Azeroth, Written Down One Evening at a Time

Short Evenings, Long Azeroth: Spending Your Hours on Purpose

The weekly list that never quite ends

Most of us do not play WoW the way the trailers imagine. We log in after work, with maybe ninety minutes before the day catches up with us, and the first thing waiting is a list. Weekly quests, a dungeon or two for the vault, a profession cooldown, a few world events that only make sense this week. None of it is bad on its own. The trouble is that the list is the same shape every seven days, and it is easy to spend a whole evening ticking boxes without ever doing the thing that made you reinstall the game.

I keep a paper notebook next to the keyboard for exactly this reason. Not a spreadsheet, just a page per week with three lines: what has to happen, what would be nice, and what I actually want to do. The third line is usually the shortest, and it is the one that tells me whether the week went well.

Counting where the evening actually goes

Try this for a fortnight. Write down, roughly, how long each chunk of a session takes: travelling, queueing, repeating a familiar dungeon, clearing the same daily hub, sorting bags. Most players who do this are surprised. Queue time and repetition eat far more of the evening than the exciting encounters do, and the exciting encounters are the reason we play.

Once the numbers are on paper the question changes. It stops being how to squeeze in more and becomes which chunks deserve my attention and which only need to get done. That distinction is the whole point of this article.

Where a WoW Boost fits into a busy week

Some players hand the repetitive parts of the week to other people, and a WoW Boost is the common name for that arrangement: an experienced group clears a piece of content with you or for you, so your own hours go to something else. It is not for everyone, and it is not a replacement for learning your class. It is simply one tool among many, in the same drawer as addons, a tidy interface and a regular raid team.

The sensible way to think about it is the same as any other time-saver. If a dungeon wing has become pure routine for you, and you would rather spend that hour exploring a zone you have never walked, then handing over the routine can be a fair trade. If the dungeon is the fun part, keep it. I have written about both sides in the journal, including a look at how people choose helpers for group content, so you can read other opinions before deciding anything.

Keeping the good parts for yourself

Whatever you automate or delegate, there are parts of WoW that stop being WoW if somebody else does them. My own short list looks like this:

• First visits to a new zone, because you only get to be surprised once.
• Learning a raid encounter with a group you like, wipes and all.
• Collecting runs where the story of the hunt is half the reward.
• Profession work you enjoy, such as crafting a set piece for a friend.
• Quiet exploration with no goal at all, which is how most of my favourite screenshots happened.

Notice that none of these are efficient. They are the reason to be here, so protect them.

A rhythm that survives a busy month

A weekly routine only works if it bends. I split my sessions into three kinds. A maintenance evening handles the list in one sitting, with music on and no ambition. A project evening picks a single goal, such as one mount, one transmog piece or one zone achievement, and ignores everything else. A free evening has no plan whatsoever. Most weeks get one of each, and busy weeks get a short maintenance night and a free one.

The addons I lean on to keep maintenance nights short are collected on the farming addons page, and if you are returning after a long break, the start here page suggests where to begin reading.

What to do with the hours you get back

Hours saved are only worth something if they go somewhere. Pick a destination before you need it: a dungeon from an older expansion you never saw, a lore thread that has been nagging at you, a fishing spot with a view. Azeroth is a very large place, and most of it is more interesting than the weekly list.

If you try any of this, I would like to hear how it goes. The contact page has my e-mail, and the editor page explains who is typing all this at midnight with a cold coffee.