Burnout!!!

We’re all seeing more and more evidence of burnout. Burning Crusade has had its heyday and people anxiously await Wrath of the Lich King and I’m one of the many.

I hit burnout a few months ago, so much so that I seriously considered quitting until the next expansion, but held on and found new things to keep me going. I rep’d up to exalted with Aldor, Netherwing, and Sunwell, maxed out my Fishing skill, devoted myself to starting a new guild, devoted myself to getting its members into raiding, and finally got 150 badges to buy my Gavel of Naaru Blessings which in turn boosted me over +2000 bonus healing unbuffed. Trust me that last one was draining. I was only able to average 4-5 badges/night maybe 4-5 times/week. So it took me a month to get all those badges. I’m sure some of you out there got this in a couple of weeks. To get all the remaining badges items I can use, I need just over 500 badges. Oh the pain!

So why the burnout? I think it’s mostly because of the daily quests. I go in spurts, primarily because I don’t absolutely need the money. If I drop below 1000g, then I hit them hard for a couple of days until I’m back around 1200g. If I’m above that, then I see little need to do daily quests because I’ve already gotten my epic flyer, what else do I need?

I’ve told myself to get the money to help a few friends get their epic flying mounts, but I don’t have enough motivation to keep at it and my own alts aren’t anywhere close to 70. I also want to collect all the enchants I possibly can and that’s expensive, but most I don’t absolutely need. Someone posted Vitality the other day at 1200/1400. After it didn’t sell he posted it at 1250/1500 the freaking #@$^@%&!!! That’s one I desperately want in my collection!!! But again, I refuse to pay 1500g for an enchant that I can probably get for free with tip and my own mats and did on my current boots.

So what do I do? Well, I do the fishing daily every day. There’s the cooking daily, but I only do the soup and the mana berry quests. I don’t have the motivation to do the others, because I usually don’t do the quests in Skettis or Blade’s Edge anymore. I finish the Netherwing quests only because I spend a lot of time mining nethercite for the chance at gems. I fish a lot for food buffs to put in the guild bank and for Motes of Water. But even now that’s getting old.

Running Kara is keeping me from getting too bored, but we can’t do that every night and we do plan on getting into ZA this week for a little peek. So to combat the burnout I’ve started spending time with Maedchen again. The part I hate about leveling is in the beginning. Every quest seems to have you run all over and kill x number of mobs, the only problem being that you have to kill about 30 of them; or a drop quest where the number of drops is high and the drop rate low. I don’t remember it being this bad in later levels, but I’m old so maybe there’s a few holes in my memory. However, I’ve gotten her from level 25 to 29 in the last two days so I’m pretty happy and excited. I’m sure I’ll spend an enormous amount of time trying to get her to 40 this weekend because I hate walking. With the guys from the other part of the guild merger having so many level 70 toons, it’s motivated me to get Maedchen to level 70 as soon as possible and to start poor little Erdkrieg up again. I spent one night with him and got him to level 5.

I love healing and if you notice a trend here, I’m leveling a Shadow Priest that’s intended to switch to healing once I get to 70, but we’ll see what the guild needs. My little level 5 Shaman will be next, again with the intent to make a healer at level 70. I’ll then start a druid after that and somewhere in between I may do something with a Death Knight.

The Death Knight. Lots of emotions out there about this one and I laugh at most of them. Sure there’ll be a lot of DKs running around, but do you think I’m going to abandon my pally healer for a death knight after all the time and energy I’ve sunk into him?! HELL NO!!! My current intent in rolling a DK will be just to check it out and to level up two more professions. Another reason to start saving money, I guess.

So I guess through all that rambling, my way to combat the burnout is to play the alts. Wonder what others do?