THE BENCH. omg.

I'm benching myself this week. I'm probably still going to have to come in for Beth'tilac and Rhyolith, just because I'm one of our two (2) ranged DPS and even the other ranged doesn't have a good way to handle spiderlings. But I'm still going to be missing out on the majority of the night of raiding (and the VP!) and probably a guild-first Alysrazor kill. And depending on how things go, maybe a guild-first Staghelm kill. I dunno! So it's a little bit of a bummer, but to be honest I should have been rotating myself onto the bench well before now. It's easy to make yourself feel indispensable, but the reality is that if I ascended into a being of pure energy tomorrow, the raid team would get along without me.

On the other hand, most of my gaming time has been going into WoW recently, and that's a bit of a shame. I own a bunch of great games that I like very much (Dragon Age, Civ IV, Medieval 2: Total War, Heroes of Might & Magic V, Sims 3, etc.) and I've probably spent less time playing them, combined, than I've spent on WoW.

That's the goal and nature of MMOs, to an extent, but I've been doing things like looking at some of Total Biscuit's video reviews and reading Rock Paper Shotgun recently, and there's a ton of pretty neat stuff that I've been missing out on. I've still never played the Mass Effects, which has meant that I've missed out on one of my favorite things in CRPG playing: creating a character and watch her grow in power and experience throughout several lengthy storylines. My plate-clad, dual-wielding warrior in the original DA:O. My half-elven Ranger that I took all the way from her humble beginnings in Baldur's Gate 1 to the very end of Throne of Baal (GOD that last boss fight sucked).

Further, my Starcraft 2 single player campaign has stalled out, as has my ladder ranking (lol gold). I've probably dropped back to being a silver-league player in SC2, actually. And Diablo 3 is coming out! And dear sweet merciful biscuits if I don't want to play a sorceress (or I guess "lady Wizard"). I watched some gameplay footage last night and she was able to shoot these two laser-fire beams out of her hands and nuke some monsters. It looked really fun, especially since I could probably be playing coop and talking on vent with WoW guildies.

This isn't even mentioning music, books, movies, and so on.

Basically there's a lot of cool stuff out there, and it's easy to let WoW eat your "cool stuff" time. So even though I'm sort of anxious at the prospect of (mostly) missing a raid week, but it's not really a bad thing. I can just park Pradzha outside the instance portal, hang out on vent, and do some other stuff in the meantime.

Apropos of nothing: this is the coolest WoW fanart I've seen in a while. I love it so much.