I've recently hit a patch of Burnout within WoW, now this isn't the normal type where you just don't want to play the game, it's more of a class burnout. I play a warrior, and I've done both the roles from Main Tanking, up to being around 3rd DPS wise. I've just hit the line where I actually don't want to do either of those two roles anymore.

I have decided to make a healer, in this case a paladin, and start leveling it up to get a feel, pre-TBC. But my question to you all is how do I get back into the feel of my lost class? All that gear is wasted really if I never go back, right now I feel as if I won't.

Also, to edit in.

Have any of you ever suffered a class related Burnout?
What did you do to cope?
Did it affect your raiding?
Did you change class ultimately?

I used to play a Priest but I was running raids and pretty much all I could manage was Heal R2 spam om the MT and I got pretty sick of it.

I rolled up a hunter, once I got her to 60, if the raid was fine on healing I would bring her. After a couple weeks I moved over to the hunter completely. I knew I was unhappy with my priest though so I only took gear if it was going to rot.

my first 60 was a mage.. wasn't my play style
2nd was the rogue, which i consider my main. 125+ days played. got tired of the pigeon hole blizz designed for me.

been happy w/ the warrior so far.

as far as all that "wasted time" with the gear. well, that's pretty much it, if you chose to view it that way. I was never a loot happy person, and only took it when it couldn't benefit another more than myself. I played the game to see new things, and the gear was a nice little perk (raided AQ and Naxx for months, and the only gears i have to show i've even been in the zone are the aq rep ring, and 2/5 T2.5, no naxx gear, even though i had plenty of DKP to get a few upgrades).

it kinda sucks to give it up, especially if you're going from alliance to horde, where a lot of the stuff is hard to even transfer over, but i think if you enjoy playing the game, and the new class, then the lost time is OK.

I stopped playing WoW all together. After several months when I returned, I found that my new guild rank was "Ebayed" and a slew of tells asking how much I 'paid' for my account. Some people still think I ebayed, make me laugh that even being in vent, telling them about things we did they persist.

I like my priest quite a bit, I like the toon, put lots of time into it, and actually enjoy healing playing a healer. At some point I just lost interest, was tired of pretty much every in game aspect. Now even the crazy boring farming, herbing, 5 mans, raids all seem way better. It took a ... 5? 6? month break before i could tolerate, play, then enjoy WoW.

Decide if you're tierd of the game or class. Sounds like you may just need to reroll and well, with xpac it seems like a perfect time to do it.

A lot of people need to take breaks, especially healers. Half our guild has been with us since day 1 (dec 04), but only 1-2 people have done that without a couple weeks here and there. We have one priest who goes like 2 months on, 1 month off. If you push that extra week in, instead of taking a break, it could literally be the diff from playing another year, to quitting forever. Everyone quits eventually, so just be prepared for that.

As I've told my own guild one of the worst parts of being in a guild is seeing some really cool people quit the game or leave the guild. Of course, thats also what makes guilds so great - cause you've had that time to spend with those people. Sometimes your most hardcore just have to move on, and recruiting is the only solution.

If you're burning out yourself, take 2 weeks off.

I wish I hadn't rolled a Warlock first. Every other class is so dull (to me personally, not in general) by comparison that its just painful to make any alts.

We've had several people completely change class in the past. You just deal with it. If they don't want to play their old character then them playing a different one is better than an empty raid spot. Although they are knocked pretty far down on the pecking order unless they REALLY put in an effort and get lucky with BWL drops etc. to compete in AQ40/Naxx.

Once you take the time off you'll realize very quickly if you need to spend more time IRL (quit), or just were sick of 24/7 in naxx. Naxx progression push is pretty intense, and sometimes you need a breather before going again.

Naxx? I wish.

I've only done BWL -> AQ40 (And that was only Sart)

Naxx interests me alot, and if I could get a slot in a Naxx that might make me want to tank again.

Often times when people think they need to change classes the real issue is that they just want to do something new. When you are unhappy even change for the worse can seem to be good at first. When the novelty wears off you may find yourself dissatisfied again. Try to be sure that what you really are missing is a dynamic that new class can bring to the game.

If you can find someone in guild who would be willing to swap characters with you for raids then get first hand experience with the class. If you can't raid as the class learn its skills and visualize raiding as that class in your mind. Try to talk to some people and see what they like/dislike about their class. You may be surprised to hear that their dislikes of your chosen class are the very same things you are running from.

