Another World of Warcraft Post
My primary WoW character, Varshak the Orcish Hunter, reached his final goal of level 60 a few weeks ago. To celebrate, a small dog barked for a few seconds off in the distance. Somebody coughed quietly, once. An ant ran in a circle. I did feel a nice warm inner glow when it happened, but it wore off pretty quickly. Since then... well, it's been pretty boring. There was an amazing couple of days when I found decent instance groups and ran Scholomance, Stratholme and Dire Maul for the first time, scoring a Beaststalker's Cap, some Beaststalker's Boots and even a Barbarous Blade and I thought that level 60 was going to be cooler than a polar bear's nipples, but since then it's been a slog to even find a group for the high level dungeons. I log in, poke around for a group, find nothing, log out. My happiness is almost totally dependent on other people, and as a rule, other people tend to suck.
The big pain is that Varshak is a Hunter, which is a class that seems to rate slightly below torn knee ligaments in general popularity. Warriors and Priests are always in high demand, with Mages and Warlocks close behind, and Shamans and Druids flexible enough to fit into most parties easily... which leaves Hunters and Rogues down at the bottom of the list. Naturally, Paladins aren't even worth mentioning.
This isn't to say that Hunters and Rogues are bad classes - they lay down the smack in bucketloads, and that's always useful. They're never going to be chased for their involvement though, and quite a few people want a Warrior, Priest, Mage and Shaman in their five-man group before they even start thinking about that final slot. There's something to be said for organizing a balanced party, but this kind of thinking makes life bloody difficult for us lowly badass, evil-slaughtering, death-dealing masters of raw damage.
I could always roll up an alternative character, or join a big guild, or blackmail my friends into making characters on my server... but it all seems a bit too much like hard work. There are some excellent single player games out there that I could be enjoying, WoW costs money every month and dicking around for hours to have a nice fun instance run is getting less and less interesting.