World PvP was one front. Early on, just winning fights felt good. Then, as I got better, it felt more normal when it was an advantageous matchup for me. But the peak for me was during TBC, I was leveling my rogue and a hunter jumped me as I was mining. This was pretty much a worse case scenario, especially because the hunter was lvl 70 (max at the time) and I was still something like lvl 65. But even at the same level, a) a hunter is a natural counter for a rogue, and b) I was mining so I didn’t even get the stealth advantage.
So there was a lot of dopamine when I ended up getting to finish mining that node and the hunter had to walk back to his corpse after I beat him anyways.
Also a lot of dopamine from finally beating raid bosses that my guild had been stuck on for a long time. Vael in BWL was the peak for that one IIRC.
WoW probably holds the most cases of this for me.
World PvP was one front. Early on, just winning fights felt good. Then, as I got better, it felt more normal when it was an advantageous matchup for me. But the peak for me was during TBC, I was leveling my rogue and a hunter jumped me as I was mining. This was pretty much a worse case scenario, especially because the hunter was lvl 70 (max at the time) and I was still something like lvl 65. But even at the same level, a) a hunter is a natural counter for a rogue, and b) I was mining so I didn’t even get the stealth advantage.
So there was a lot of dopamine when I ended up getting to finish mining that node and the hunter had to walk back to his corpse after I beat him anyways.
Also a lot of dopamine from finally beating raid bosses that my guild had been stuck on for a long time. Vael in BWL was the peak for that one IIRC.