I am not so sure you would like Naxx, from my rather limited experience with it (I simply stopped raiding once I discovered what it required out of my RL). The loot is great and the bosses are very well designed as a general rule, but the amount of hardocre involved was waaay too much for my liking. Encounters like 4H can destroy guilds, and I know a few that have exploded this way.

Its wasted anyway. If you've burned out on your class but want to play another, you've picked the perfect time to do it. Unless you're in full T3 you'll be replacing most if not all of your equipment in the levelling process for TBC. Roll that paladin and don't look back.

I expired in February, haven't renewed. Following the game like a fan is fairly interesting, but actually playing I find deadly dull.

I was experiencing this very issue myself about 3 weeks ago. I was to a point where I didn't want to play my main (a priest) or even my other 60 alt (a mage, although non raiding.. I have a priest :( ). I created a druid to muck around with a few friends (out of guild, so I couldn't be hassled to go heal a raid), but had got to the stage where I wasn't at all concerned with playing, in fact I believe I would have quit, even with all the excitement of the expansion pack.

The guild I was in was raiding 5 nights a week, we were up to Fankriss (the guild formed 8 months after release and thus we were a little behind where we could have been). I say 'was' for a good reason. The powers that were in my former guild decided that PVE was a good option for the guild and without discussion stated that we were all transfering. Being the stubborn person I am, I didn't like being told what I should do, so I, along with a third of the guild remained on our current server. As such, we no longer raid 5 days a week - its absolute bliss after a year and a half of devoting my spare time to raiding.

Having this forced break has definately changed my perspective of the game, and realigned my priorties - it's just a game afterall. I'm making sure I don't skip stuff for the game, so when I do play, it's fun again.

So my suggestion, take a break - even if for a few weeks, or do as you are doing, go back and discover the joys of starting a baby character.

Taking a break until there's 'something new' usually works for me. I've tried rolling another class but for some odd reason I always end up coming back to the damn druid.

I've hardly logged on in the last month but I'm still psyched for the next patch, and of course BC.

I have never been lucky enough to find competent players in large amounts, so my raiding experience is quite limited in WoW (I just can't put up with retardation).
I raided for years as a cleric in EQ, so my first character in WoW was a priest, but it didn't last long, the amount of abuse a healer can get in wow is absurd (retarded players all around), EQ CH rotations were a load of fun in comparison.
I have nowadays 1 character per class at least in the 50s and a couple 60s and this helped me enjoying the game more, so if you ask me, switching playing style can be good at times, but in the end it's not a big deal in raids.

Raiding is more a team execution of a script, you have a well laid pattern ahead consisting of moving in certain spots and performing certain actions and in the end playing a different class can only delay the burnout if that is what is going to happen.
Sometimes going from a pro-active class to a reactive class (or the other way around) can help: a couple players I know thought they choosed the right class at the beginning, after a reroll they were much more happy and were playing more often.

I think I'd play a hunter should I have to raid 24/7 again, relaxing (10s cycles for a "4-years-CH-rotating-cleric"? a breeze!), not a huge need for consumables, no one really cares about how much dps you do and with some luck and itemrack you can even save repair costs.

Last night I wrote the dreadful words of /gquit. I just had enough. Raiding 7 days a week and especially, raiding with a class that gets less and less wanted in raids just because my guild was extremely focused on progression felt really bad and made me feel a bit useless. I had countered that, since I do not like to be useless, with being the tactic writer for the guild. Funny thing when I typed /gquit was that the most people was worried about me taking all the tactics with me.

I think that somewhere in the game you will become a bit fed up. Raiding on a hardcore level really takes a lot of energy and dedication. Once you feel that it is not fun anymore and you are just doing it to support the guild I think you should take a break. If real life feels better and more fun just quit the guild since there is other players that are probably better for the spot than you. It is hard to do it, after all you have spent a lot of time with the people in the guild. But you have to figure out for what reason you are playing the game. If you feel that you are playing since you are "forced" to do it you should probably consider doing something else. It is hard to quit the game. Taking a break or just rerolling is needed sometimes.

This is almost exactly where I'm at now. imo I think warriors have a serious lack of direction at the moment.

OP: Try some PvP with a guild group, thats a nice change from the raiding 'grind'.

Played warlock since beta, and up until two months ago. I got bored of the class, no idea why. Made a druid and started raiding with him, no plans to activate my warlock yet. Druid brought back the fun I had with WoW again. *meow*

Yes, December '05 major major burnout on my priest. We blew through MC and pushed hard for a server second for Nef, and I remember thinking... anything god... let me do anything but log on tonight and heal again. I still enjoyed the game, but I couldn't stand logging into my priest.

