How to avoid those "What do I do now?" moments

When I started playing WoW, I had one goal: to get to the level cap. I didn't think about why that was my goal or what I would do when I got there; all I knew was that was what I had to do. When I did get there, I had a moment I dreaded having: I thought to myself, "What do I do now?" After messing around in Outland for a while, I decided to make getting epic flight skill my next goal. Getting the Ogri'la dailies made that significantly easier, and though it took a while, I saved up that 5,000 gold. I knew I was going to have another WDIDN moment if I didn't think of something else to do after getting my epic flying skill, so I decided to go for exalted with Netherwing. I thought their mounts were really cool, and I had always heard people talking about how much money one could make with their dailies, so I figured it was a good goal. Well, when I did finally get my Netherwing drake, I had another WDIDN moment. I won't bore you with the continuation of my story. To sum it up, I've had quite a few of those moments where you complete a goal and realize you don't know what to do next. This post is about avoiding them.

The key to preventing a WDIDN moment is rather simple: always have a goal. It helps to have both short term and long term goals, since you may not have enough patience to see your long-term goals to the end if you don't try other things. You could make your long term goal making enough money to buy epic flight or getting one of the meta achievements. With the advent of achievements, nearly everything that you do in the game has a reward. Pet and mount collecters have their own achievements, cooks and fishers get their own titles, and even raiders and PvP'ers can get in on the action. These meta achievements often have their own rewards that make them worth doing, but just doing them is really what makes the game fun.

So, once you have decided on a long-term goal, you need a short-term goal to keep you entertained while trying to achieve that long-term one. These goals could be getting exalted with a certain faction or grinding the materials for a certain item or just doing dailies for money. It helps if your short-term goals help your long term goals. For example, if your goal is to save up enough money for epic flight, you could make a short term goal out of getting exalted with Ebon Blade or the Alliance Vanguard, both of which have dailies that reward a good amount of money. You could also make your short-term goals completely unrelated to your long-term goals if you just need a break. If you are tired of grinding reputation for 40 Exalted Reputations, you could try running a heroic instance for a specific item or doing the daily instance for extra emblems to buy something with those.

Raids and PvP are also good options for things to do. They both give you cooperative experiences that are rarely the same and give good gear to boot, although the gear is really just a side reward. In fact, if you are raiding or PvP'ing on a regular basis, you are much less likely to have a WDIDN moment, so you probably don't need to worry about it. People who mostly do solo content are the ones who are likely to have those moments, so it's them that need to keep goals in mind.

To give you an example of the goal mindset, I'll give you my current goals. I want to eventually save up enough money for the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth. My main method of doing this is dailies, but just to keep me from being bored as I do those dailies, I'm also saving up Champion's Seals. I was collecting them for the pets at first (I did use them to upgrade my weapons, so the pets were my secondary goal), since I am an avid pet collector, but with the promise of new items for people with the crusader rank in patch 3.2, I decided to save them up instead. I'm also doing the fishing dailies in hopes of getting the Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat. I enjoy fishing a lot, especially now that it is a great source of raid food, so the hat would be a big help.

As you can see, for some, goals are really about biding your time between raids or battleground or arena battles. They give you something to do when you aren't working toward a common goal with other people. And if you don't enjoy any of the above activities, then goals are really what it's all about for you. After all, if you aren't helping others succeed, you'll only find satisfaction in your own success, so you need to create that feeling of success.