One of my biggest struggles with World of Warcraft currently is finding stuff to do outside of raiding. I’m pretty much wholly unmotivated when it comes to everything outside the realm of raiding; which is depressing when you consider I was fully engaged throughout Legion. I never felt the grind of leveling my artifact weapons, I was pretty much always enjoying doing what I wanted to get that done. There were a couple of points where it felt like it took a bit to get a level, but I don’t remember it feeling impossible the way leveling my Heart level does. As I’m sitting here waiting for 8.2 I’m wondering, why does everything feel so difficult this time around?
I think part of my problem is I focused a lot on leveling my Heart of Azeroth up when 8.1 hit because I was able to by a 415 ilvl Azerite Armor soon after. So, I needed to get that leveled up to unlock the new traits. Since I was already on the high side of what level my heart was at this set my burnout up right away. One of the main ways I worked on my heart level was by doing a lot of Champions of Azeroth World Quests. They are easy and quick and do provide a fair amount of AP for time it takes to do them. Except, there isn’t much variety to the WQs. It’s either kill something, repair the wounds, or kill lots of things and mine to absorb Azerite. It turns out, after doing the same WQs for 7 months it’s difficult for me to want to do them.
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I was doing Island Expeditions for a while, but man those get super boring quickly. The weekly rewards had me motivated for a bit but most of the time I’m stuck doing Heroic because I don’t have two other people to queue for Mythic with. The way each expedition unfolds is basically always the same and the sad thing is I don’t think the new islands in 8.2 are going to change this up enough to lure me back. Maybe I should give the PvP version a try. Maybe playing against other players would make it more interesting. Of course, then I have the issue of needing to find two other people to queue with again. Not that I resent them setting that requirement for PvP. Coordination is probably important for that, the having to queue with people for mythic is sort of pointless though. It’s just not much of a challenge either way so I’m not sure why we need to full party to queue for it.
One thing I do regularly still do is the war table missions. I have so many resources at this point it feels like I sort of need to just to keep myself from maxing out those. I mean, I assume there’s a max. Either way, I never use them faster than I gain them which is hilarious because before 8.1 I was constantly running out of them. Of course, I never log in just to send out new missions so I’m not maxing them out at all. As a source of AP though they are meager. Sometimes I see the ones worth ~460 AP but most of the time it’s the ~250 range. When 18k AP is required just to get the next level on my Heart it barely feels worth it. Since this content is what requires the least amount of engagement it feels pretty bad it’s one of the few things I can regularly get myself to do.
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I still do the Darkshore warfront when it’s up, but that’s only once every few weeks. And it’s a case of that rose is getting really wilted at this point. Never mind doing the stuff in the other parts of the cycle. I think I went there once to do the quests and… it just wasn’t fun. I think it’s because I used to do all the quests in Arathi so when Darkshore came it out, it was same thing different place. I can’t even remember the last time I went to Arathi for anything at all. Part of it is my hopes had been sort of high for warfronts to be something interesting and really engaging. The descriptions of RTS in WoW was really intriguing. They are nowhere near that experience.
I had been doing M+ regularly and having a bunch of fun with that. In particular, I really like this season’s special afflix Reaping because it forces us to pay more attention to how we get things, so we get reaping at not terrible moments. Really that’s what the special afflixes should be all about, changing the norm of things just enough to add a bit more complexity with out making it crazy. Unfortunately, I think the rest of my group has gotten sort of burnt out from doing things outside of raiding as well because everyone has gotten sort of spotty on showing up. At first the allure of getting 415 ilvl azurite pieces was strong, but since no one is particularly close to unlocking all the traits it’s really kind of waned.
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I could pug some Mythic+ but honestly, I’m worried about that crapshoot a bit. A lot of people have negative opinions of Druid Tanks this expansion and it’s kind of frustrating. I could switch to DPS but since my preferred DPS spec is Feral I’m sort of in the same boat on that one. Not to mention the whole thing some people go through with RaiderIO scores. Plus, then there’s the whole aspect of coordinating with the group is important so talking on coms is sort of required which opens a whole other area for things to be terrible. The whole thing is fraught.
Looking back to Legion makes all this even more frustrating. I know the underpinning reason I have no real motivation to do much outside of raids is not only it is super repetitive, but for gaining Heart levels nothing really feels very significant. Getting the original levels for my artifact weapon in Legion took some time but it didn’t feel overly oppressive. Then getting concordance was easy. Everything I did felt like it made a significant dent and all levels past concordance were just icing on the cake. In BfA it just doesn’t feel like I’m progressing my Heart as easily. Everything feels like it barely moves the needle and it just makes the repetitious nature of the content feel worse.
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I’m hopeful some of this might feel better in 8.2. Hopefully the World Quests and events in Nazjatar will give significantly more AP then our current methods give. Hopefully there will be a wide variety of things to do there as well which will help things feel fresh. It’s possible too much is currently riding on 8.2 right now and it’ll not refresh things the way I need it too. Either way though, 8.2 can’t come soon enough.
