Breakfast Topic: Sometimes being strong is not fun

If you’re a person who reads this site, you probably know about our weekly leveling stream. And if you’re not, congratulations on being able to receive my thoughts via telepathy. Anyway, for the first 55 or so levels on my brewmaster monk, I was pretty much miserable. Why? Well, three reasons.

The first was watching all the gear and weapons that would normally go to a strength class get vendored. The second was feeling dirty every time I had to compete with a hunter for agi gear.

But the third reason was the simple fact that I felt utterly invincible and often crushed entire trash pulls by myself. Listening to other players say ‘I didn’t even get to damage any of them’ made me feel like I was ruining other players’ fun. That’s not a good feeling.

Now I’m playing a gnome death knight, and I’m a lot happier. I’m sure at max level things all even out, but at level 60 I definitely feel more balanced with my party than I did on the brewmaster, and our run of a dungeon definitely gave me time to get a sense of what I could and couldn’t do as a blood DK at that level. There’s definitely no giant ‘everything dies’ button like Keg Smash.

It’s not that you don’t want to feel strong, you just don’t want to feel so strong that everything is trivial. It’s no fun to blow up the world, sometimes. You have to live there.