Progression raiding (and the process of going from a new recruit, to an officer, to a class lead, to a raid leader) taught me a lot about how to manage and set boundaries with people, and shaped the way I think about leadership, success, and failure to this day. Probably a lot of people learn about those things in their early 20s, but the specifics of how I learned them are not something I can easily share with most people.
HARD SAME. Honestly I don't know where my social skills would be today if I hadn't had that experience, because I learned SO MUCH from it, and while I have described it to a few people who have seemed to understand, for the most part people (especially those of older generations, and non-gamers) seem to get incredulous at the idea of playing a video game involving such a sophisticated degree of organization and group social skills. Which is ridiculous, because getting a group of 10+ people to work together on anything is a major undertaking in itself, let alone work together well, but something something get off the internet and make some real friends, why don't you.
But it seems to me that when they try to do Big Story it's often repetitive (the Old Gods are threatening the world! again!) or they write themselves into a corner (the characters are tired of war... but the war can never end because it's baked into the game).
pfffft, yes. I also had/have some friends who are really into the lore, but I play actual RPGs for lore and Blizzard games for mechanical challenges and shiny aesthetics.
This sounds like you would love mythic+, because that's exactly what I get out of it. But I also hear you on not wanting to do the leveling slog.
I might actually go for it, if I was sure of having a group to do it with me, but from experience thus far with this group, one member in particular is probably going to get bored before we get anywhere close. But I'm glad to hear the leveling dungeons do ramp up a bit!
I loved playing CoH holy and I healed most of the way through BC, but in Wrath I was the swing healer spot and I ended up going shadow more often than not. I played shadow for a while in Cata too (it was awesome then!)
I feel kind of silly for saying it, but I actually preferred shadow in TBC (even though it was still quite fun to play in Wrath and Cata!) because of the special snowflake factor I had for my DPS output at the time; at least on my server back then most spriests were primarily healers who respecced because Vampiric Touch was the bee's knees, and they tended to play very conservatively, whereas I had started out as a rogue and had the e-peen to match. xP (I remember there being a lot of Serious Discourse on the priest forums about when it was and wasn't appropriate to use Shadow Word: Death, and my answer was "stack crit and use it every cooldown unless it's literally going to kill me :3", which attitude I got away with because my healers never had mana problems. And it was always funny to get teased when I occasionally slipped up and used it on the Prince fight in Karazhan, or something. Good times!)
I enjoyed healing as a priest at the time, too, but had more fun on my druid - the Lifebloom rotation with Swiftmend felt really good to my brain, probably because it wasn't all that different from playing the spriest, except that there was a reactive aspect to it.
but for some reason being in that front-and-center role makes me so damn nervous in a way that I never am when I heal or DPS. I can't relate at all when people talk about being scared to heal, because healing has been my comfort zone for so long.
Yeah, I never tanked progression content, and would not have wanted to! I remember being SUPER nervous the first time I tanked a raid at all, because our normal tank roster was *stupidly* good; DPS got away with so much shit in our raids that they absolutely didn't in other groups (the organization we were part of had open sign-ups, so a lot of people raided in multiple groups, and I frequently got asked to fill in on my alts for other people's no-shows), and quickly found that it was much harder to actually lead the raid (in the voice-over, shot-calling sense, which was by that point My Job) from Boss Crotch view! Healing is really the role that I've found gives the best understanding of what is going on overall in a fight, though of course you're still not going to see Everything.
I really really enjoyed the level of collaboration between the different role leads needed to troubleshoot fights - that was really cool. And I miss our healer lead and main tank bickering like an old married couple, because wow, did they ever. xD (The MT was one of my roommates, and the healer lead only lived a few hours away, so he actually visited us semi-regularly. When we'd raid all in the same apartment the MT would be yelling about how he was going to die and Liss would yell back at him to shut up and stop being such a baby and it was so funny, oh my god.)
How did you find Wildstar to be?
It was very pretty, and had a lot of potential; the mechanics were interesting and felt quite different from WoW's - you frequently had to aim things! Buuuut it had balance issues out the wazoo and the raid content was, at the time we quit, basically unplayable. It was a big disappointment; my core crew from WoW + a very old friend of mine who had no-lifed WoW in a different timeframe than I did had gotten together and formed a guild and we had been very excited when the game launched.
