Buying items

I saw a Glowing Brightwood Staff for 400 gold bid, no buyout, medium duration, no apparent bidder on the auction house. This staff usually costs around 700 gold, so it would have been an opportunity to replace my priests much less good Sarah's Guide. My characters on Runetotem all together have about 600 gold, so I could have afforded the staff. But after some consideration I decided not to buy it. The reason was that I had the impression that buying the staff would diminish my fun.

Kyroc, my priest, is level 60 and thus will not gain any more levels before the Burning Crusade expansion comes out. The only way to have character development, to make my character stronger, is improving my equipment. But what is the purpose of making my character stronger? The purpose would be the ability to overcome even bigger challenges, get even better gear, and make my character stronger again. It's circular, I make my character stronger so that I can make him stronger.

Buying an epic item from the auction house is taking a shortcut on this route. It doesn't matter whether you earn the money by farming, questing, and trading, or whether you buy it from EBay or some gold farming company. If I bought the Glowing Brightwood Staff, the next couple of staves I find in dungeons, or earn with quests, become a source of frustration instead of joy, just disenchant fodder. You always compare what you get with what you have, and the better stuff you have, the less likely it becomes that you'll be able to improve it. My current staff is from a quest, and there is another quest line in the plaguelands that will give me a better staff. Earning a quest reward I can use is fun. Buying is a lot less fun, and it would prevent me from having the fun of earning my equipment. I only spend gold for equipment on twinks, because twinking speeds up leveling.

If tomorrow the Glowing Brightwood Staff would drop for me in a dungeon, I would be ecstatic. What a luck, what a joy! If I first bought the thing, and *then* it would drop, and I'd resell it for the same amount gold, the fun would be a lot less, even if the final result would be identical.