Having completed Eternally in the Vale and the Barrens stuff just in time, I am feeling much less pressure to play WoW. With about 2 weeks of solid effort I was able to hit exalted with Nat Pagle, the Anglers, the Tiller and the Golden Lotus.
It felt good to get them all done, it presents me with more options. Initially my thoughts turned to gearing and having finally clawed my way up to the required ilevel despite having not done any dungeons and only the scenarios required to open up the 5.1 content, I plunged into an LFR. I had grand and sweeping plans for the gear grind, and mapped out how to spend my Valor before 5.4 hits. Then, as I considered my gemming and enchanting plans I rather fell out of love with the idea.
That's the part that really sucks, the thousand upon thousands of gold you need to spend, repeatedly, only to have all your hard won, lovingly coddled and pampered gear rendered utterly irrelevant once you earn your first quest reward in the next expansion. So, I'm not doing it. I utterly refuse to spend the next 12 months on the gold grind and gear grind, I have better things to do with my time Blizzard, thank you very much.
To really make sure that this mindset sticks, and because I am rather bored with dailies and Pandaria as a whole, I am taking a WoW-cation. I am going back to play Lord of the Rings.
To me it's novel and fresh. The graphics are different. The music is different, with nary a Kazoo to be found. It presents new challenges and unlike WoW I don't know every single corner and facet like the back of my hand. There also lacks the dearth of information that is available for WoW. WoW has been dissected, examined, played and written about by so many people that there is simply very little to write about it, bar op ed pieces. Even new encounters and things that come with patches are stale as everyone and their dog plays the PTR and writes about it. Hell, even the speculation is stale. Truly my only remaining interest in the game is seeing where the story goes.
LotRO on the other hand is new (for me). Not the main story, of course. I've read the novels 3 times a year, every year for the past 20+ years. I could almost quote it verbatim. What is new is the game world and quests and characters that populate it. Adding to the novelty is the fact that there is no 'Lotro-head' or 'Lotro-Insider'. There aren't 1,000 bloggers writing about it every day. There is information to be found, but you really have to hunt and search for it, and it's not always complete. The game therefore presents the opportunity for learning and experimentation. You cannot simply spend a few hours reading and preparing and then barrel to level cap within a week.
If and when I do return to WoW, anything WoW related will be posted to the Inveniam Blog. In the meantime I have resurrected a once started, then abandoned site, Tales From the Green Dragon which is expressly for LotRO. This site will be, going forward, a general site, tied to no game in particular.
So, if you're a LotRO player or are interested in getting to know something about the game, visit me at Tales From the Green Dragon.
Cheers,
E
