Unclogging the Time Sink

After nearly two years of full-time play, my obsession with World of Warcraft seems to have reached a plateau. There was a time, particularly when I was still leveling my first character, when I was hell-bent on putting in every free second of my life to reaching 70 and beginning to raid.

If I had off on a Tuesday, and the servers were down for maintenance, this usually put me in a foul mood the rest of the day. I sometimes viewed family and friends as an annoying distraction from my personal, in-game progress. Guild woes were a source of anxiety because of the necessity of belonging to a good guild in order to progress.

That word “progress” is really the key, there. I was of the mindset that although one can’t “win” World of Warcraft, one should have a as a goal the maximizing of one’s character to the greatest extent possible. And that maximization, or progress, requires insane amounts of time input into the game.

Raiding itself usually requires a significant commitment of time in any given week. Of course there is the five to ten hours (or more) each week devoted to the actual raid; in the case of my guild, raids occur in blocks of five hours, one block during the week and one block on the weekend. Weekend raids usually interfere with family time, for those of us who are married to non-WoW playing souses. More than that, there are hours spent not raiding, but doing dailies and farming to make up for the material cost of raiding or to meet other in-game goals.

On top of that, the new badge reward system has added a level to gear progression, because now in addition to raiding and doing dailies, one also has to make time for Heroics. Some of the Badge reward gear from the Shattered Sun offensive, such as these Tormented Demon Soul Robes, cost as much as 100 badges. The Scryers Blade of Focus costs 150! Assuming one runs one Heroic a day, for five badges, that’s 30 Heroics in 30 days. Breaking that down into hours, assuming a two hour run (not always possible if the Heroic is a hard one), that’s at least 60 hours of play. Running Kara on a weekly basis in addition to Heroics can cut the amount of time it takes to earn the badges, but only doing Kara (no Heroics or other raids) would still take about six weeks to earn 150 badges.

WoW is a time-intensive game for players who want to maximize their character’s progression. And I feel like I am finally over that obsession with progress.

My character is well-geared in Tier 4 and a few Badge reward items. I’ve seen Karazhan from one end to the other, to the point I think I could participate in a Kara raid while watching TV. I’ve seen Gruul lying on the floor of his cave. I’ve been there when Magtheridon was taken down.

SSC was a disappointment for me, and maybe that’s when my interest in progress really peaked, then plateaued. SSC is a boring instance. Since I don’t know what other 25 man instances are like, I can’t really judge them all by the SSC standards, but if TK, Hyjal, and Black Temple are like SSC, I am really not all that interested in seeing them.

SSC is cavernous and uninteresting. Maybe it has to be, in order for 25 people to move in an orderly fashion through the instance, from one boss to another. Yet it still feels less like a natural environment for these bosses to “live” (much as Karazhan feels natural for the spooks and spectres and demons who inhabit it), and more like a theme park ride.

The elevated walkways that lead one through the instance even look rather like a conveyor belt meant to carry you from one boss to another. Maybe it should be called “10,000 Fish Oils Under the Reservoir” or “It’s a Naga World After All.”

I haven’t been impressed with the gear from SSC, either, probably because there is not as noticeable a jump in quality as there was from 5-man blues to Karazhan purples. I have twice passed on the belt that drops from Lurker simply because it’s only a marginal upgrade from the belt I got from High King Maulgar a month or so ago. The belt seems to make other people very happy, and it does little for me, so I pass on it.

To me, that’s a sign of someone who is no longer much concerned with his own progression.

I am finding my in-game fun in different places, these days. I enjoy working towards the goal of my epic flying mount. It’s slow, and lonely, but I find that I like it. I can do as many dailies as I want, time allowing, and I can quit when my wife says “Let’s watch TV together.”

Or I can farm an Enchant recipe in Netherstorm. Or I can run my Shaman through a few quests, or work on leveling his Jewelcrafting.

There has been some concern in my guild about people leaving, or going on hiatus until WotLK. This would have caused me some high anxiety at one time. Now, I don’t let it concern me. I’ve been through it all before. I don’t allow events or people over whom I have no control influence my enjoyment of the game. Even if the guild broke up today, I’d just move on. Maybe I’d look for another guild, maybe not.

I think the important thing I am taking away from this period in my gaming life is that I not longer allow the game to determine the amount of time I sink into playing it. I set my own hours, now. If I never get that Scryers Blade of Focus, oh well. If I am not top DPS in my class in raids, oh well.

There are more important things in life. My own self-worth is not determined by the stats on my sword or my damage out numbers in a raid.

