Jumble of Thoughts

Blearg, another month with no posts here. I feel bad, but I've been playing so little WoW, between my other social obligations and moving this week, I just haven't had the time. I tried forcing myself to post in the past, and that results in terrible garbage prose that shames me deeply. I can't really think of anything to go on at length about, so here's a shotgun approach instead.

---
There's some debate over hunter pets; one side wants them to be identical except for cosmetics so they're free to pick whatever and still be min-maxed, and the other side wants every breed of tiger to be it's own special snowflake. This is perhaps the biggest false dichotomy I've ever seen outside of Glen Beck's show. Appearance has to be tied to functionality for PVP reasons, but there's no reason there shouldn't be some standardization.

Instead of making a bajillion pets, there should be archtypes that a creature fits into. So there's the "max DPS pet", the "ranged DPS pet", the "tanking pet, the "hamstring pet", and so on. So imagine mammoths, gorillas, and rhinos were all tanks, and functioned IDENTICALLY, but you could decide which is coolest for yourself. Problem: solved.

---
I'm ambivalent about AVR going away. On one hand, it was like a cool cyberpunk battle where your deck pointed out cover positions and whatnot, but it was a whole new level of holding the player by the hand. My computer is too ghetto to run such a beefy add-on anyway, so beh. Also, I've seen people die to positioning errors even with AVR, so it's far from idiot-proofing raiding even then. We are not poorer for it's loss.

---
One thing WoW could really use is mid-boss checkpoints. A lot of civilized, upstanding games with long bosses use these, especially for between phase transitions. No More Heroes 2, God of War, Bayonetta, all mercifully made sure when we had chipped away 90% of a bosses' health over 10 minutes only to get sneezed on, robbing us of our last sliver of health, all that effort wasn't a total waste.

We spent about 4 or 5 hours mastering Sindragosa, and most of that was managing her crazy ice block bullshit in phase 2 (or phase 3, if you're a dick). The first two-thirds of the fight became akin to the Kel-Thuzzad 5 minute trash pull hell; we've utterly mastered this part, yet we are shackled to this eternal nightmare. There has to be a better way.

---
Cataclysm continues to look pleasing, especially the changes to all the old zones. I'm glad they're finally realizing that variety within a zone is a good thing. Look at any Outland zone, they're all one color and texture copy/pasted forever. Except Blade's Edge, that place is cool.

Professions look to continue being a pretty ancillary part of your character, but that's fine in a way; the alternative is re-speccing from patch to patch cause JC is now BiS over Enchanting for SPriests, or whatever. It should be noted, however, that some professions are WAAAAY easier to level than others (Blacksmithing, Engineering, and Enchanting), so I should hope since all professions provide roughly equal benefit, they'll make the tough ones easier to compensate.

---
FUCKING TRIPLE SPEC JUST GIVE IT UP ALREADY.