Gaming life and burnout


World of Warcraft Burnout.

My gaming life has been shaken up a bit lately. Fist I was starting to feel some serious WoW burnout right when Champions Online arrived.  Then I started a new job, and my gaming time went from anytime (for as long as I wanted), to only a few hours when I returned home from work.

Things have started to normalize and I am settling into new habits and play times and I looked back and saw that I I only addressed my WoW burnout by avoiding the game instead of facing it. So tonight I wanted to get my current thought and feelings down.

Currently I am no long feeling as though my time spent in the game is my best entertainment outlet.

I believe this is happening for a number of reasons.

First, I don’t feel like the current raids I am participating in are providing me with much reward for the time spent. What I mean is I am seeing very little meaningful advancement in my character. Week after week I show up and spend three to four hours playing and maybe walk away a piece of new gear that makes me 1% better than I was without it. This is not exactly what I call meaningful advancement.

I could almost deal with lack of character advancement if I was able to take part in or even witness some actual advancement of the story / world.

Second, worse than no meaningful advancement, is the feeling that each week I am doing worse compared to the other characters that heal.  This I believe is happening because for a few reasons:

  • These players have acquired a lot of new loot both in our 10man and in other raids they run.
  • They spend a lot more time pursuing activities that help them progress their characters. Time which I no longer have the time to do.
  • I believe holy priests are need help from the design side of the game.

I have QQ’d before about how I feel Holy priests are out performed by some other healing classes/roles so I wont re-write it all here. If they are “balanced” then I feel even worse, since it means all the learning and practicing I have worked on in the past was either wrong or not enough.

Any how the result of all this is I don’t feel my contribution very meaningful or helpful to the group, and I have started wondering if they would be better off replacing me.

Third, encounter frustration.

I have run enough ulduar 10 to not want to run it any more. I would love to be part of a smooth 25 man version but I know with my time limitations that is most likely not going to happen.  That leaves me with Trial of the Crusader, which is a raid I really like 4/5ths of but has one encounter I hate more than any other raid encounter I have faced.

The “Faction Champions” encounter is a big giant pile of poo. You see, I loath most pvp encounters. Yes that’s right pvp is not for me, and yes I know this is technically not a pvp encounter but a pvp one that tries to mimic pvp. What we are left with is an encounter that you can not “figure out”. You can through general tactics at it, and build your group out to optimize against the opposing group, but in the end I feel we only win because the RNG was kind to us. I don’t feel as though our group was smart or good, just lucky.

This encounter practically kills my motivation to raid. For example last night we spend about 20 minutes on the first two encounters (one shots), about 15 minutes on the last two encounters (also one shots) and two hours (mostly wiping obviously) on that middle encounter.

Two HOURS. And we only saw progress when we swapped characters out to try and optimize for the group we were facing. I have spent much more total time wiping on other encounters in the game, but each time I faced those we made progress. This fight is a slog each time, with very little indication that we are “getting better”.

This , and its variations, is the only raid left for me to run and that encounter alone makes me want to hide in the corner crying.

So there you have it, those feelings do not provide a lot of motivation to log in and play. This is particularly bad when I have another game that I can drop into for short bursts of time and see my character advance without the pressure of being “on my game” for raiding.

Does this mean I am done with the game?

No, not yet, but I do think I am done raiding until the next batch of content. I would much rather pop on to chat, quest, and level and alt than I would running raids, with annoying encounters, that provide little advancement.

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