Since all the cool kids are doing it, I decided to jump on the Account Played bandwagon. This is a simple World of Warcraft addon that adds up all your time played across your account and puts it into a handy graph, broken down by class.

This is mostly in the ballpark of what I would have expected with a few notable exceptions.

It’s wild to me that mage is still in second place. My mage was my original main, but his playtime dropped off heavily in Cataclysm, ultimately leading me to stop playing him for most of my WoW career. I’ve only picked him for light play in Legion and War Within.

Monk is also a fair bit lower than I expected. I’ve given Nisa roughly equal attention as my warlock and rogue, and I also have a few other monks that I’ve sunk a not insignificant amount of time into. I do have a few other rogues and warlocks as well, but there’s no doubt Mai and Doro make up the vast majority of the time shown for those two classes.

Shaman being so much higher than death knight and demon hunter is also a little unexpected. That’s almost entirely on the basis of my old Orc shaman from the back in the day. Also would have expected demon hunter to be a little higher in general.

My main takeaway from this is that I played a lot more WoW when I was younger. It’s very clear that what I played in Wrath and Cataclysm still has a massive influence on the overall numbers. In Wrath, I played my mage and rogue far more than anything else, and in Cata those were joined by a paladin and a warlock, and those four classes are still topping the charts by miles.

I’m quite confident that I have played my monk at least as much as my rogue and warlock on average since she was created, but because she didn’t come along until Pandaria, that class still lags far behind the top four.

I’d like to say this is because I grew up, got adult responsibilities, and didn’t have as much time for video games, but honestly I think it’s not as much about playing less as it is about just playing WoW less. Back in the Wrath and Cata era, I played almost exclusively WoW and nothing else. Now it’s just one game among many.

Let’s try not to think about the implications of that “5,851 hours” total. There is a fairly credible chance that is more than my play time in all other MMORPGs combined.