WoW – Waning Motivation

I’m currently on a one week break from WoW, crunching the numbers on my future in the game.

It’s still fun, and the Classic server has been great for me to run instances I’ve never been in before: Blackfathom Deeps, Razorfen Downs, Uldaman, Zul’Farrak, Maraudon, Sunken Temple, etc.

I’m in the low 50’s on my priest (level 52.5) and things have slowed down quite a bit. My previous fighting technique hasn’t changed, but the downtime has. I need to drink water to recover mana every two fights… or finish off the last 50% of an enemy by wanding to let mana recover. Both result in a similar amount of downtime which feels much higher that it was in earlier levels.

I keep an eye on LFG but I’m in that in-between where (I think) players rush from 50 to 55 so they can do LBRS/UBRS, Stratholme, Scholomance; meanwhile the BRD groups I can do are slim pickings. And ZF or earlier don’t really get me experience or gear upgrades.

I missed the leveling wave of players in my guild – one day a bunch of us were in the low 50’s and wanted to try the initial fights in BRD (but they already had a priest so I didn’t go), the next, everyone was level 55+ wanting to move on to the aforementioned dungeons players do when they are level 55+.

I have around ~10 hours a week I can play, which means on a typical weekday if I can’t find a group *quick* I just wind up working on crafting. That’s why I’m now 225/225 cooking and fishing. 😉

If I persisted, I’d get over this hump, hit level 55, suddenly qualify for the pre-raid end game dungeons… the catch is do I actually have time for it? Say I do put in the time and effort to get there – it’ll be a slow road to gear up and keep going given my overall time constraint.

Back to the 10 hours a week, that doesn’t favor a game where the group content is the main draw and IHMO, WoW’s group content is why people play and subscribe, because the PvE content is not that compelling. And, a lot of time in WoW is wasted doing things like traveling.

Anyway, I decided to take a small break and try out LoTRO and ESO again (well it isn’t like I quit those games, I was just focusing on WoW) and ponder what to do.