Depleted Keys
Before the pandemic, my experiences with World of Warcraft were limited and intermittent. I found it difficult to get into the game for many years - partially because by the time I was old enough to really understand the game and have access to it, it was around the time that Cataclysm was launching. It's a complex game and the wealth of content even at that point was a bit too overwhelming for me as a young solo player.
Years later, I had an opportunity to dip my toes into the game again. My partner at the time had been playing the game seriously for many years. Her and her brothers had actually been banned from playing the game - or even mentioning it in the house - because it had had such an impact on their work in school. Being away from home gave her an opportunity to sneak back into Azeroth - even going so far as to change the icon on her desktop to the Borderlands 2 logo and rename the shortcut so that her parents couldn't catch her when she travelled home.
The pandemic had just hit, and we both had recently bought ourselves nice gaming PCs. I decided to see what all the fuss was about and I was very kindly shown the ropes by her guild at the time. I got a taste of levelling, raiding, hunting for mounts, the dress-up game (transmogging) and a bit of the chill vibe that hanging around the hub cities could evoke. It was a fun time right at the end of Battle for Azeroth as everyone started to get excited for the Shadowlands.
I vividly remember the launch of Shadowlands. A portal was set to open up at Stormwind Keep and a huge throng of people had gathered around in wait to enter the new area. It was a great community feeling and I had levelled a new character to kickstart my first full expansion as a WoW player. I remember asking what the worst specialization was, and what the most in-demand role was, and almost universally being told that everyone wanted a healer and the worst was Discipline Priest. I suppose I’m stubborn so I decided to give that a go and I absolutely loved the style of healing that Discipline used – a focus on providing shields and using your damage to provide healing to your allies. It felt very involved and I took immediate pride in the idea of impressing people with my performance as a class deemed “useless”.
My Discipline Priest - Kaiba
We ploughed through the Shadowlands, started our own guild with some friends and discovered Mythic+. This is a version of dungeons that add a scaling difficulty through numbered keys, timers and affixes with random effects that make the fights more difficult. At the time, +15 keys for every dungeon of the season was the main goal to be able to unlock the mount and, as a relatively new player, +15 was a difficult height to reach.
It became a bit of an addiction, but I needed a group that would push keys aggressively. My ex had her own group that ran keys every week and it was a little bit of a clique. They didn’t like any of their team running keys with other people – which was a little bit strange but it opened the way for a few of the less serious players to form our own little clique. We jokingly called ourselves B Team and we started “bumming” keys every night for weeks on end.
We had Mobiwan, our dwarven Paladin tank. Mobi was a bit of a tech guy, he ran a small Minecraft server for us to chill in when we weren’t in the mood for Warcraft and still to this day I nudge him with random tech questions. There was Mark, our arms Warrior. He was a real classic WoW type player who didn’t care if he was standing in fire, he just wanted to hit things hard with his big sword and shout “Zug Zug”. Scattach was a younger guy from the Czech republic who really did not like paying for WoW. He would farm gold for hours every month to buy a WoW token to cover his subscription. He played a Fire Mage and was completely useless outside of his 2 minute Combustion window. Lastly we had Pixiepopp. She was a young girl from the UK who had been going through a lot at home. I think she needed the escape and we desperately needed her Havoc Demon Hunter.
Slowly but surely we started to complete higher and higher keys. We had moments of triumph and moments of terrible defeats. Some weeks we made amazing progress only to struggle the following. Finally, that moment of timing our first +15 arrived and it was such a great moment of pride. Heading to bed afterwards full of adrenaline and telling my partner all about it. I think there was a bit of jealousy that the B-Team had overtaken her group in progress but I was so overwhelmed with pride and excitement that it didn’t really click with me at the time.
It's funny that, even now, I look back on the pandemic with a weird air of nostalgia. Despite being a horrible time for so many, including myself in so many ways, being locked up inside for a long period of time allowed me the distance to finally leave a job that I should have left long before 2019. It gave me time to just enjoy myself for a few months, to sit at my PC and hang out with friends late into the night. Whether it was running keys in WoW, messing around on our Minecraft server or playing cheap Steam horror games - we were just having the time of our lives.
But as we all know, life did eventually return to some level of normality.
