Ya I even turned off details altogether. It’s just not something I have any interest in from a gameplay perspective. Makes me tunnel on how everyone is performing instead of fixating on how good my rotation feels and how engaging the mechanics are to deal with. It’s like escaping from a rat race and finally experiencing the game again.
It’s a heavy distraction and for what benefit? To have some weird dopamine or jealousy or sense of competition? Isn’t it enough to just strive to tap into your full power as is?
I started caring about it more last expansion when our guild, who never usually had a problem getting AoTC, started struggling a lot. It was a combination of the fights being generally unforgiving and the fact that a lot of our good raiders had to peel off for RL stuff.
So we had a bunch of underperformers in heroic with about 4-5 solid dps to carry them. We got heroic jailer just a few weeks before AoTC was gone after the many nerfs. I had to be on my A game because if i wasn’t, we wouldn’t succeed.
Almost didn’t get the Fated AotC either because our raid leader peaced out for a while because he was fed up.
This time around? Blizzard learned their lesson about critical mechanics with a lot of personal responsibility and it’s not been as bad. Less pressure to perform flawlessly. So now i mostly push myself for fun. It’s like a competition with myself.
Yeah it is a personal preference thing largely but I don’t know if many people realize how much enjoyment that distraction takes away from the core experience of the game. It does completely transform the experience from the perspectives of feeling and reason. When you’re met with that much dopamine from being on top of damage meters, it becomes the end all be all of the experience.
“I play to parse” is a common sentiment in mmos, and I feel that’s a waste personally. The games are really good on their own and it makes me sad to think that people place so much value in this largely hollow side of it. It’s needless for success, and it comes at the cost of so much.
I haven’t gone much past the starting area but their short casting range and soar limitations just give me the feeling that they are a gimped version of something that was envisioned to be far better. That doesn’t excite me in a way that’s going to convince me to set aside another alt to invest time in one.
I really want to love mine, but I’ve more or less stopped playing it after it became very apparent that Blizzard doesn’t know the problems with it, or what to do with it. Dracthyr as a race have kinda grown on me a bit, and I want to like their class fantasy, but it’s clear they put way more effort and time into preservation and devastation is an afterthought.
You’re still appearing in their MAU statistics. That’s support. Want to send a message? Move on completely.
Worked for me and god knows how many others who ditched WoW in SL. There’s a reason there’s no mission table or “dragon power” or “dragon covenants” in DF.