Not that WoWed

It's been a bit quiet on here, mostly because WoW hasn't been getting that much attention from me. Some of that is due to real life interference - for example I'm writing this post on my laptop while travelling, and while it technically has WoW installed on it and is capable of running it, I do find gaming on my laptop a bit awkward and am not that keen on it. However, other things have been happening as well.

For example, the biggest change affecting my Classic play was that I stepped down from raiding with my guild in era. Not in a hard "I'm never raiding with you guys again!" kind of way, and I'm still trying to join for things like the occasional ZG when I can, but I just felt like I couldn't hold on to the "raider" rank any longer and wanted to be open about it instead of simply having it revoked eventually due to no longer showing up.

When I first started raiding with the Warriors of Sunlight over a year ago, their raid days fit into the rest of my life pretty perfectly, meaning I was able to show up for most of them. However, over time, things changed for me, and more and more raids became a bit of a struggle or outright impossible to make time for. I would basically always sign as "tentative" for everything and then change to "absent" at the last moment.

My attendance had honestly been pretty shocking for a while; I just didn't really want to admit it to myself, because I do like the guild and I wanted to continue raiding with them... but the other week it just really hit me that realistically, I was fretting about sign-ups, consumables, world buffs and being on time three times a week, just to maybe do the first half of Naxx once every two weeks, which was not a very satisfying experience.

(It's kind of funny to me how originally, Sunday was the day I was least likely to make - plus I needed to gear up really - so for a long time, I was only ever running the lower-tier raids and Naxx was this pipe dream that I might be able to come along to one day. Then I geared up, and my availability changed so that suddenly, Sunday was in fact the one day I could make reliably, and it was always Naxx, so I never saw anything else anymore and that got me down. I honestly kind of prefer the chill atmosphere and lack of need for consumables of the earlier tiers.)

And well... while Classic has never been about raiding for me, it's a good way of staying engaged and having a reason to log in. Without that, I've been a lot less active recently, just spending a little bit of time puttering about on alts and keeping my hunter's small engineering gadget business going on the AH.

As for hardcore, I haven't really gone back to play more since my last post. I'd like to some time, but other things have just always taken priority.

And retail... well. I still have reason to log in at least once a week there to play with our little friend group, though we dialled back on the Mythic+ again. Over the summer, people were on holiday for quite a few weeks, and we had to once again rely on (more experienced) outside help to keep the weekly runs going, and let's just say it introduces friction in terms of how capable everyone thinks they are when some people get carried to higher keys and others don't.

After several more dungeons that left my husband and me rather exhausted and unhappy, we agreed to limit ourselves to something like a +10 every other week, and spend the other weeks doing something easier, such as going back as a group and taking a stab at some old BfA raids (which are apparently still not fully soloable on the higher difficulties, even two expansions later). That has been... interesting, with all of us effectively going in blind. For example we learned that mythic G'huun and Jaina still require quite a lot of people because there's only so much you can do against hard-fail mechanics that were originally designed for a group of twenty and haven't been nerfed retroactively (we didn't beat either of them, but at least we cleared the rest of the instance and learned the fights).

I've also taken to levelling a few more alts to better familiarise myself with different classes in retail, as well as to visit more levelling content that I've only seen once before or not at all (BfA Horde-side for example). My investment in those is very on-and-off though.

As for the actual level-cap content... there's been another patch recently, but to be honest I haven't even really looked at it. There was a quest NPC that showed me a cinematic, but that just confused me about just what was happening in what order and didn't make me feel like I should follow up immediately to see more of the story. There's also a new open world event that I did a couple of times and yeah... it's definitely becoming a bit of a meme at this point that all of Dragonflight's events tend to feel a bit samey. I'm sure I'm going to catch up with all of this eventually, but it's just not enticing enough to me right now to make it a priority.