Darboux the tank, and walking away from Warcraft
My third and last main, a paladin tank named Darboux, the one job I had left to try. And then, after six years and a dead Lich King, why I put World of Warcraft down and did not pick it back up.
There are three jobs in World of Warcraft: deal damage, heal, or tank, soak the hits so nobody else has to. I had done damage as a warlock, and I had healed as a priest. The only one left was tanking, and near the end I picked that up too, with a paladin named Darboux. The name, like Trihedron, is a math joke, a mathematician this time. By then it fit me.
It started as a need. Our guild kept coming up a tank short, and paladins happened to be excellent at it, so I leveled one to fill the gap and split my nights between healing on Trihedron and tanking on Darboux. Then two things pushed me fully into the armor. The guild needed the tank more than it needed another healer, and Blizzard had reworked priests so that the kind of healing I loved and was good at, Holy, got shoved aside in favor of a different style, Discipline, that I just did not enjoy. So I stopped fighting it and became a tank.
And tanking, it turned out, was a completely backwards version of the job I already knew. As a healer, my whole purpose had been keeping the tank alive, and I got praised when I pulled it off. As the tank, I was the one being kept alive. My job was to grab the giant monster’s attention and never let go of it, and everyone else’s job was to keep me standing. It was, honestly, less stressful. A healer has to watch twenty-five health bars at once. A tank watches one very large, very angry thing. I was good at holding its attention, and I liked the quiet of only having the boss to worry about.
Across those three characters I had, without ever quite planning it, played the entire game. Every role it had to offer. I am a little proud of that.
Why I stopped
I want to be honest about the ending, because it is not a dramatic one. I just got to the bottom of it.
We had killed the Lich King, the final boss of an entire expansion, and not just once, many times over. I had stood at the literal end of the story and felt like I had finished something. And then the next expansion, Cataclysm, came out and broke the part of the game I loved most.
Here is the thing about me and that game: I loved the world. I read the quests, I knew the cities, I was an Alliance kid who thought Stormwind was beautiful. Cataclysm tore the world up, set huge pieces of it on fire, and left them that way. I kept waiting for the part where we rebuilt it. Vanilla had once run a giant server-wide effort where everyone pitched in resources to open up a new zone, and I genuinely hoped Cataclysm would be that: the world gets wrecked, and then we all spend the expansion putting it back together. That never came. It just stayed broken and burning, for what felt like forever. I bought it, I leveled my paladin through it, I did a couple of small raids and made one last trip back to old Ulduar for a mount I had always wanted, but my appetite for the big stressful ones was gone. And when I heard the expansion after that was about pandas, I knew I was done. We went from the world is destroyed to here come the pandas, and I could not follow it there.
But the real reason is simpler than any of that. I was burnt out. I had played World of Warcraft for something like six years, most nights, before school, after school, after work. You could probably add up my hours and they would frighten me. A lot of people I knew were genuinely addicted to that game, in the way it could quietly eat a whole life, and I was honest enough with myself to see I was one swerve away from that, and to just walk off. So I did. I put it down, and I did not pick it back up.
I will tell you the part I do not usually admit, though. I miss it. Sitting here now, with a stressful job and a busy life, there is a small voice in the bottom of my stomach that thinks it would be wonderful to disappear back into a world like that, work a part-time job to keep the lights on, and just live in the game. I know that is the burnout talking in reverse, and I know walking away was right. But those late nights with forty, then twenty-five, of my friends, all of us pointed at the same impossible thing and beating it together, that was real, and it was genuinely some of the most fun I have ever had. I do not regret a single hour of it. I just don’t need any more of them.