world of warcraft addiction

I just had an eye opening and thought provoking experience: I often look myself up at http://be.imba.hu to see what I should be working on gear wise and what content I should be running. Its a great site for doing that. But today I took it a step further and looked up all the priests in my guild. Here is what I discovered:

First, our guild “only” has 19 level 80 priests. That surprised me. I’ve always thought of Ex Cinis Cineris as priest heavy and would have guessed us to have maybe half again that number at very least. But what really shocked me is that I am roughly tied for 4th best in terms of gearing with two others. Looking at it another way, if this data is to be believed, I’m no worse than the 6th best geared priest in our guild. There is some room for error as some folks may have logged off in pvp gear or geared for an alt spec, but still.

What this means is that I’m harboring some delusions as to my status. I’d always proclaimed quite loudly that I was at best 2nd tier and quite possibly 3rd tier in terms of ECC priests. However, assuming 4 tiers of 5 each, I’m right at the cusp of 1st and 2nd tier.

Yet I’ve hardly ever run a 10 man (3 to be exact as of this writing.) and never have run a 25 man instance. At this point I could veer off to talk about problems in the WoW reward mechanics. Clearly I’m over geared for the content I’ve run. But I’ll leave that for others to do. (TotalBiscuit of the Blu Plz! podcast does a fine job running that topic into the ground.) Where I want to go with it is that I am once more catching myself caught up in the position of underachiever. (Wherever I go, there I am again it seems.)

Actually, this revelation of my gearing status within our guild impacts me at least 4 different ways at the same time: 1) I’m proud that my efforts of the last few weeks have resulted in such a gearing improvement. Clearly, upgrading doesn’t take as much as I’d assumed. 2) I’m shocked to discover I’m so deluded. I thought of myself as more prone to honest assessment. 3) I’m disappointed I’ve let myself off the hook so easily. My excuse for not attempting harder content was that I wasn’t properly geared to do so. 4) I’m sheepish that I’ve been letting my guild down even in the slightest. ECC is by no means a hardcore raiding guild. But we are large (500+ toons) and I suspect there are more than a few that would like challenge themselves. Why not? Isn’t that part of the fun? I still think we are probably priest heavy, but I’m also sure I’m one of our few discipline healers.

I’ve been thinking of myself as a charity case in need of help when instead I’m at a point where I really should be helping others. I don’t mean just those newly arriving at level 80 but maybe all but the the very top levels in my guild. Maybe even those top players could use my help if only to fill in spots on a 25 man roster from time to time.

I’ll continue this next time talking about what this revelation means to me in terms of gameplay. I know I still want to limit my gameplay time. But maybe its time to reevaluate how that time is being spent.

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