Without Burdens

Of Holiday Parties

This morning I am slowly eating my oatmeal and trying to make my head stop throbbing.  I feel like I have a “hangover” but I didn’t even drink last night.  I think this means I am now officially “old”.  Last night was the Christmas party for my group at work.  I think I said it yesterday, but we are the only group that actually likes each other enough to hold a party.  It has been years since I have felt the way about a group of people that I do about these people.  Quite honestly I probably never have felt exactly the same, but my very first work environment was a similar “family” feel.

The highlight of the evening was dirty santa, which for folks who do not know what that means.  Gift exchange with the ability to steal from others.  The best gift was…  a large thing of crown royal, a pair of captain america underoos, and a package of fake moustaches.  I cannot and nor do I really want to picture the scenario that was planned with that combination of items…  but it was needless to say hillarious.  Even better… someone had inadvertedly brought a Captain America mask and shield…  the underoos were donated to the winner for the full effect.  I brought some legos, and they were hotly contested… as were the call of duty mega blocks that were brought.

Probably the coolest item of the night was one I ended up winning initially but then was quickly stolen from me.  The “Boozequet” was a floral bouquet made up of individual shots.  The creator had hot glued the individually sealed shot drinks onto floral wire and then arranged all of them in a bouquet.  Extremely clever, I told the creator that she should market it and I am sure during this time of the year she would get a lot of business.  She even made a cute little “drunk santa” tub for the base of the arrangement.  The whole night was pretty amazing.  I go through this “I don’t want to go” phase right before any party, because my body rejects being around lots of people.  However when I actually do go I have a blast.’

Without Burdens

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I really do not have a lot of gaming news today.  When you have a big event going on in the evening the entirety of the day tends to be dominated by planning and preparing for it.  My day yesterday was either planning or waiting to play for the holiday party.  As a result I didn’t get into anything that I could not rapidly exit if needed.  That meant my only real options were LFR.  After some moving stuff around I managed to get my ilevel high enough to queue for Vale of the Eternal Spring, the first section of Siege of Orgrimmar. In fact currently I am sitting at 502 with a 450 ring still equipped that I have not been able to replace.  I am proud of myself because I got there on this alt without “actual raiding” and without leaning on Burden of Eternity gear at all.

Why does this matter?  Well a Burden of Eternity is one of those things from the timeless isle that is either a super rare drop, or super costly (50,000 timeless coins).  When you apply it to the gear tokens that drop from the island it transforms what would have been a 496 ilevel item to a 535 ilevel item.  The problem is, just like the normal tokens there is no control whatsoever on what stat package you will get.  This creates a lot of odd situations like tanking items with no avoidance stats on them.  I personally find the burden gear to be a bit of a crutch, and what I mean by that is… I cannot seem to make my brain ignore the fact that it is higher ilevel and instead evaluate the stats of an item.  Many 502 items will be better for your character than these 535 items just because of the particular stat distribution and the inclusion of gem slots.

Having these extremely high ilevel but not very optimized items just confuses the mix for me.  I have or have had quite a few of these on Belgrave my main, and in each case I find it really hard to make myself abandon them for a better itemized but lower ilevel item.  This is the double edged sword of ilevel after all… the number does not adequately represent how well a player is geared.  I could have a bunch of extremely high ilevel items equipped that are functionally useless for my class.  On my shaman I admit that I equipped a healing trinket that I got from a random loot bag… just to get my ilevel up high enough to be able to run Vale of the Eternal spring.  I am sure there are lots of other people out there doing the same.  I like the feeling of seeing my gear score going up incrementally, but I feel like as a gauge of quality it has never really been valid.

A Quiet Day

This has to be the slowest I have taken to eat my oatmeal in the morning.  I blame the multiple directions my head seems to be spinning right now.  As a result of my present state… I am hoping for an extremely quiet day.  Far as I know we don’t really have much of anything to do today, so my hope is that other than doing laundry I can pretty much sit on my comfy couch and relax.  Said relaxation is probably going to involve a lot of LFR for a shot at shiny shiny loot drops.  Now that my paladin can queue for Siege I want to get him all the way through to Downfall.  I also should run my shaman, dk and druid through as well.  Who knows how much I will actually get accomplished but needless to say I will be enjoying my day today.