Summer Slow Down

Memorial Day weekend seems like a harbinger for the rest of the summer. I didn’t play much, and didn’t really miss WoW all that much either. We cooked out almost every day, and we worked around the house and in the yard. I mowed. I took my son to see the new Indiana Jones flick Friday night.

I took an extra day off yesterday, but it was maintenance day and the servers only started to come back up around 1:30. Since I have to leave to pick my son up at school around 2:15, and my server was still down at 2:00, I didn’t play at all yesterday.

I did have some spotty, hour-at-a-time play over the weekend, but did not accomplish much of anything. On my Warlock, I got the bright idea to farm this Enchant recipe in Netherstorm. A Paladin guild mate was talking in gchat about how this enchant is so great for tanks, but no Enchanters on the server seems to have it. So I travelled up North to Manaforge Ultris and started farming Ethereum Nullifiers and Avengers (you have to kill the Avengers to get the Nullifiers to spawn).

I thought it would be easy. There are plenty of mobs to kill around the Manaforge. I circled it again and again and again, picking up and completing a quest or two out of the base camp on the North side of the forge. I did this Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, for the limited amount of time I could play each day.

I could have been doing dailies. Instead, I farmed this enchant that never dropped. Even now, I am still parked out there in Netherstorm, though I probably will end my search for the elusive recipe tonight. I have a Zul’Aman raid at 8:30.

I even managed to kill one of the unique Ethereum Jailor spawns, which supposedly has a near 100% chance to drop a cell key, and all I got was some Netherweave.

By the way, Netherweave doesn’t sell for shit on the AH. I’ve been making stacks of it into Heavy Netherweave bandages and selling them for six gold a stack because I can’t sell it on the AH. The dailies have totally killed the market for cloth.

The sad thing is, I was so frustrated by that enchant not dropping, I will probably go back there and farm some more after tonight’s raid. I’m stubborn like that.

In other news, my hunter has not seen any action in weeks. My Shaman, which I was so excited to level up to 60, has been sitting at 60 for a couple weeks as well. It’s been a bit of a drag to level him, now that I am past the stage where I can benefit from XP boost given to levels 20-60. Contributing to my lack of enjoyment of my Shaman, I respecced him Resto thinking that I would start to run Hellfire Ramparts and Bloodfurnace for as much Honor Hold rep as possible before beginning to quest.

As it turns out, I am a chicken. I am afraid to step into healing a PuG, never having healed much of anything in my life as a WoW player. Stepping out from behind the slacker mentality of a DPS class is a tough first step to make. Healers and tanks have so much pressure riding on their abilities.

I belong to a good guild, so why should I have to PuG heal, you ask? My guild is also heading into some slow summer months. A lot of people are going on vacation or otherwise taking a forced or voluntary break from WoW. Our raids are being combined with those of another guild, just to keep our progress at its current level. If I want to level my Shaman and learn how to heal five-mans, I have to do it on my own.

Resto is not a bad spec for leveling. My survivability is way high, as I’ve discovered when trying to mine Fel Iron nodes in buzzard-infested areas of Hellfire Peninsula. As soon as I kill one buzzard, another attacks me. I’ve had to kill as many as five or six buzzards before being able to mine, and the only reason I survived at all was because I am Resto.

But Resto just isn’t as much fun as playing as Enhancement. If I totally chicken out and decide to solo level to 70, I’ll probably respec back to Enhancement and play my Shaman as a melee DPS.

World of…Pacifism?

Just by chance this morning, I discovered a blog called WoW Pacifist Undead Priest. I am absolutely fascinated by people who try to make a game their own by playing differently, so this blog is now one of my favorites.

I remember someone on Sentinels trying something similar. This was before Burning Crusade and the introduction of Battleground Dailies, which (for a healer) can provide a source of XP that does not require killing anything. This person on Sentinels leveled mostly by discovering new parts of the map and doing whatever delivery quests were available. She kept an RP “journal” of her experiences on the forums.

Now, it seems like Pacifism is catching on and there are quite a few people giving it a try. I think it could be a challenging, fun way to reignite interest in the game for someone who has already done the end game part of the game and has grown bored.

I don’t think I would want to try this on my first toon, however maybe there is someone who is doing just that.

Note Reinisch’s “WoW Oddballs” links on the right. Apparently there are more people trying to play WoW in unusual ways. I am particularly interested in reading about the melee hunter. I would also add that, briefly reading the Pacifist Undead Priest blog and some of these other “oddballs,” they all seem to be literate people with a talent for expressing themselves…always a benefit in a genre that seems overtaken by text messaging shorthand.