In retrospect the realities of coping with heavy classwork in school, helping officer in a guild that was taking off smashingly well but was playing catchup to the top guilds on server, and the fact that originally I didn't even want to play a priest all kinda dog piled on after 6 months of 90% raid attendance. I didn't feel like there was any progression left (this was before AQ opened) in the healing game and I was just plain BORED. I wanted to be entertained by raiding. I wanted to go back to my level 50 mage on my old server and kill things... but I didn't have anyone to play with there =(

To cope- 2 things.
1) A friend strong armed me into speccing shadow *just for a week or two*. I played a game with the guild trying to stay on the top of the healing meters with my new suboptimal spec and see how long it would take folks to notice. (Everything was on farm at that point). 2 weeks later I gave up and just started going shadow form when people complimented me on my healing. That lead to a few smart asses in the guild saying "if you want to dps reroll warlock noob."

2) I rolled a warlock. I still missed my mage, but everyone seemed to think I'd do smashingly well on a warlock... and eh... I was open for suggestion. I logged onto my priest for raids and immediately logged off and shelved her after and before raids and pushed my warlock heavily. Loved the class! Leveling was a pleasure, it was complex and interesting.

My raiding: Wasn't severely impacted. Luckily it was at it's worst when we were farming everything in the game in 3 days, and a half asleep monkey could have healed through it. By the time we opened the gates and got to the stuff that mattered, I'd gotten my warlock to 60 and started taking her to MC alt runs and realized... I HATED RAIDING ON HER. Oh god. It was horrible. I'm an affliction nub at heart. Dots dots and more dots! But there wasn't enough debuff slots for my tastes and I wound up spending most of my time spamming shadow bolt. BUT... with the gear I'd picked up on my priest.. I could do more dps... with fewer debuff slots and a much more affliction-style raiding-friendly play by just going back to my priest. Once I realized that... I was happy as a clam raiding on my priest.

Class change? Nope! I'm actually happier as a priest now than I've ever been. It's a great class and the dual role nature of it (healing/dps) really really suits my interests now that I know what I'm capable of and have had the time to gear out both aspects. My warlock is a pot maker now (although I do expect to level her in expac where affliction got much more love) and I transfered my mage to Skywall when the option became available and I can take a pure dps break whenever I feel like it on either of my alts or just pewpew on Bekah.

The next alt I spend time getting from 1 to 60 will be a warrior so I have the holy trinity available to choose from (and so maybe I can learn something more about tanking), but I find that healing and dps is usually enough to keep me interested, especially with 3 choices of dps classes to play with.

^.^

Rerolling is a fine idea. I went from Mage->Priest->Rogue, raided with the first 2 in different guilds and simply hated it. I enjoy my Rogue completely, there's no other class I'd rather be playing in the content I'm doing (Naxx). I can't even get my Hunter past 47 because it's just boring as all hell.

It's also nice to have different classes laying around. I still pvp heal in group bg's, my mage makes food/water. :)

The biggest problem with my alts is the gear disparity. My priest and mage have UBRS gear and my Rogue is in naxx/aq40 gear. I'm looking forward to the expansion equalizing them so I can play with each again without feeling horribly weak.

I'm playing my mage since release and there's no other class I'd enjoy raiding with but pvping is boring as hell with combustion build :/, I can't login when not raiding because I've got absolutely nothing to do :p
I'm leveling a rogue now and guess I'll take that one to pvp a bit :p

We sort of had a burn-out guild-wide. We were raiding fine, then after killing KT for the first time, everyone had the "game over" feeling; around 5 of our oldtime members quit the game, 5 more went "on a break". We couldn't raid properly for several weeks, with like 14 people coming online for raids, people were fed up with Naxx, or so it seemed. But over time the urge to raid again got stronger and with the help of some recruiting we're raiding fine in Naxx again now. In retrospect I think we might have asked too much from our members those last weeks before killing KT.

As for alts on the same or on different servers, I know there are a lot of people that "would have quit the game a long time ago if it wasn't for their alt". I also expect a lot of people to magically return from their breaks when TBC hits :/

I haven't experienced a burn-out myself yet, nor do I have any alts. Then again I am a rogue, which is considered a "fun" class to play. However I see some people that get bored with the game tend to focus only on raiding, and when raiding goes bad, or is repetitive, the game gets boring for them. I tend to do atleast some PvP on the side, just queueing with randoms in battlegrounds if you will, which, even with my full PvE spec, can be a lot of fun at times.