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HARD SAME. Honestly I don't know where my social skills would be today if I hadn't had that experience, because I learned SO MUCH from it, and while I have described it to a few people who have seemed to understand, for the most part people (especially those of older generations, and non-gamers) seem to get incredulous at the idea of playing a video game involving such a sophisticated degree of organization and group social skills. Which is ridiculous, because getting a group of 10+ people to work together on anything is a major undertaking in itself, let alone work together well, but something something get off the internet and make some real friends, why don't you.
But it seems to me that when they try to do Big Story it's often repetitive (the Old Gods are threatening the world! again!) or they write themselves into a corner (the characters are tired of war... but the war can never end because it's baked into the game).
pfffft, yes. I also had/have some friends who are really into the lore, but I play actual RPGs for lore and Blizzard games for mechanical challenges and shiny aesthetics.
This sounds like you would love mythic+, because that's exactly what I get out of it. But I also hear you on not wanting to do the leveling slog.
I might actually go for it, if I was sure of having a group to do it with me, but from experience thus far with this group, one member in particular is probably going to get bored before we get anywhere close. But I'm glad to hear the leveling dungeons do ramp up a bit!
I loved playing CoH holy and I healed most of the way through BC, but in Wrath I was the swing healer spot and I ended up going shadow more often than not. I played shadow for a while in Cata too (it was awesome then!)
I feel kind of silly for saying it, but I actually preferred shadow in TBC (even though it was still quite fun to play in Wrath and Cata!) because of the special snowflake factor I had for my DPS output at the time; at least on my server back then most spriests were primarily healers who respecced because Vampiric Touch was the bee's knees, and they tended to play very conservatively, whereas I had started out as a rogue and had the e-peen to match. xP (I remember there being a lot of Serious Discourse on the priest forums about when it was and wasn't appropriate to use Shadow Word: Death, and my answer was "stack crit and use it every cooldown unless it's literally going to kill me :3", which attitude I got away with because my healers never had mana problems. And it was always funny to get teased when I occasionally slipped up and used it on the Prince fight in Karazhan, or something. Good times!)
I enjoyed healing as a priest at the time, too, but had more fun on my druid - the Lifebloom rotation with Swiftmend felt really good to my brain, probably because it wasn't all that different from playing the spriest, except that there was a reactive aspect to it.
but for some reason being in that front-and-center role makes me so damn nervous in a way that I never am when I heal or DPS. I can't relate at all when people talk about being scared to heal, because healing has been my comfort zone for so long.
Yeah, I never tanked progression content, and would not have wanted to! I remember being SUPER nervous the first time I tanked a raid at all, because our normal tank roster was *stupidly* good; DPS got away with so much shit in our raids that they absolutely didn't in other groups (the organization we were part of had open sign-ups, so a lot of people raided in multiple groups, and I frequently got asked to fill in on my alts for other people's no-shows), and quickly found that it was much harder to actually lead the raid (in the voice-over, shot-calling sense, which was by that point My Job) from Boss Crotch view! Healing is really the role that I've found gives the best understanding of what is going on overall in a fight, though of course you're still not going to see Everything.
I really really enjoyed the level of collaboration between the different role leads needed to troubleshoot fights - that was really cool. And I miss our healer lead and main tank bickering like an old married couple, because wow, did they ever. xD (The MT was one of my roommates, and the healer lead only lived a few hours away, so he actually visited us semi-regularly. When we'd raid all in the same apartment the MT would be yelling about how he was going to die and Liss would yell back at him to shut up and stop being such a baby and it was so funny, oh my god.)
How did you find Wildstar to be?
It was very pretty, and had a lot of potential; the mechanics were interesting and felt quite different from WoW's - you frequently had to aim things! Buuuut it had balance issues out the wazoo and the raid content was, at the time we quit, basically unplayable. It was a big disappointment; my core crew from WoW + a very old friend of mine who had no-lifed WoW in a different timeframe than I did had gotten together and formed a guild and we had been very excited when the game launched.