I have been playing a lot of WOW these past weeks. What often happens to Wendy and I when we resub is that we play together doing story and levelling stuff for quite a while, and then eventually I decide to start doing hard stuff and she keeps on doing story stuff. She loves to see things from both factions sides, do all the side quests, and see all the cinematics.
I love to find something hard and beat it into submission.
The trouble in the early going was that my performance was just not up to snuff. I was standing in bad, failing to interrupt, generally just being mediocre. I knew my mouse was being an issue because sometimes I hammered on the keys and just got no response, and had to sit there and watch myself die. I am getting old though, and it has been years since I played seriously. In that sort of situation you have to ask yourself if maybe you just don't have it anymore. It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools, after all.
Turns out it was the tools, not me.
I got a new mouse and it was like I could fly. I circle strafed around monsters, slid out of fire, and bashed all kinds of faces. I have to remember this - I can't keep up the kind of performance I could deliver 15 years ago, but I am not a chump. I just need the right tools!
It does bother me to buy new stuff when I have old stuff on hand that still kind of works though. My mouse, while it was a disaster for gaming, still mostly functioned. Plus it wasn't a cheap thing when I got it many years ago. It makes me twitch to see it just sitting on my desk, never to be used again. I paid over 100 dollars for a new mouse just to play WOW! My money demon is losing his mind.
Nonetheless, the feeling I get from playing with proper equipment makes it all worthwhile.
I am certainly finding it odd to plop down into an expansion so late. After a couple weeks of levelling I joined a guild and ended up beating heroic N'Zoth, the final boss of the expansion, on my first raid. It was fun, don't get me wrong, but there isn't anything new to fight, there aren't any fights to learn. That is the end. I can still gear up (and I am!) but it is extremely strange to not have that big end boss waiting for me as the final goal.
There is a long way to go in gearing up, inching ever closer to that perfect gearset. I wonder if I will end up playing right to the end of an expansion and starting the next one right away. It will have been a long, long time since the last time I did that, if indeed it does happen.
