Top 10 First-World (of Warcraft) Problems

It’s tough sometimes, isn’t it?

Sitting at home on your computer, sipping a soda, playing a game. We’ve all been there, right? Unsure of how to correctly perform during an encounter, but feeling too lazy to read our dungeon encounter journal? Forgetting we redid our keybinds and totally messing up our rotations? Listing an item in the Auction House only to be undercut mere minutes later? Sometimes it feels like no one understands just how tough it is. Well, I do, and I’m here for you. Let’s commiserate together, shall we?

10. Your backpack is full of valuable loot and you’ve been forced to exchange it for in-game currency before you can continue to pick up valuable loot.

9. You just saw someone else’s character that’s the same race as yours and realized you like the face they picked better.

8. You said some of your most hilarious material in guild chat seconds before a raid group got achievements and now you don’t think anyone got a chance to see how funny you are.

7. Someone in your random dungeon group asked for DPS meters, but you don’t want to post your Recount because you’re not at the top.

6. You tried to fake a disconnect during the raid so you could go play your level 5 gnome warlock, but you forgot that the raid leader is your RealID friend.

5. You won Ashes of Al’ar. On your first run. On your alt.

4. You hope no one realized that you popped all your cooldowns when the tank engaged the boss, but you forgot that he gives a speech before you can actually attack him.

3. You hate everyone who talks in trade chat but you don’t want to leave the channel.

2. You’re so bored because there’s just absolutely nothing to do in this game.

1. You’re lagging.

/hug

Curing Altoholism

I used to be an altoholic.

I had all the early warning signs in childhood — I got sick of my toys easily, followed my parents around the house screaming, “I’M BORED!”, and would come home from my first ballet class claiming that actually, my calling was soccer (and then volleyball and then crew and then cheerleading and then why hadn’t they let me stick with ballet? I could have been selling out The Nutcracker by now.). The usual.

So it was no surprise that when I started playing WoW, I had the same wavering commitment towards my characters. In Vanilla, having two level-capped characters was almost unheard of due to the relatively daunting time it took to even get one to level 60, so most of my alts stayed in the 20-40 range for the majority of the game. I liked trying out different classes, so much so that often times it was difficult to figure out who my “main” was — the one who was the highest level? The one I spent the most time playing? The one I enjoyed the most? I switched both mains and mainly-played-alts every expansion, unsure of what class I even had the most fun playing.

And then I rolled a druid and it became clear that no other class would ever compare.

On other characters, I miss being able to do stealth runs. I miss hopping out of the water in the middle of nowhere, popping into flight form, and bouncing away. I miss sprinting to where I’m supposed to be when something trivial distracts me. I miss knowing that if I want to, I can tank, heal, melee DPS or ranged DPS with just a respec (and an obnoxious gear grind, but still). I miss the mechanics of the class because they all click with me (on my warlock, I’m just like, “I don’t even” whenever a boss is pulled and I have to figure out which ability to press first; on my mage, I Arcane Blast with one hand and flip through a magazine with the other; on my holy paladin I wonder if I should use that cooldown now or wait or heal through it or… oh look, the boss is dead, didn’t use my cooldowns at all, fantastic). I’m fairly confident that for as long as I play, I’ll be playing my druid and mostly nothing else.

… Those monks look kind of interesting though, don’t they?