Things weren't going very smoothly with my relationship and things that my partner used to find fun about my little group were becoming an issue. I got upset and stepped away from playing with them. I could sit here and say that was the catalyst for the end of that group but, in truth, the days of us playing together every night were coming to an end anyway. Pixie went off to another guild, Scattach didn't want to pay for the subscription anymore, Mobiwan moved onto other games and Mark was back to working non-stop. The glory days of WoW keys were ending, I just didn't help to ease that transition with my attitude.
The inevitable break-up happened and I poured myself into my new job. Working a ridiculous amount of overtime just to fill the hours. Raider.io shows the slow regression of my interest in running keys season over season - from one of the highest ranked Discipline priests on the server to not ranking at all just a few seasons later. Whereas before, I would hunt mounts and transmog in the old dungeons and raids as a group, now I would just log on once a week and run a few old raids on my own to pass the time.
Many raids have a chance to drop a rare mount at the end of the final boss. The odds can vary but a 1% chance would be the most common. One of the more coveted mounts would be Invincible, the mount that drops from Icecrown Citadel after killing the Arthas - the Lich King. Not only is it a very cool looking mount, it is a bit of a slog to farm. Getting to the Lich King with a character takes a bit of time to get your 1% roll every week so if you are unlucky and it takes a lot of attempts (limited to 1 attempt per character per week) then you could lose a lot of time over the course of potentially years worth of attempts before you see Invincibles' Reigns drop.
In my loneliness and boredom, I started running Icecrown a couple of times a week after the weekly reset. It was kind of therapeutic to listen to a podcast and just run my way through the raid, it largely becomes mindless once you've done it enough times. I was averaging about 15 runs per week so the odds were slowly moving in my favour until finally, the mount dropped. I was absolutely ecstatic and I happened to be on a call with some Destiny 2 friends I had made so they all had a good laugh at my excitement. Thankfully, unlike many of the mounts I have farmed, Invincible is a rare mount that I actually really like to use regularly so it is more than just another box ticked in my collections.
In many ways, farming Invincible with a tenacity and good level of planning marked a change in my attitude that I had been working on for the months since the breakup. I had been doing very well at work in a job I really liked, I had gone on a date with someone new, I was hitting the gym and rediscovering a rhythm that I hadn't been able to show since before the pandemic. I posted a photo of my new mount in the discord chat with the B Team and the other guildies with a caption along the lines of "HOLY SHIT", called it a night and work up the next day to discover I had been removed from the guild, banned from the discord and blocked by the ex-partner. This...was not the expected result.
Invincible remains one of my favourite mounts
In the end I'm grateful for that weird moment and for the line in the sand that Invincible played a role in giving to me. People are much more open to the concept of going "no contact" with people who aren't healthy for you these days and the forced "no contact" with my ex, who for the guts of 10 years I spent most days with, gave me the separation that I needed to take the next step in rebuilding myself. It is also a very nice mount.
I still wander around Azeroth from time to time. Perhaps a new expansion launches or they release another one of these Remix events. Both Pandaria and Legion Remix events were fantastic ways to sprint through old content, unlock a bunch of mounts and not have to worry about your DPS rotation or knowing your mythic routes down to the last percentage.
It's very much a cosy game for me now with more time spent changing my outfits and wandering old areas than anything else. I prefer to play as a warrior now - Protection Warrior is a relatively straightforward tank, doesn't have to worry about long queue times and has some really nice transmog opportunities as a plate wearer.
It's also become a slightly forlorn or lonely place for me. I miss having that drive to push higher and higher up the rankings. I miss the feeling that there was always someone online to hang out with. I miss that sense of community in WoW. It's a sense of community that I have somewhat found with Destiny 2 but, especially recently, that game hasn't excited me as much to play so it has become a double-edged sword.
The fountain at Boralus is still one of my favourite spots to sit and think
I don’t want to feel like I have to apologise for playing WoW anymore. It's been the butt of the joke for years - the famous South Park episode comes to mind. I feel like whenever I say that I enjoy it, I have made light of what the game means to me. Azeroth was a world to explore when our world was suddenly closed off – a place where I made friends, lost friends, won and lost. It rests with me still to this day. Now I log in and stretch my mounts wings. A world that used to be home, now just somewhere I visit from time to time.