I’ve been pretty good at un-training my brain to stop with that kind of garbage, but the addition of an audience with Twitch streaming brought up some of those old, painful feelings. The onslaught of internalized feelings that I was somehow letting ALL WOMEN GAMERS down because I failed on a trash pack in Ankahet was somewhat surprising. Every mistake I made, like when I wiped on trash or didn’t use my cooldowns properly, I felt like I was proving everyone along the way that had made some shitty comment about how women were terrible at video games. I had the best gear I could get my hands on. I was only soloing because I had heirlooms. The time I started hitting Wrath dungeons, more or less roughly at level as well, a new ticker-tape of self-criticism came in. Here’s the funny thing about success, especially when you find yourself having an audience - the voices that were only you wrestling with yourself suddenly become you wrestling with how you feel everyone else thinks about you. I got some tweaks from my friends to my rotation and cooldowns and I was streaming all of my progress. I tackled all of Auchindoun, and even dying a bit, it still felt like I had accomplished something. Here, someone who was still relatively new to a class was not only soloing at-level dungeons but not even dying that much. It was just Hellfire Ramparts, surely this would fall apart once I did a real dungeon. It really surprised me that I managed to clear an entire dungeon, solo, at level 64 with no deaths. I was slightly above level but I picked something easy like Hellfire Ramparts. Remembering how blood death knights are the reigning queens of solo content, I wondered aloud if perhaps I could solo a dungeon. The goal was to get from Point A and Point B (level 62 to level 85) in the shortest, easy way possible - a spec built for murder (Blood), the best gear available (heirlooms) and all the content I knew like the back of my hand.Īfter spending two levels getting the gist of the spec from quests, I found myself getting bored. I started looking up leveling guides, clearing off my bars (a must-do whenever I come back to a particularly old set of action bars) and started asking questions. The mount sitting in my death knight’s bags started calling to me, as leveling to 85 would be superbly easy now that I could load that toon up with awesome gear. Now that we are a whole year later and I’ve run out of stuff to do with this expansion, my vigor for leveling alts has returned once again, especially with the recent change to Bind on Account items. It’s hard to force myself to play something I don’t innately understand and I had better things to do, especially when most of early Outlands consisted of level 90s from Kel’thuzad smearing my already twice-dead corpse from the Dark Portal and back. I got exalted pretty quickly with the guild and bailed, and the death knight got left to rot with a nice mount sitting in her bags. I created a death knight, not because I knew how to play one but because the mount required being level 85 and I figured that the shorter distance for leveling would be fine. The project started out very pragmatically last Christmas, where I rolled up a death knight one night because my friend told me that a guild had just transferred to Mal’ganis and were letting anyone in for free to get to exalted with the guild and buy the guild raid meta achievement mount. For the past week or so I’ve been soloing dungeons on a death knight, on a server I have no guildmates on, just to see if I could. I’ve always had the tether of a guild or other people if I wanted to go do something else, so it’s been really interesting to have very little of either. I do things alone a lot as a way of focusing on a task or giving myself space and time to clear my head out. While I don’t think that playing World of Warcraft is even in the realm of marathons, I’ve always thought of myself as a decent solo player. There were no shortcuts here, just myself and the road and I wasn’t going to let the road beat me. When the rain was running into my eyes or when my lungs were burning, the little voice got louder and I had to focus on some meaningless phrase on repeat or the rhythm of my footsteps. I had to do whatever it took mentally to keep one foot in front of the other, especially when all my body was doing was telling me, “ Stop. Training gave me the endurance and muscles, speed but nothing ever prepared me for spending long chunks of time inside of my head keeping myself motivated. Most of the long-distance game was actually mental, not physical. You’d never be able to tell now but in high school I was a cross-country runner and skier.
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