What makes this fun?

I had stopped raiding. It was not fun. It was the opposite of fun. It took too much time, took too many repairs, took too much patience for wipes and failing over and over.

Not fun.

Maybe the problem was my paladin. I was a bit burnt out on tanking. I was sick of ret's lack of interactivity. Sure, we have lots of buttons to press, but I don't really react to anything, I don't care about maintaining debuffs or buffs or anything other than "is the cooldown ready? Is it better than the one coming a half second later?" That's not much fun.

So I played my rogue and had fun. I planned to level her to 80, gear up, and try again at raiding. Maybe a better class would fix it. She's currently 79 and working on JC and Ebon Blade dailies.

Interruption: If you want to skip the boring "what happened" stuff, skip to where it says Saved by the Rogue.

Monday night I had a fit of insanity. I decided to send a tell to see if I could get into the raid. I did. Then I stood around for a while, bored out of my mind and wondering why I'd agreed to come. We did twins, I was confused because I'd joined vent but forgotten to join the right channel. Not much fun. But they died.

Anub'arak: We died. We died again. We also died. The first few times were annoying to me. A certain healer kept getting tons of debuffs and wasn't happy about it; her constant complaints, and the failure of anyone to fix them, annoyed me. Not fun. But something weird happened. We gradually got better. We tinkered with the strat and decided that trusting DPS to interrupt was getting us all killed, so dropped ice on his butt and tanked the adds there (I apologize if this is useful). That worked better. We died again, but he was at 24k.

Suddenly the fight was trivial. We were nowhere near the enrage. No one died. Cakewalk. Without cake. But there was frosting, without the ing. Frost. I had that thing that I had been missing in raids: fun.

Tuesday night we went back to the fresh instance. Actually I was first waitlisted and was a bit happy, because I was wary of burning myself out (I know, gosh TWO raids, wow, gotta slow down). One of the tanks was having connection problems, so there was my spot, which made me nervous that my night would be ruined. I was tanking on everything but twins. Beasts: One shot. Demon guy: One shot. Faction champions: One shot. Twins: I heard the fight finally and understood what was going on; also a one shot. Anub'arak: Supposedly we was buffed; but also: one shot.

For some reason I was given loot. I guess I won the coin toss against the DPS warrior. Icehowl refused to give me my badges.

Then we very slowly went to Onyxia, wiped on trash when the server went down, wiped on her when the fight bugged, and then did some more standard fail-type wiping. Learning I think, we did get better after the server stopped killing us. Still, it was fun. I'd done the 10 man earlier and didn't like it much; it's hard to get whelps from two sides at once with an AoE that doesn't move while trying to stay behind her. Three tanks makes it much more manageable.

Saved by the Rogue?
I decided to get my rogue's JC going. I also decided I wanted to make a profit from it. Level and profit, tall order. This meant farming and watching the AH and seeing what was profitable. I did manage to level her skill a lot. And the mining spree by my paladin brought in a good bit of gold. I didn't truly make a profit though, since the rings that I thought were a great way to level; while they did sell pretty well, were made too expensive by the titanium (I underestimated the cost of a bar). Still, the process of figuring out what gems might sell, testing them, mining (does anyone else get a sort of dull high from mining?), prospecting, etc; that got me into the game again. I was engaged and interested.

I will still level my rogue and farm heroics for cuts and all that, but she's not going to replace my paladin. I remembered again that I enjoy tanking. I remembered that ret can be fun, despite the terrible mechanics.

Is this broadly applicable? I see real life parallels. Someone is a bit down and what do they get told? "Be active" or "get involved." Before I was purely questing and I like quests, but I had no real goals or engagement. I was thinking, sure; but it was mostly for this blog, trying to imagine what to write next. Sometimes I ran out of ideas because there's not much to say when there's nothing happening. I was WoW-depressed. My rogue got me active again and suddenly things were fun. Instead of complaining that we're bored, we should find some goal and work towards it.

Suddenly it's fun again.