not reflections of popular opinion or objective fact. Feel free to propose your own nominees in the comments; I'd love to hear them.

Most Interesting Boss Fight: Siegecrafter Blackfuse

There are plenty of fights in Siege with interesting mechanics, but while I got sick of looking at a resource bar by Sha of Pride, I never grew tired of the belt. With the choice of which weapon to kill left up to the players, the fight can change drastically depending on which mechanics a particular team finds hard to manage, the raid size, or the difficulty setting. If you're a lucky boomkin or hunter, you could be on the belt full-time, and as much as people bitch about having to be on belt duty, it is truly the easiest job in raiding history besides maybe being a lock on Garr or anything on Gunship. I would have given my left kidney to stay on the belt instead of hang out in the fiery deathtrap that is the main platform. Even though the fight on normal becomes pretty trivial with improved DPS, it's still fun and engaging every time.

Boss Who Puts Up the Best Fight: The Spirit Kings

 

In WoW's encounter history, it often feels like bosses just hand us the tools to eventually kill them. How realistic can a fight feel when there are such conveniently placed mechanics like Feng's Nullification, Will of the Emperor's Opportunistic Strike, or Tortos' shells? In fact, the one boss that seemed to actually want to kill us rather than help us was the Spirit Kings. They offer no protective bubbles, damage-buffing pools, or one-shot disintegrating lasers that were totally negated by clearly defined paths of safety. While other bosses were giving us magic tiles or standing around while we disabled their bombs, the Spirit Kings tried to take our armor, pin us down, and turn us on each other. Even when Meng was cowering away, he still put up a damage-reflecting shield that could easily cause a player to kill him/herself. There are many fights that are more technically difficult, but in an actual battle, these guys would be tactical officers.

Best Normal-to-Heroic Conversion: Imperial Vizier Zor'lok

There are many easy methods for changing a normal fight to "heroic," and I've seen Blizz employ them over and over again: increase boss health enough to turn it into a DPS check, add adds, include an insta-death mechanic, tack on an additional phase and change nothing in the previous ones, etc. What makes a successful conversion is changing the fight in a way that makes the raid rethink its strategy while still maintaining an organic relationship with the normal-mode mechanics. Therefore, I give this award to Imperial Vizier Zor'lok. Not only was the fight varied in normal mode and culminated in a last phase combining all of his abilities, the insect-like shedding of an echo forced the raid to strategically split up and handle the mechanics they had already seen in new ways. Unlike Morchok, one didn't merely split the raid in half and continue like normal, and the last phase was so appropriately chaotic that it gave a sense of relieved triumph to defeat him.

Worst Mechanic: Horridon's Pink Dinosaur

Since I consider well-thought conversion from normal to heroic mechanics to be extremely important, the worst mechanic of Mists raiding has to be that pink dinosaur. I'm not going to bitch that it was hard, because it wasn't, especially for a ranged DPS like me. It was a terrible mechanic because it was just freaking annoying and turned an otherwise engaging encounter into a nightmare of micromanagement, and anyone unlucky enough to be picked early had to deal with repeatedly knocking back an add for up to ten minutes. In general, I love add fights and council fights because there is so much to juggle, and there is a pleasure in keeping a mental priority for what adds and their mechanics need to be taken care of and which can be ignored. The dinosaur? Well it adds nothing to any of that.

Best Pet Name For a Guy's Penis: Wheatley

Uh... How did this one get in here?

-Avia.

The Flow of Gold

Now that I have a ton of gold on my old server that I haven't yet moved to the new one, I've been thinking of dumping a bunch of it on the supreme gold sink: the Black Market Auction House. If it weren't for the BMAH and battle pets, gold on an old server would be like having a bunch of money in the currency of a defunct country, but now it just means that I can camp multiple places for chances to win Unclaimed Containers full of Tier 3 bracers and cat carriers. What was that? They can have mounts inside them, you say? Well I'm sure that one person who got a Mimiron's Head for 10k is ecstatic, but I'll be over here transmogrifying a slot that no can see anyway and playing with my 8000g Siamese.

While I'm trying to hemorrhage money, my guild is starting to rake it in for we just opened our raid to buyers this week, something I've never before had the opportunity to experience coming from less competitive/10-man guilds. In the meanest sense, it's the sale of our services that is set to make us a small fortune over the next few months. Some would say that this is the true end-game for high-ranked guilds, an understated but vital part of raid preparation for the next tier or expansion when consumables and repairs will rapidly drain bank funds.

As for me, I rather liken it to being a mercenary for hire. An inexperienced stranger is in our midst, eager for the spoils of war and the thrill of battle. What he lacks in knowledge and skill, he makes up for with gold. We tell him to stay out of our way while we do the real fighting, and once we've salvaged a body of any useful armor, we toss our patron whatever we don't need or what he has bartered for. But we are not unfriendly. When the battle wanes, we invite him to joke with us, listen to our stories, and dance together. At the end of the night, some of us shake his hand before we part ways, a favorable transaction for the both of us having been completed. Next week brings another opportunity for riches.

Want to be a part of it? Read this post and then contact one of our officers.

-Avia.

Initiate Blues

Things To Do While Waiting on the Bench

Read a book.

Read forums.

Cheerlead.

Research your class.

Alt-tab another game.

Play with yourself.

Dance like no one is watching.

Cry for eternity.

-Avia.

Making friends in the military starts with your sub-unit.

What it felt like:

 

There were plenty of people in our battalion but only a few of us in our platoon. Three warlocks against the forces of Orgrimmar defending their corrupt warchief. If that's all the lieutenant thought we needed to succeed in our mission, then so be it.

A little away from us, the healers huddled around a pile of complicated charts and graphs, their officer briefing the new priest recruit on his assignments. The tanks seemed to have their strategy set and were sitting quietly, keeping an eye on the enemy that marched in the distance. Meanwhile, one of the death knights had fallen asleep, and the other melee were taking turns teabagging him. How ironic.

"You alright?" asked a fellow warlock, sitting next to me.

"Yea," I replied, a little too quickly. My fortified rations sat unmoving in my stomach.

He patted me on the back with a heavy hand. I felt some of the anxiety dissipate under the pressure. "Just do your job," he said, staring off in the same direction as the tanks. "It's important to get the mines down before they reach the ranged troops. Just kill the mines, and if you're still alive at the end... Well, that'll really impress the officers."

"Ok," I said. "Got it." Just stay alive. Stay alive.

"Ready check!" yelled the lieutenant.

We all leapt to our feet, the death knight swatting away someone's crotch as he did so. I adjusted my staff and my shoulders with shaking hands.

"Get into positions! We engage in twelve seconds!"

Falling in line next to the other warlock, I looked over at him. He caught my gaze and smiled before turning towards the boss, a potion at the ready in his hand. I clutched mine too and faced forward.

It was time to prove myself.

What really happened:

 

[warlockchannel] Fellow warlock: Just stay alive.
[warlockchannel] Me: Kk.

-Avia.