Yeah... I think it is because I've come to the staunch realization that I am losing interest in WoW. Basically, I started dabbling in CrossOver on my Mac a few weeks ago, and last week I finally got it working to a point where I declared it "usable." So, I installed Steam as my first task, of course, and then installed all my favorite games there: Counter-Strike, Half Life, Half Life 2, and Portal (which I had never played but really wanted to).

I beat Portal, and it was immense fun. I've also been playing Counter-Strike again (I suck so bad after taking my 2 year hiatus), and all those fond memories of spwning came flooding back in an intense euphoric reminiscence that was just great. After beating Portal and proving, once and for all that I'm horrible at CS now, I installed and started playing Half Life 2 again. Mother of God, I didn't remember the game being this much fun the first 2 times.

Admittedly, the first time I played it was between classes in my first year of college... so I didn't get the full appreciation of sitting up alone at night killing zombies, and the second time I played it was on my Linux box running bland Wine... and that froze a lot... A LOT. This time, the only "freezes" I encounter (because I am using Wine... but CodeWeaver's version) are usually directly after auto-saves when text is starting to load on the screen and audio is played at the same time. This does not happen a lot, but when it does, I can quit and restart right where I left off pretty simply and quickly, which is nice. Next, I'm probably going to buy episode 1 and episode 2 and play through those, because I've never played them, but I have read some reviews and they are all positive.

WHAT ABOUT WOW!? Man... it makes you realize how bad you really have it... playing great games. World of Warcraft was a lot of fun for a long time, but now it seems like I'm only playing enough to get my arena points for the week, and I don't even care if we go up or down. I realize, when playing HL2, that I'm having more fun than if I were playing WoW, and it starts to dawn on me that WoW USED to be fun... there USED to be goals that were reachable and worth going for. I have come to the realization that I'm never going to get a team above 2000... it's just not going to happen because I don't play enough. My brother is in his final semester of school, and I don't really want to go anywhere without him... so we don't have a lot of time during a given week to get matches in.

Sure, maybe in a few months when he's graduated and settled down with a job, etc etc, we can pick up arena on a better scale... but as for right now, it's just not competitive. We don't play enough to counter the fact that every other team we play is druid+hunter (which neither of our teams can beat... ever), so we take out 5-5 weekly record with a shrug, and he goes back to studying. Before, I would continue doing battlegrounds, or hit my daily quests, etc... then I realized that neither of those things are fun anymore. I don't need the honor... at all, and daily quests are the worst installment in WoW to date. IT IS NOT FUN GRINDING... for money or otherwise.

I oft find myself thinking about starting gimmick teams just for the shear amusement of it. I think "5 druids would be hilarious" or "nothing but druids and retadins" or something stupid like that. Yet, it's hard to tell if anyone out there would enjoy it as much as I do. There's always a factor of "they aren't your friends, they just want points, no one will join a gimmick team for real" that creeps into my head.

Sigh... my friends either 1) don't play competitive PvP, 2) aren't on my server, or 3) have such bad classes that teaming with them would be the worst team construction ever... moonkin + pally + feral + resto + enhancement shamang. There is nothing in that lineup that strikes me as a good team. In fact, I can't figure a good lineup with a moonkin in it other than 5 moonkins... which would only be marginally decent because moonkin aura doesn't stack (what if it did... lawl... 5x moonkin auras = 25% spell crit... that would be good... would it be OP??? No idea).

...

I don't want to do 2s anymore... I hate 2s. It's become too rock-paper-scissors and not enough actual thinking or gameplay. So, I think I'm going to focus more on 5s. 3s suffers from the same problem that 2s does... there's one team that's better than the rest, and you always face it half the time. The same is probably true of 5s too, but I know that I can bubble a 1650 rating pretty easily with a decent setup:

resto druid + pally/disc priest + enhancemang + warrior + rogue (or another warrior/shamang)

It's a windfury team... I had a 1700 team that I was on with this setup... basically against most drain teams, you just eat one of their classes alive before they've drained the pally to 50%, and I can keep CoT off him. Also, innervate on the pally just messes drain teams up. This isn't a traditional outlast team, since we only have 2 healers, but I double as a dps sometimes with wrath-spam and offensive cyclones. I've talked about this team makeup before... it's okay.

sl/sl lock (mine), disc priest (my bro), disc priest, pally, hunter

This is a combo outlast team and a drain team. Everyone except the pally can drain mana, and each disc priest can switch to mana burning when the pally is healing without much worry or cc. Eventually the hunter and the lock will dps something down with the healer's oom. I don't know about this one, but I don't really care either.... so I have the advantage there.

Oh well, I want to do this... but it's hard to work it in... getting peeps you know online with gear is hard as hell...

guess i'll play some cs in the meantime...