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Since Warlords of Draenor I’ve been playing World of Warcraft once again. For the expansion I made a paladin, got it to level 90 with the free boost and started leveling on Draenor. Now, I’m somewhat of a lore-geek so I decided to do all quests (including reading them all, so I knew what was going on), while not doing any dungeons. My thought process behind this was that doing a dungeon would mess with my leveling curve and cause me to eventually outlevel the zones before finishing them. I figured I could always do the dungeons later at level 100, either in normal or heroic.

No, not that kind of ladder, you sillyhead :3

The basic idea worked pretty well. I didn’t outlevel the zones much, even though I did some bonus objectives (until I realised just how much experience they gave ^_~). But there was one major flaw in that plan: I had no idea of how to do any of the new dungeons. I didn’t know where to go once inside a dungeon, I didn’t know any trash mechanics, and I didn’t know any boss tactics :(

I reached level 100, still having fun questing in Nagrand and managing my garrison, and I didn’t feel any need to go into a dungeon. However, this couldn’t go on forever, and soon enough things got kinda boring. Then these thoughts hit me. I didn’t know my way around any of the dungeons. I felt like a burden, even though I hadn’t played with any other players yet. I didn’t want to go through the dungeons because of this... And that’s when it hit me: Once again, I had ladder anxiety :(

What is ladder anxiety?

Ladder anxiety is a condition that cause people to be hesitant toward playing parts of a game where there’s competition and a ranking system. Because of the ranking system, such as a ladder, people can become very anxious when playing a game such as StarCraft II or League of Legends. The anxiety can occur if, for example, a person is afraid to lose his/her rank.

Okay, so it might not be the best term for how I felt, because there’s not a ladder or ranking system coming into play when talking about dungeons in WoW. However, I’m using the term because I have diagnosed myself with it before and the feelings were about same.

I used to play League of Legends at a good enough level to get Gold-rank and stopped whenever I reached that rank. Gold meant that I was more skilled than the majority of players, and I could get the end-of-season skin reward. But why did I stop the minute I reached gold? Well, whenever I queued up for a ranked match in LoL I would start to shake a bit and sweat heavily. It wasn’t very pleasant, even when things were going great and I won games. But I wanted to prove to myself and others that I was good enough for gold.

I haven't played LoL in a while, so this is the only proof of my glorious ranked career :P