#Blaugust2019 – What makes you play?

Here is the conundrum I find myself in. I want to raid. That is basically all I want to do in game. So when I set aside my personal time to group up with however many other people, I want to spend my time in the raid zones killing stuff and having a laugh.

However lately we are spending some of the night raiding then going off and doing other things as a raid group like warfronts or PVP. It hasn’t happened often at all, but it has happened enough to make me question my loyalty to the cause.

This was a discussion point between Michael and myself the other night and it really got me to thinking about what I play the game for. Why do I want to – or not want to – log into the game.

It used to be log in for dailies for rep and get gold or mats for raiding only. That was all you had to do to ensure you would get gear and upgrades and have a laugh with your guildies. Now though, you need to get azerite on your necklace, you have to scrap gear to get residium, you have to do emmisaries for better gear, source mana pearls to upgrade and buy gear, get essences (which involves mythics, dungeons, pvp and rep), do island expeditions every week for azerite, mythic 6+ for a piece of gear in your chest – which requires other mythics to achieve a worthy keystone, warfronts – if the quest is good and even the weekly sometimes has decent gear; then once you have done all that you can worry about actually getting into a raid which drops lower gear than all that stuff combined and isn’t even guaranteed for you or your stats.

I wonder what the point is? My discussion with Michael made it even worse. I am somewhat in denial about how much time I need to raid and how much time I am willing to give it – they are not the same. I don’t like the idea of having to min/max just to get competitive gear, but then it isn’t fair to the raid team to not be trying to get the best of everything available. But I can’t justify logging on every single night of the week to ensure I have done the tens of things I need to for hours at a time. This is my conundrum because none of this effort includes the stuff I actually want to do in game like collect pets, chase mounts and complete achievements. I want to use my raid time to do that – raid. Kill big bosses and see us work together for the win. I don’t want to do use my raid time for something else which could be organised for another night. It just feels like we spend more time preparing to be in raid than actually raiding, especially since people get annoyed if we wipe a couple of times on any boss. Like people want to have absolutely every piece of gear so you can face roll it without issue, which then doesn’t make it a challenge or provide you a sense of achievement when you actually something together.

I just feel frustrated by the entire element of work I now need to put into the game to be able to raid. Maybe I need to admit to myself I am no longer raider material. As much as I want to do it, maybe I just need to stick to LFR when I have time. I know if I don’t raid I won’t play because I will find other things to occupy my time. GAHHHHH!!!!! I feel like a peanut.

On a more positive note we did clear the first 3 on heroic again without a wipe this time, and then had a play with Lady Ashvane which looks terrifying; there was wiping on her. We got her to 74% after 4 minutes and as we were ending for the night there was discussion about how she gets killed in 4-5 minutes total. I was a little dumbfounded but it will be interesting to see how that pans out.