Hi.
(Sorry for the long text, skip to TLDR if you don't feel like reading the intro.)
I am a solo player (it's pretty standard - I have nothing against groups, but have to be able to stop playing and go offline at every minute due to real life priorities such as work and family).
I also am a completionist, so for a long time I was seriously bothered by the fact that so much of WoW short-circuits into group content. I have to set a goal for myself and then work towards that goal, this is just how my mind works. Regretfully, with WoW I find that goals like "get _all_ achievements" or, say, "get _all_ mounts" -- which are juiciest to a completionist, because they have the word "all" in them! -- don't work, since all such things eventually lead to current raids, which aren't soloable.
I looked around, tried other games, but... WoW seems to have made me immune to everything else. :-)
So, that was kind of a tough catch. I was oscillating between "but I can't play WoW, because I can never complete anything in there" and "but I can't play anything else, because that's not WoW [followed by lots of rationalizing, like - not enough quests, combat not responsive enough, etc]". Some of you might have been in the same kind of state.
Then it occured to me that maybe my biggest problem in WoW and the reason for saying that I can never complete anything in there, is that I simply limit the range of acceptable goals to traditional goals, most of which are coming straight from the in-game achievements dialog. There is nothing stopping me from defining my own set of goals, completely orthogonal to the traditional ones, and perhaps that set could be both soloable and interesting.
--- TLDR ---
So, I have been looking for such a good set of goals for solo play. Obviously, I can do, and have already done -- all quests, all soloable instances and raids, all soloable reputations (99% of them), lots of pets and mounts, lots of PVP achievements on BGs. I do these things every expansion, and obviously I will continue doing them, that's good content. The problem is that even playing casually I am running out of such traditional solo content quite quickly (I'd say solo content is just about 30-35% of all content now, the rest is raids), so what I need is something beyond that, something which I could use as my solo _endgame_. Some of my ideas for what that could be:
(a) keep one char of every class, when new expansion comes, bump all chars to the new max level and try getting the best gear that can be obtained solo (ok, add some LFG and scenarios, maaaaaaybe LFR, but that's likely too much time for too little),
(b) keep all professions, when new expansion comes, level all professions to the new max level, chase all new recipes,
(c) max gold, farm materials, find sweet spots in professions, camp the AH -- might run into big problems with AH bots though.
Anyone played like that? Was it good / boring / something else? Any other ideas for a solo endgame? I'd appreciate your thoughts and experiences.
Thank you.