Like pretty much everyone who plays World of Warcraft, I have a morning routine that I tend to follow. I wake up, put the coffee on, and let the dog out. While the pooch does its business, I do mine. I log into WoW and deal with the various garrison missions and daily cooldowns. Usually I have to do that for a few characters so I let the dog back in and pour myself a cup of coffee before I finish up with the delegation of garrison duties.

What happens next usually depends on my day – if I’m working, well I go to work. If I happen to have the day off, I usually have a plan to focus on one character. That means I’ll either level them up, use them to level up battle pets, run old raids or dungeons for transmog gear/pets/gold, or find something else’s face to kill.

There’s no shortage of things to do, is what I’m saying. Those things also tend to change from week to week.

My last post was about the Brawler’s Guild. My plan at the time was to run through the seven ranks and unlock the heirloom fist weapons, the title, and so on. The problem I ran into was that some classes are better at certain fights than others, and while I enjoy using my Monk there were a few fights that were elevating my blood pressure to unhealthy levels. As much as I wanted the fist weapons, I wanted to avoid giving myself a stroke even more.

For my own well-being, I turned my attention to something a little more stable – the Stables. Now I’m not what you’d call a mount collector, per se. As long as I can get from Point A to Point B at 100% movement speed, it doesn’t matter if I do it on a horned zebra or a spectral tiger. Just get me there faster than my running speed. But one day I was standing in Stormwind on a bank alt when I was eclipsed by a huge mountain of fur and ugly – the trained icehoof mount. It was big. It was different. It was something I could relate to. So the monk’s new purpose went from Brawler’s Guild to clefthoof rustling.

You’d need a black belt to ride this beast.

After running the daily stable quest for a few days, I decided to use some of my spare time to log on with a warrior that I was hoping to push to 100. While he was questing I queued him for a random battleground. Something different, you know? Sure I’d probably get smashed but it’d be a change of pace. But my warrior, well he killed some folk. And when he killed those folk, and people noticed and healers healed me, he killed more folk.

Interesting.

My 100 Fury Warrior soon found himself outfitted with the Gladiator’s Sanctum in his garrison. More motivation, and goals to kill. Also, people to kill. This meant that I needed to collect piles of broken bones, so off to Ashran I went.

I found out two things once I got there. First, not many people were running Ashran anymore, at least not on the Alliance side. I discovered this when I asked to be invited into a raid and was met with the sound of crickets. I started running around the zone, trying to find a group of Alliance folk that I could ask directly. I covered a whole lot of ground before I found anyone.

When I did finally find people, I made my second discovery. The second thing I found was that my computer is old. A handful of Alliance folk were standing at the top of a hill, looking down at an empty crossroad. I ran by them, hoping to gain their attention with my fearless approach to what could have been an ambush. That’s when my computer finally started rendering the huge mob of Horde players killing people left and right. By the time I could see that I’d just stuck my head and shoulders into a big red meat grinder, I was hanging with the spirit healer. This happened a few times before I finally dropped my settings to Fair. I ran out of time for the day so I couldn’t tell how much that would help with the renderings, if at all.

Fast forward to this morning. I put the coffee on and let the dog out, then started up WoW. At the character select screen, I stopped. I actually didn’t know what to do. I had time to check out some garrison missions on a couple of characters, but who was I going to focus on? What did I want to do?

The mount? It had been a few days since I did the daily to train the mount I wanted. I’d actually almost forgotten about it.

PVP? There didn’t seem to be a point in doing anything with the Gladiator Sanctum due to Ashran being an apparent lost cause. So was I gearing up a PVP character for running BG’s?

Raiding? The Ashran meat grinder incident made me question whether I would even be able to run a raid without lagging out to death. More experimentation was going to be necessary before I took that step.

Pet Battles? Really? Was I paying 15 bucks a month to play Pokemon?

In the end I just logged out, sipped my coffee, and went to work.

Sometimes the best thing to do, is nothing at all.