Posts with tag Insomnia

I've talked before about playing with insomnia, and how my current schedule has caused me to play at odd hours with my Alliance toons instead of my Horde ones. I miss playing Horde, but the late shift and my new guild means that I have found myself with almost a guaranteed group for whatever the daily heroic happens to be, and I know I can rely on those players to not stun the mobs before I hit them, fail to cast heals on me while I'm tanking three mobs, set sheeped mobs on fire while I'm looking at the two mobs I was planning to tank, or what have you. So far the guild groups I've run with have been so smooth it's like I'm playing an entirely different game from when I run PuG's, and the new game is fun. We make smart recoveries from bad pulls, kill bosses, get loot and badges, and even handle the occasional wipe with aplomb rather than sniping at each other. It's been delightful.

Last night, however, heroic Mechanar made it magical.

The hardest thing about playing WoW during the night shift is watching your standards for success drop as people who aren't as demented or as sleep-deprived as I am realize they have to do things like sleep and get up in the morning. Since I know I won't be able to sleep I'm fairly cavalier about it, but as the night transforms into early morning people go from let's clear Heroic Arcatraz to let's try one more time to kill this annoying boss and call it a night. That's right, Zereketh, you know who you are. I'm somewhat of a perfectionist, so it can be very frustrating for me to tank a boss over and over again and see the DPS dying from stuff I can't do much about, like the Void Zones he keeps spawning right under the clothies' feet, especially when you get the boss to 1% six times in one night.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

I've posted before about my insomnia and how it affects my WoW play: last night was a key example, as I ground AB marks on my Tauren Warrior, then ran Durnholde Keep on my Draenei Shaman, then went back to Arathi Basin on the bull until server shutdown.

When I play in the afternoon or evenings, my PvP experience tends to be mostly positive, with the Horde winning about as many games as we lose and giving a good showing for ourselves even when we do lose. Last night was not like that. Instead, it was the Alliance rolling over us like a crimson zerg, crushing our faces into the dirt, every AB mark I managed to collect soaked with the blood and tears of a demoralized force that actually cheered on the eventual five caps as a mercy killing. As you might expect I found it frustrating enough that I took the time off to go run an instance on my Ally shammy, which went well enough... basically it was four 70's and a 69 (me) burning our way through Durnholde Keep, remarkably little strategy or tactical application of our abilities, very much the kind of 'Hulk Smash' run I usually hate. And I hated this one, too, as they talked to Thrall before I had a chance to and so I didn't get to finish the quest, so I'll have to go back there again to get that done.

One of the biggest problems I have is that, from time to time, I suffer from extremely painful bouts of insomnia. I've had this issue ever since I was a very young boy, and it still reoccurs from time to time. This has lead me to discover the joys and pains of logging on to play World of Warcraft in the middle of the night. Since I tend to play on servers in the same basic time zone as I am (Edmonton, Alberta if you're curious) this often leads me to discover that it can be an entirely different world when most of the server is asleep.

One of the large positives is that I often catch the Auction House when a bid is about to expire - I got my BE pally a Sword of the Magistrate for practically nothing not an hour ago, for example. It's also a lot easier for me to do quests that involving farming mobs that are otherwise popular either because the quest itself is popular or because they drop something folks want, like the elementals in the badlands that everyone and their parents tend to farm.

There are some big downsides, though. For starters, instances? Forget about it. If I can find two people on at my level at any given time it's a small miracle. Also, when you're bleary eyed from lack of sleep, that may not be the best time to try and do an annoying escort quest. Admittedly, I tend to find escort quests in general to be the second most annoying quests in the game, with "bring me x number of the eyes/hearts/brains of y" being the absolute worst, but I want to level my characters so I do them anyway.

Is anyone else out there playing on the graveyard shift? It sometimes seems like I'm totally alone, but a few folks must be toiling away alongside me. Do you prefer it or are you just there sometimes? What's good, what's bad about it for you? I sometimes like the relative peace and quiet, but I miss being able to get a Sunken Temple group when I need one. And I can't say that playing the game makes me feel any more rested.