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.

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.

The end of a year... and an expansion.

My guild hasn't been doing anywhere near as well in Dragon Soul as we did in Firelands. After we reached the
DPShealidiot check that is Ultraxion and learned that a third of our team can't click a button that saves their lives, we lost a bunch of core members to a mass server transfer and had to fill spots with our
benchnew recruitsincompetent casuals for a week. We only just downed Deathwing on Thursday and it was... anticlimactic. I'd already seen the grand finale cut scene thanks to easy-mode LFR in which I "won the game" with thirty minutes of minimal effort. Even the comforting and encouraging words from Thrall didn't uplift my warrior spirit since I knew I didn't deserve them. Usually, it takes at least a couple weeks of dedicated teamwork to get some cool RP that makes the player feel like her efforts contributed to the safety of Azeroth. Yet, I got to celebrate the end of the Cataclysm with... random fucks from Whisperwind server. I couldn't even jump up and down and hug anyone without feeling like a creeper.

In real life news, I'm on winter break, so I have four weeks to
apply to internshipslearn a foreign languagecamp rare spawns in Outlands. I've also been trying to gear up my druid alt, but I've had little success due to the following well-known rules of RNG:

1. Your main will never roll higher than a 35 on important loot.
2. Your alt will roll better than your main...
3. But your second alt will get all rare pets and mounts and win gear upgrades that boost ilvl by 10 points at a time.

My fourth 85, a god-awful ret pally that forgets to use its cooldowns, is now better geared than my precious druid healer that I actually leveled to play rather than be my disenchanting slave. Every time my druid loses a roll, I sigh in knowing resignation, and every time I win a roll on my pally, I want to quit WoW and start buying winning lottery tickets for people I don't care about.

Anyway, in a few days, it's going to be my favorite holiday! I'll be doing my usual New Year's Eve thang of going out to
danceget fucked up and danceget REALLY fucked up and dance. Then the next day, I'm going to to bow to my elders and get cash.

Being Korean is awesome.

-Avia.

P.S. Aggra is pregnant. Thrall better watch his back.

RNG never fails to displease.

A couple weeks ago (yea, I've been a bit truant lately), I played my first ever game of D&D, and it was even geekier than I had imagined it! As a creative writer, I always wondered why I never got into tabletop RPGs. I'm not even sure if people still RP in WoW though I sure as hell try to as much as I can on a PvP server. You'd be surprised how many people in Stormwind are willing to join in on a costume party and (jokingly?) erotic scenarios, but it's usually by the time someone says something disturbingly inappropriate about women/children/orifices that the crowd disperses in a trail of nervous laughter and I fear for the future of our species.

Anyway, during my aforementioned adventures in Hypergeek Land, I found that the things people like the most about tabletop RPGs, i.e. the face-to-face interaction and regular convening of friends in real life, are pretty big turnoffs for someone who has trouble conversing with people outside of a typed environment, i.e. me. I can't even remember the last time I was in a group setting, but I'm certain alcohol was involved. However, my guildies and I got over even the hurdle of having to meet up in person to D&D: we play over vent. Apparently, I'm a druid who shoots things with a bow and can tame animals. Obviously, the graphical interface isn't as sophisticated as WoW, but that's what my imagination is for, right?

Guess which one I am!

After engaging in a few battles, I noticed an important flaw in our setup. All the dice rolls are automated by d20pro's AI, and as anyone who plays WoW knows, all /rolls by a player will suck balls EXCEPT when they're not yours. After the fifth miss on a mob, one of which actually whiffed so badly that I hit my teammate for full damage, I was starting to think that playing a game based on lucky rolls wasn't such an encouraging prospect. Some people might say that it's not luck; it's probability. But after five years of playing WoW, I know that the probability of whiffing a roll and losing your item to a "teammate" is so close to 100% that it defies the laws of statistics.

I'm expecting Morgan Freeman to show up any day now to do a special on the numerical wormhole that was ICC. Stupid Rotface trinket.

-Avia of throttled inequalities.