bleh.
i know i haven't written an entry in a long while. i wish i could say it's because things got better, but it's really just i haven't felt like bothering. i still kind of don't, my life still feels not worth existing in in every way, but i also kind of don't want my journal to languish.
ended up missing most of the dota 2 final playoffs for The International, which is the biggest game of the year, through a combination of eventually falling asleep but before that staying up until 7am talking to a very long-time friend about the past and old memories as they went through all their old wow characters, deleting some that had a lot of complicated or bad memories attached to them. (i'm using they pronouns to obscure their identity, since this is a public post. they may actually use they / them pronouns, they may not. you don't get to know.)
they ended up trusting me with some things they've never told anyone else, which i appreciate that they trust me like that as much as it's sometimes hard to feel worthy of being shown that level of trust. they were some very emotionally complicated things. i only hope the talk we had gave them some level of closure, if nothing else.
i've been really enjoying wow, particularly the launch of this new expansion. there's always some things i'm kinda meh about as with any game but that list is short, and the list of things i genuinely enjoyed is quite long. introduced some new characters i've become kind of obsessed with, brought back at least for cameos a lot of old characters i'm kind of obsessed with, great story, (mostly) fun dungeons which surprised me since i normally hate dungeons as content (fuck the dawnbreaker though i hope they remove that dungeon from the game lol), delves are absolutely fantastic, and as usual the art and design teams for all the creatures, assets and zones really knock it out of the park. and they even made the game so much more alt-friendly i'm maintaining a few characters without feeling dangerously close to burnout, which is honestly really nice.
and of course so far the raid seems great, which if i'm being honest raiding is the #1 reason i play wow. no other mmo i've tried has group content that even comes the tiniest bit close to wow raiding for me in terms of sheer enjoyment. i've only ever focused on getting gear as a vehicle to push me towards being able to do harder encounters; i frankly don't give a fuck about gear on a personal level past that. raiding is always about loving the fights and learning the mechanics. and this new raid is a little short for my liking and about ⅔rds of the earlier bosses are a bit easy on normal difficulty, but my raid group hit a hard stop at the second to last boss on our first raid night due to the sheer complexity of the mechanics, which i absolutely loved. i had a great time, and i'm looking forward to heroic difficulty.
as one of the two raid tanks, switching my main character from guardian druid to brewmaster monk has greatly increased how much i enjoy tanking now as well... raid tanking specifically is my #1 favorite thing to do in raids, but even then playing guardian was just not keeping me engaged. it's not even that it's a bad tank! i even recommend it to people starting out or who don't want to really think hard about their class mechanics while tanking; it's simple, straightforward and effective in how it plays. it's a great tank for most people.
unfortunately i have a specific kind of insanity that makes simple straightforward classes generally boring as fuck to me, to the point i was starting to space out mid-boss pull as guardian because i was so bored, unless the boss was complex enough to keep my attention. brewmaster is, as far as i can tell anyway, the most complicated and demanding tank class with a ridiculous amount of buttons to press to play your best, and i fucking love it. i love a class that challenges me to play well and rewards me for doing so, and punishes me for slacking. guardian druid is, by contrast, very forgiving of mistakes and makes recovering from a mistake quite easy; again, good for most people, but not what i need to stay focused at all.
wow's brewmaster monk has always been the most fun i've ever had in any video game, even outside of the mmo genre. i only ever switched off it because at some point it was drastically reworked in a way that vastly simplified it in a way i absolutely fucking hated lol. like i kept trying to play it and found it completely unplayable, and so with a sigh returned to druid, which was the class i mained for a very long time before monk was implemented.
and then in the expansion before the last one they reworked monk again, but this time to largely switch it back to its convoluted bullshit playstyle that i instantly fell in love with the second i played my very first monk. so i sighed and waffled on main switching for a while because i admittedly hate main switching, i really invest hard in my main character, but eventually relented and have been enjoying things so much more for it. i do still play my druid, but the dps druid spec i was planning to play (feral — turn into a giant kitty and bite things to death) was also reworked but in a way that made the spec unplayable to me because blizzard is never fucking satisfied unless they're completely dumpstering at least one spec i love very much lol.
so i just switched my druid over to being a dedicated pvp healer. if nothing else, to ruin restoration druid completely they'd have to remove everything that even makes it a druid at all.
either way. whatever. this game and my friends are all that's keeping me feeling like this life continues to be worth existing in at all. and even then, only on some days. there's still many. many days i feel like none of this is even worth it, and am hyper aware that i am still yet again forced very firmly into "survival" mode and am just trying to make it through each day one at a time, trying my best to not look at or focus too long on how absolutely shit everything is, how much every other aspect of my life makes me think every day about how much i wish i'd just never been born.
but i mean... i'm still here, i guess. i still really wish i wasn't. but i'm here, and at least there's still a video game and the friends that play it to keep me from throwing myself off a cliff.
editing to add.... fuck. i didn't even talk about how much i fucking love arcane mage and how weird it is to even say that. i don't normally like caster classes very much; i'm heavily a melee dps player when i have to dps. the few times i've tried mage i haven't really liked it and kind of felt like it was a class for people way smarter than me lol.
but i both love arcane mage as a spec so much, and also the OC who is my arcane mage in-game i've developed so much and kind of really fallen in love with as a character he's been upgraded officially from "minor OC" to the realm of the main OCs. which i only very rarely do that!! he's quite a fun guy. unfortunately for him though lol being a main OC means he will be subjected to significantly more Torments.
maybe eventually i'll write an entry about him. i've already written novels of character info about him to friends over discord; even as a minor OC i had so fucking much development put into him over a decade. which isn't even that uncommon for my minor characters, but was starting to get to be A Lot for a minor character of mine. when they get that developed, they're a main OC now, baby!
anyway. idk. maybe watch this space for Funny Magic Man Content, or a link to a page on my website containing such. because i apparently Cannot Shut Up about this man and the only thing stopping me from making him his own webspace right fucking now is websites take significantly more work than infodumping a LOTR trilogy's worth of character info into a chat message, and it's so rare i have that kind of energy anymore right now.