Malaise

With the arrival of Wrath last year, I found my enjoyment of the leveling to be nearly non-existant. I've mentioned this countless times to long time WoW friends, and now I share this with you. Somehow, I simply couldn't find it in myself to enjoy the way the quest hubs worked.

In the old days, you'd get like 20 quests in one place, and about 1/4 of them all sent you to the same general area so you could multitask and still accomplish stuff. In Wrath, you'd get to a new quest hub and find maybe 5 quests that turned into quest chains, each of them sending you to a different place, after which you'd return, only to have to go back to the same place to continue. It didn't feel efficient and clever, it felt sort of like my mother telling me to clean my room, do my laundry, walk the dogs and do the dishes. I don't know about the rest of you, but those chores were never an entertaining experience for me.

So the leveling in Wrath was irritating. Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a Warcraft lore fiend. I love me some lore, but for whatever reason my brain cannot really retain a great deal of the incredible depth that is Warcraft lore. I tried playing the old Warcrafts, and I think I got about as far as Arthas turning and running amok, but around that time I think my computer burped and I had to redo the hard drive etc. Also, I felt like I was hitting a brick wall in that stage of the campaign and wasn't yet prepared to return to the torture. So in that vein, I'm not that closely tied with what's happened in the history of Azeroth amongst the races, nor do I harbor any particularly strong feelings about the various famous personalities that crossed over from Warcraft into World of Warcraft.

For me, the Arthas lore simply isn't as interesting as it is for, say, Vani. I mean, I leveled through Vanilla WoW. I visited Menethil Harbor. I'd seen the entrance to the Undercity and seen the cinematic where Arthas comes home at some point. I'd collected Arthas' tears on my herbalist. I even played a little tiny bit of Warcraft - though not to the end. This combination has turned out to be not quite enough for Arthas alone to carry the expansion for me.

That said. I'm a raiding Priest now, and rather than work on Dailies or farm stuff or run Heroics, mostly if I'm on my Priest I'm probably raiding. Or buying reagents before a raid, or repairing after a raid. I mean, I do occasionally run Heroics with friends who need a healer, or a Heroic Daily for a guildie who's recently returned to the game after moving, and thus needs a hand collecting Triumph badges and oh hey, could you heal us for it?

But somehow... somehow, I've once again reached that point where I'm looking for the "fun" in playing. Part of it is the occasional bitterness I experience as a Healer class working on an encounter that the raid is very familiar with, and yet people are still standing in the fires, not dispelling, not focusing fire or running into something's Cleave despite knowing on some level that it's probably not the right place to be. This isn't limited to either 10 or 25 man raiding, it's about equal across both.

I'm thinking about this now and I think I've decided that the content really has been a bit too easy for the people I run with. The premise of my guild is one of working on progression raiding. As great as it's felt to down a new boss, having reached the point where we've downed everything (except Algalon) and have nothing left to really work hard for (hard modes being entirely optional makes them more along the lines of Achievement Junkie Candy than content) has sort of left many of us a bit lost. We've done what we set out to do. Like Illidan and Maiev, what of the hunter without some prey?

At the same time, I'm an Alt-o-holic. I have all 10 character slots on my server filled, though a few of those characters I hardly think to play. Every so often I get the itch to level one of them a little bit, but then the itch is satisfied and goes away.

And I am struck with this malaise, this lack of motivation, this lost sensation. This happens with some regularity. I don't think of it as the end of the world, or the end of WoW for me, because I've been through it so many times that I can take it for granted.

That said. What do you do, if you're feeling less than enthusiastic about WoW? Get off the computer and putter around your home? Step outside under the sun, breathe fresh (or not so fresh, depending on your location) air, do some outdoor activity? Go shopping? Do some home maintenance? Or do you switch to an alt, start on another server, log back onto your main and grind out some dailies and farming because you know you'll feel terrible if you don't? Perhaps you play another game, or start some sort of creative process at your computer - November is apparently National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.

Sometimes I grab a blanket and just go lay down outside on the grass. I like to listen to the sound of the wind in the trees. If there are birds, so much the better. Dogs, cars, doors slamming, wind chimes all pass through, but even those sounds are rather soothing. Other times I'm a bone head and keep plugging away at WoW.