As raiding begins to crank up, I find myself for the first time without any raiding options open to me. My main guild’s GM has been more or less AWOL since a year ago, and shows no sign of starting to play again, and a potential "we’re getting the band back together" opportunity appears to have fallen through. So for the first time since BC1, I find myself with no plans to raid, no pressure to hit level cap, no pressure to do anything other than play whatever toon I want for as long as I want. Which is exactly what I’m doing.
There are many, I am sure, that will point out that LFR fills the gap, and lots of my guildies are going that route and are, at least on the surface, quite happy about it. Personally, I don’t consider "raiding" to be all about the content, and no number of Epics will alleviate the fact that I’m raiding with a bunch of strangers that I’ll probably never see again2. All of my fondest memories of raiding have more to do with the people I raided with than the raid experience itself. Sure, downing a boss was fun. But the whoops heard in Vent from nine3 of your closest comrades after hours of study, practice, effort, and wipes is What It Is All About, and anyone that disagrees is just itchin’ for a fight.
This is somewhat liberating, as I possibly change focus and attitude with regard to WoW. Ever since the breathtakingly awful reveal of WoD and its subsequent consistent misteps, I’ve become somewhat sour on Blizzard games. WoD is a fine expansion, there is no denying it, but my feelings of loyalty to the brand are greatly diminished. They will need to do a lot more of what they’ve been doing4 before they win my trust back.
And meanwhile, there’s Elite: Dangerous, and it’s shaping up to be something I’ll want to do. The time I expect it to stabilize after commercial release just so happens to coincide with the time that I’ll probably start to get bored with the tedious Garrison grind and other not-actually-a-daily-in-name dailies. The fact that a game that I’ve wanted for quite some time is coming up to speed in the next two to three months may have provided the final temptation to spring me out of this game.
Or, it may be another Wildstar, and my interest will die a silent death in the dark of night again. You just never know.
- I wasn’t a raider in vanilla.
- And in some cases, that’s a good thing.
- Yeah, we can’t really get 25 going. So we’re scrubs. So what.
- And I must say, they’ve been doing a lot right in the last three months.
This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on December 2, 2014.
