Oh the Monotony!!!

These past two weeks have been a little boring for me.
I get home from work around 7pm pacific and log on to my JC'ers.  yes, it's plural.  grab the successful sales and relist the gems i didnt sell.  i sell four gems at a time, but since i have most of the cuts, my acutions usually end up being about 100 total.  (i get annoyed when a new seller decides to put 50 fractured amberjewels up, only to be undercut in 3 minutes by someone else.  its annoying yet funny.  they dont add anything to the market besides dropping prices. people are so impatient these days.) anyway, back to my topic.  i then will not log on to any of my 85s to see if anyone will do the harder dungeons with me.  instead, i log on to my worgen hunter alt (created two weeks ago) or my goblin shaman alt (created a month ago) to level up.  and i have to tell you, its pretty boring.  its soooo boring i dont know what to tell you. actually i do. here.

low level grinding goes like this:  getting a level appropriate quest, which leads me to level appropriate mobs and quest objectives, which leads to boredom.  it was this way before but it seems really bad now.  on my hunter, i've only died once.  the battle starts off with a steady shot, followed by a concussive shot and then some arcane shots.  serpent sting doesnt even last that long so i skip it.  then, by the time i am halfway done with a zone, my five levels higher, ready for another zone or two.  its pretty bad.  its pretty dull.  there's no challege.  the only challege i have is to figure out where my new spells will go on my action bar. seriously. that's it.

I also queue for dungeons hoping that it will give me some challenge.  However, it only exacerbates the problem by giving me a whole experience bar's worth of experience in ONE dungeon.  but even then, its a little more difficult.  for one, there's random people of random experience trying to work together.  sometimes it gels well. sometimes its a total disaster. most of the time we work through it. i'd say 25% disaster, 25% awesome groups and 50% not optimal.  the not optimal groups will have a combination of undergeared tank, healer with no water, mage that does half the usual damage/dps, afk'ers, people getting lost, at least a couple of wipes, etc.  you get the picture.  there's room for improvement, it its not a total disaster.  so 75% of the time i'm having a decent time.  but it's still boring. 

after getting my rotations together (yes, hunters still use a rotation even though we have "priorities".)  rotations only comes out a certain way because i am trying to do two things.  1) regen focus.  2) maintain haste buff.   the remainder just comes in between.  its easy.  its pretty boring. its still somewhat fun to learn, and fun to adapt to the situation. but honestly, the challenge isnt really the dungeon or the bosskill.  the challenge is really dealing with the various groups i've been in. 

that's the real challege.  it tests my patience and challenges me to use my defensive cooldowns. that's the only fun times i get.  so far, i have disengage and fiegndeath with wingclip and concussive shot to keep the guys away.  i'll get a few more abilities soon.  i need to start using my traps more.  but yes, rotation is boring. maybe that's the way it was designed.  by now i have my rotations down and i dont really need to think about it.  i still need to keep my focus and buffs up. but that isnt hard to do at all.

I was talking to a guildie yesterday who told me that hunter dps was boring to him.  he has one at high levels but it's still very boring.  maybe i was just "new" to this hunter thing and it kept me going for a while.  i still think its fun to be a hunter but totally boring to go through content, again and again with zero challenge.  maybe that's the issue.  we're bored.  we go through too much easy content.  i went through scholomance yesterday with my girlfriend.  we were both dps.  we had a decent tank and healer combo and we carried the last dps.  it was new to go through the whole experience with a tank that actually line-of-sights mobs to avoid grabbing the whole room.  it's very refreshing to see the tank talk in chat that certaim mobs are immune to this or that.  wow.  challenge! sort of.  we still facerolled everything.  boring.

My guildie also said something that i thought should never be the case.  he auto-shoots most of the fights and still wins.  i was not going to try that in the groups i was in, mainly because i figured trying to be as good as my gf in dps requires more than auto-shots.  but overall, the feel is the same.  i can go through the entire dungeon doing auto-shots and still come out OK. i mean the mage we carried through the dungeon with 1/2 the dps me and my gf were doing was doing OK.  i mean i could have just dropped my dps to almost nothing too and still benefit the same.  but then, i'll be even more bored. 

and i am trying. i really am.  i am trying to keep sane but i have no desire to go through another night of mindless dps.  i have no desire to sit there for four hours thinking how maybe i should add a new shot into my boring rotation.  heck, i might as well level using the target dummies.  because that's how it feels right now. 

So here's the story.  i made a new shaman to learn to dps as enhancement.  im learning the spells and stuff and its going well.  i am just dreading the next 60 levels because it will simply be the same thing over and over again.  the only challege will be trying to work with bad groups.  the shaman is also a guild leader in a guild that i was hoping to form and make better.  but my girlfriend had different plans.  that's OK i guess. but she went ahead and made some alliance characters.  now there's a problem.  we cant play together if that's the case.  and to top that, its on a different realm.  so what's the point of playing an MMO of we cant play together? right.  so i just put the guild project on hold so she can level her toons.  i guess.  i dont know why i am even playing alliance.  so i picked the best looking alliance character (they're all dumb looking, really they are.)  and ended up rolling a worgen.  female.  the males are dumb looking.  as an afterthought, i guess i could have rolled a dwarf, but i figured that's too close to the true american human form it makes playing a dwarf a little creepy. 

so i made a worgen hunter to play with my gf over on Ravenholdt US. i figured why the hell not.  it's new. its not as dumb looking (excluding the casting animation), and its got that "horde" feel.  you know that feeling where you're the underdog, the outcast, the refugees?  well that's basically the horde.  the more refined, civilized and cultured peoples with broomsticks in their asses?  that's the alliance.  so with that reasoning, i picked a worgen. they're outcasts, misunderstood and fighting for survival as a people and as a species, i guess.  they're made refugees after the whole ordeal with the forsaken, and that's when it began to become boring... because somehow we become night elves and played along helping them in darkshore, ashenvale and stonetalon.  yea. pretty epic. /sarcasm.

So back to the grind i go.  uninteresting lore. uninteresting quests.  uninteresting everything. doing the worgen starting quests was great. levels 1-14 done. it was fun.  now i have to go through a new world of dullness because someone put the difficulty on too low. honestly, i enjoy a good challenge.  i really like working hard to figure out a dungeon or a boss.  i get way more satisfaction from spending time learning to beat a boss with a group i am given than dinging four times in one night.   dinging four times might be great, but i did almost nothing to get it (in all honesty, leveling in and of itself is an illusion of progressing, almost to the point of delusion in WoW).  killing a boss that wiped the group five times?  that feels like an accomplishment. maybe i need a break from leveling.  it's just THAT dull.  or maybe i need to find a new game.