"Long time" readers of my blog will note I haven't really said anything about WoW in about three weeks. That would be because I haven't logged in to WoW but three times in that period, and that was for raids. Two of which ended up being canceled due to no-shows. I had mentioned previously how raid drama was causing some problems for my guild and it has really sapped my will to play the game at the moment. This isn't the first time I have gone through all that, and it's not something I greatly enjoy. So I've been casting about recently trying to figure out whether I wanted to continue playing WoW or find another game to play. I might eventually go back to WoW, but I realized last night that I am fine not playing WoW, which tells me quite a bit.
I've been playing WoW since March 2005 and I wouldn't be exagerating to say that I absolutely loved it. Part of the problem for me now though is that as an alt-a-holic I've leveled many characters and just don't have it in me to level another. With two level 80 characters at the moment, I don't even feel like leveling my real "main"--my Druid, who is my real pride and joy. He languishes at level 70. Why level yet another character--even one at 70--only to find oneself in the same mess you are in with the other two? The mess is called end-game and can be a political mudbath. Unless you are fine with running the same 5-man dungeons with PUGS day after day; running endless quests and dailies; and farming, then you have absolutely nothing to do other than raid or pvp. I love to raid, but the whole guild drama over it tends to dampen your enthusiasm after awhile. Unless of course you happened to have found a solid guild that gels and has no problem fielding a full raid team. I haven't had such luck myself.
Then of course there is the news of all the upcoming nerfs and changes to various class, including my favorite--the Druid. A very well written piece on WoWinsider yesterday summarized the problems Blizzard is currently having with the tanks and how Druids are getting the royal shaft yet again. Frankly it pisses me off because Druids weren't even viable until patch 1.8, which was implemented two years into the game. Then Druids underwent the larges single nerf in the history of the game shortly after BC went live. And there have been a slew of nerfs in WotLK as well. Including those incoming in patch 3.1. On top of that the mana regeneration changes (NERF) make me very unwilling to play a mana using class any longer. I used to love tanking on my Druid, but I don't even want to do that any longer. And that uncertainty about what I want to do with him is why he sat out of WotLK while I leveled a Shaman and a Death Knight to 80.
Outside of character specific differences, I have general differences with Blizzard how they have unfolded WoW over the last several months. I think they made a huge mistake unveiling the Death Knight as a class and the first "Hero Class". I said before, and I believe it even more now that they should have created sub-set classes for each of the existing classes instead. Druid --> Arch-Druid, etc. Introduction of the Death Knight as a separate class has caused all kinds of problems. For raid design, for PVP, and everything in between. And Blizzard has every indication of not knowing how to fix any of them. With each patch comes numerous class changes with no apparent long term goal in mind for any of them. They're simply trying one solution after another with all of them eroding the fun and ability out of the classes along the way.
And so I decided finally that I really need to step back from WoW for a while and see what else is out there. I've been playing EVE for the past three weeks but with all other player created content games it gets rather boring unless you find a niche in a well populated guild. I'm a noob who has a long way to go to get to anything exciting and I'm already well bored running vanilla level missions. And mining is a little too much for me when you have nothing else to do.
My wife and I are talking about trying WAR again though. So we'll log in to night and see how that goes. I haven't touched WAR since last September so I'm a little rusty and need to figure out what is what again. Guess we'll see how it goes. In the mean time, so long WoW.
