Usually I am nowadays enjoying our tiny little garden instead of playing when the weather is nice. The weather has been nice the last few days 
I’ve done a few dailies with Yashima Wednesday night though and tanked a few trees up in Skettis and fished me some food. I particularly enjoyed the races you can do with the Netherwing when you get to Honored with them. Those are not dailies but rather very unique quests. I wish there would be more unique quests.
I am still selling off most of the stuff I find, like the Shadow Pearl I got for the Fishing daily. So now I have once more made it above the 3k only 1.8k to go if I want to get Thalya her epic flyer.
Lakshmi has made a few levels lately. She finally got both her Third Legs enchanted with Crusader and with Windfury and Stormstrike I am having lots of fun playing her. I am currently on my way to Tanaris and made a stop for a few quests in Feralas. Yesterday she dinged 44 there. After Tanaris I’ll hopefully be able to go to Un’goro. I kind of like the jungle in the crater. The last character I leveled through there was Thalya of course and she has Skinning so it was rather lucrative to kill all the raptors.
Lakshmi’s professions are still a bit low. I just made it past 200 with both Mining and Jewelcrafting. At 44 that is low. She should be past 225 with both in my opinion. But I didn’t have time or gold to spare so far. She still needs tons of Mithril to get both professions to an acceptable level.
I wish I could play her a bit tonight. But the guild has been complaining about there being to few groups for 5-mans lately so if I play tonight I should make nice and tank some stuff for them. Or shouldn’t I? Should I spend my little playtime doing stuff I don’t feel like doing for people who play way more than I do? I often say no and I don’t expect anybody to help my twinks do any instances.
I am one of those solo-players – except when it works out to play together and everybody profits from it I do enjoy grouping a lot. Most often though only half a group really needs to do something and the rest goes along to help. Helping is only profitable on the meta-level of the game and sometimes not even then because it does not always make me feel better to help. Sometimes it just gets on my nerves that I cannot do what I want in that time.
That’s why I like leveling. While you still have experience to gain there is always a bit of profit: experience.
Weird observation: doing Scholomance with my druid solo is profitable. Helping a lowbie with the instance is not. Why is that?
If I go in there with Yashima, she can skip out on the mobs she does not think are profitable. I go straight to the mobs that drop Righteous Orbs. When I am alone all the drops are mine. I collect everything all the junk, cloth and green items. Anything that drops is mine. I get all the boss drops and while I cannot shard them, they still yield a bit of gold in the end.
If I go in with a lowbie, I need to take much greater care with pulls, I cannot skip any mob groups and I have to share the loot. The lowbie will want to do all the bosses and may need to go places I would have skipped. He’ll probably die on some groups and I’ll have to wait for him to continue. I cannot go my own pace and … while he is some help with the mobs surely he is also a burden.
So half the loot and much more stress when helping as opposed to just solo-ing. Why would I do it then? For a nice thanks. Sure. But not all the time and never for strangers.
Sometimes I want to play for my profit! So does probably everyone. You don’t advance in the game if you don’t look after your profits: loot, gold, crafting items – take your pick. Advancement is the core of the game. So if grouping provides less and less advancement the further you get in the game and re-doing stuff you have done before is not profitable at all, why do it?
So it does not come as a surprise that if grouping is only profitable for “fresh” content, for stuff that you have not seen before, that people are mostly not willing to help out on older stuff?
