Yeah, I'm planning on taking some time off from playing World of Warcraft...
Why? Well, that's the obvious question for me to ramble a response to here, of course.
Firstly, let me start with letting you know that I started playing WoW about fifteen years ago, when Wrath of the Lich King was the current expansion. Since then, I had never let my subscription to the game lapse... until now, of course.
Over the years, I've had a wide range of experiences, from good to bad, everything in between. I've clocked a lot of hours playing the game, especially on my main, Nibowin, a female tauren death knight currently on the Thrall realm. Originally, I had started out on a small roleplay-oriented realm called Kirin Tor... which had a small raiding community on it's Horde side. Options were limited there, so I during Cata, I had transferred to Thrall so that I could enjoy the game on a more populous realm that's dominated by the Horde faction. That worked out fairly well. Was much easier to find progression-oriented guilds that consistently raided and pushed themselves to see how far they could get in raids. Naturally, some results were better than others... and finding a guild group to belong in was a challenge at times... but it generally went well.
WoW has given me many years worth of gamer geek pleasure.
As for the reasons for my break, I feel that much of it has been a long time coming.
Firstly, the game has changed dramatically over the years and definitely isn't what it used to be. While I've rolled with many of the changes over these years, I've found that a few have continued to bother me, and they've become core aspects of the game that likely won't go away anytime soon.
One thing that bothers me is that my favorite class, the unholy death knight, has done a total shift of gameplay method over the years and has gone from being a consistent damage dealer to one that relies on a very frail balance of timing with several cooldown spells that one must get just right or suffer the consequences. While I appreciate the challenge of working these cooldowns, I feel it has only been further exacerbated by more and more cooldown spells becoming necessary in our kit... and with Dragonflight, my bars are overflowing with the number of skills I have in my arsenal. It's becoming convoluted and over-complicated... at least in my opinion.
The other big issue that's become a problem over the last few expansions is the reward system for the weekly vault and how prominent the mythic+ dungeon grind has come in order to be able to gear oneself for raiding. Used to be, if you were a raider, you'd run your dungeons in order to get to the point of starting raiding, then you'd progress into raiding and the various levels of difficulty offered there. Your gear would reflect your raiding progression. There was something more rewarding about that. Nowadays, you can run the mythic+ format of dungeons while you're not otherwise occupied with raiding and you're essentially obligated to do so in order to keep yourself competitive in the raid environment. The gear offered by the weekly vault for the mythic+ dungeons can easily out-scale what you'd get in raid if you're still progressing... and the more you grind in the dungeons, the more options you can have available to you in the vault. It's become necessary to dump more and more time into the game just to get some level of pleasure out of the raiding experience.
I just don't have the time for that shit anymore.
Can't enjoy the game like I used to.
So I do the logical thing...
I take a break.
Maybe it's permanent.
Maybe not.
Dunno.
Time will tell!
