In my introductory post last week, I mentioned that this blog was started and, for the first couple of years, was exclusively about my quest to achieve specific goals in World of Warcraft. And was focused primarily on my journey to level a lot of alts.
To the surprise of no one except me, leveling a crap ton of alts ended up burning me out on the game. Someone alert the Academy of Sciences, right? I'm actually amazed that it took as long as it did.
I started playing in the middle of Burning Crusade and only really started my quest to have many different alts, probably partway through Wrath. I completed my goal of having a max level of each class by the end of Cataclysm. These were all Horde characters.
This, by the way, is the original Joar. Warlock from Burning Crusade. Named Joar because that's what popped up when I hit randomize.
Late in the Cataclysm expansion, I started the same process with an Alliance character of each class but only managed to finish two before Mists of Pandaria started.
With Mists of Pandaria, I set an exciting side goal of finishing the Siege or Orgrimmar on a character of each class. Since that particular raid was out for what felt like 6 1/2 years, that was not as challenging as it might seem. So I didn't make much progress on my Alliance goal during that expansion and only had 3 more done by the time we rolled around to Warlords.
I finally got the two characters of each class from each faction completed during Warlords and then started a third set, so I had 27 max-level characters by the end of Warlords.
Those all got moved to max level by the end of the first year of Legion, and I did 6 more during the last year of that expansion to get me to 33 max-level characters.
Battle for Azeroth was mainly a slog of working through leveling those 33 characters to max level, and I had 25 of them done when an important event hit. During the anniversary event in November of 2019, Blizzard had set it up so that a vast amount of experience could be earned, for characters of any level, in a special anniversary event involving Korrak and old-school Alterac Valley. Over the few weeks of that event, I went from having 25 max-level toons to 36. By early the following year, I finished at 42 max-level characters. And that's as high as I ever got.
While waiting for the next expansion, Shadowlands, to come out, I started playing Final Fantasy XIV in August 2020. It was a game that I really enjoyed, but I was just initially viewing it as something to do while waiting for the next WoW expansion.
When Shadowlands launched, I jumped back in with both feet and leveled my Warlock, followed by my Hunter and Paladin. I finished hitting max level on my Warlock about a week after launch, and within 2 weeks after that (mid-December), I was posting about how I was getting tired of the game and thinking about returning to FFXIV. Those were the only three characters I got to max level in Shadowlands phase 1. I had stopped playing by mid-January and unsubscribed in late February.
So why? As an altoholic, I think there were things about the game before that that I just enjoyed more. The leveling experience in Shadowlands for me was just much more painful. While trying to give you more variety through the whole Threads of Fate thing, it felt like every character after your first was utterly detached from the story. I also preferred the old emissary system over the grinding process for Faction Renown. And dropping the flight whistle made running daily world quests on alts much more painful.
I was unsubscribed for almost 18 months before I picked it back up again towards the end of the expansion. I ran my warlock through all of the content I had missed, including all of the raids and Korthia and other new area, and managed to get 5 more toons to max level, for a total of 8.
I continued playing in the early part of Dragonflight and got a bit further earlier this year than I did with Shadowlands. I ended up with 6 characters at max level, then started to pull back again in February of this year, and unsubscribed for a 2nd time in April of this year.
It's a hard discussion for me because World of Warcraft was my first love in MMO gaming, and I would like to reignite that spark. I may try again at some point because it often makes me sad to be gone, but it feels like it's no longer my game.
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