Can I Tell You a Secret?

Of course I can. This is the internet. How much more private can you get?

*cough*

Yes, anyways.

There’s a little thing that crops up every now and then. An affliction, if you will, that attacks the basic drive to do something.

I’m talking about burnout.

Le gasp! I know!

When Wrath was released, I joined the massive grind to 80. Roaring into Howling Fjord, I banged out quests as fast as I could while trying to keep the whole experience authentic.

Headphones on, graphics up, music cranked, ALL quest text read. No exceptions.

By the time I was level 78 (maybe it was 79, I can hardly remember), I had averaged a level a day. It was tough, leveling that swiftly, I’m used to going slow and dicking around in battlegrounds in the leveling process.

At that point, I was afraid I was going to burn out. I expected the trip to 80 to take about a month, not a week.

And sure enough, I burned out.

I don’t level quickly. Never really have. I spent something like ten months in The Barrens. Two years to even get to 60.

I purposely delayed dinging 80 by a few weeks, playing battlegrounds instead. Finally, I dinged 80 somewhere in Zul’Drak and rushed over to knock out the Hodir quest chain so I could start getting rep with them.

Upon completing that quest chain, I looked wistfully around the room, said “fuck it”, and logged off.

Essentially, I had lost any interest in actually playing. I still kept up blog posts, kept up reading blog posts, utilized Wowhead to get gear plans in order, figured out which reps I needed to grind up, but… never actually did anything.

Somehow, I just had no drive to actually log in and play my mage anymore. I’d log in, stand around in Orgrimmar for a few minutes, do a couple battlegrounds, portal to Dalaran, complete a couple dailies here and there, then log off again in disgust.

Log in the next day, do a daily, do one Heroic, log off. Blah. I was only really interested in the metagame.

I became significantly interested in my Paladin, getting the bubbly gal from level 30 to 67 in a month. This was without RAF. Intensely enjoyable experience. If I ever got bored, I’d just slap a shield on and go solo some elite quests.

This burnout lasted a very, very long time.

Until a couple weeks ago, in fact.

Yeah, that’s right. I spent two months barely even playing my mage.

Anyway, the changes to arcane is what brought me back. It was new, it was flashy, it was exciting, and I actually wanted to play again.

Respecced to arcane, shifted a few talents around here and there, grabbed the new Glyphs, and rushed over and did a VoA-10 run. Completely trashed the damage meters, beating second place by 1k DPS.

Still trying to settle on the perfect build for me. Still not there yet, strongly considering getting the second point in Arcane Subtlety, and maybe picking up Slow. Might take a point out of Arcane Focus, and maybe Arcane Stability. Maybe take a point out of Incineration, sacrificing 2% crit on ABlast in order to guarantee that TtW is always active.

Point is, I actually care about my character now, rather than just the class.

Might not bother with all the holiday achievements anymore, though. I mean, the only title out of any of those I actually want is “Flame Keeper”. Don’t care at all for any of the others. A drake at the end of it is cool and all, but… meh, whatever. A mount is a mount. It’s not like I can’t teleport to Dalaran on a whim.

The Sons of Hodir can shove it. Seriously. I cannot stand those dailies. You can only giggle while helm polishing for so long before the other guy starts giving you funny looks.

God forbid I start thrusting.

If you know what I mean.

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