Category Archives: Blogging

A Blogging GM

Posted on June 5, 2013 | 6 Comments

Sometimes I wish I had made this blog anonymous. Since becoming GM of my guild, this wish has become even stronger.

I struggle with knowing how much guild-related stuff is appropriate to share on this blog. Generally I’m not a proponent of airing private guild matters, especially contentious ones, in public. But sometimes I just want to vent, seek outside opinions, or share things that I found amusing and think other people would get a kick out of.

I have talked about troublesome guild-related things a few times in the past, but I try to do it without naming names or getting into too many details. I also try to turn it into a broad discussion of an issue that others will relate to rather than just complain “these people are unappreciative and their whining angers me!” Occasionally someone is such a douche that any reservations I have about spilling all the gory details fly out the window, but I’ve only been driven to that point once.

One of my favourite things about blogging is getting comments and perspectives from others about things that I’m dealing with in game. As a GM, there are a ton of decisions to make and things to deal with that I’d like to hear others opinions on. However, I also feel that protecting my guild/guildmates’ privacy is more important than having a place to vent or soliciting advice and opinions.

Is there a happy medium? Obviously I’m not going to share things people have told me in private on this blog (or anywhere). But what about events that happen in guild that I’d like a second opinion on? I can try to make things sound general, but anyone who can put two and two together is going to know where my most of my issues or questions are coming from.

Is it appropriate to share specific issues that have come up in guild with anyone who wants to read them?

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Posted in Blogging, Guilds

Tagged GM, guilds

Three Years

Posted on December 30, 2012 | 6 Comments

It’s that time again. With the holidays comes yet another blogging anniversary. I’ve now been at this for 3 years. I usually take this time to talk a bit about how many posts I’ve written and comments I’ve received throughout the year. This year, WordPress has done it for me (isn’t that nice?).

I certainly got a lot more visits than I did in previous years, though my rate of posting was a little slow this year with only 51 new posts. You’d think since I was unemployed for 10 months I’d have all the time in the world to write blog posts, but with a great amount of spare time came a great lack of motivation.

Judging by my most visited posts this year and the search terms people find me with most often, Druids really like their gear lists! To be completely honest, gear is my least favourite thing to write about, but I’m happy people find those posts useful.

Next year I hope to pick up my posting pace a little and try to write at least a post a week. I want to update my World of Logs guides for healers early in the new year (maybe if I say that out loud I’ll be more likely to do it). I’m also hoping to broaden my horizons a little bit and write about topics not confined to Druids.

In game, I’ve had a good year. There are two things I’m particularly proud of. First, I think Apotheosis (we’re recruiting!) has done really well so far this expansion. Our raid team leveled quickly, even getting some realm firsts along the way, and aside from a couple bosses that gave us more problems than they should have, I think we’ve been progressing at a good pace. On November 29th we completed all normal mode raid content and since then have killed 3 heroic modes. I’m very proud of my guild. Good job team

I’m also really pleased that my challenge mode team was able to get Golds in all of the Challenge Modes, which got me my one and only server first Feat of Strength, a cool mount and the best transmog armor ever. They were also a lot of fun to do.

Thank you to everyone who has read my blog, left me a comment, shared a post or talked about Druids with me on Twitter. That’s a big part of why I’ve been doing this for as long as I have.

Here’s to a great 2013, with more boss kills, more blog posts and less unemployment.

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Posted in Achievements, Blogging, Update

Tagged apotheosis, blogging, challenge modes

Bad Habits and Flaws

Posted on June 7, 2012 | 4 Comments

This is Day 11 of the 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge.

Since things in WoW are pretty slow right now, I thought I’d go back to Saga’s blogging challenge that I started waaaay back in November.

My biggest WoW-related flaw is that I have a tendency to get distracted by certain events in raids.

What events? People dying. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when the death is unexpected, or completely avoidable I sometimes find myself pausing and then I’m more likely to stand in bad things myself. It goes something like this:

Player X gets hit by a Lava Wave and gets knocked off Ragnaros’ platform.
I say something along the lines of “Did that person really just get knocked off the platform? Are you serious!?!” (insert a number of extra four-letter words into that).
I’m too busy hurling curses at my monitor that I don’t see the Magma Trap spawn under me and pop goes the Druid.

Related to this problem, I also get distracted when I have to battle rez someone. I’m usually pretty raid aware, but when I have to resurrect someone during a fight my chance of standing in bad goes up by 432%. This flaw was the worst on fights like Alysrazor – there was always a Lava Spew or a Brush Fire around to catch me while I was running towards the corpse I needed to rez.

Luckily, I think I’ve improved on this front in Dragon Soul, but I still have the occasional special moment where my eagerness to bring someone back from the dead clouds my awareness of what’s going on in the fight. The most recent example I can think of was on Spine. My partner resto Druid got eaten by a mob and the RL called for me to rez her. So I stood in the middle of Deathwings’s back and rezzed – right as he was rolling – and flew off his back. On the bright side, I got a much better view of the fight from where I ended up.

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Posted in Blogging

Tagged 20 days, battle rez, flaws

Six

Posted on February 22, 2012 | 5 Comments

There’s a new meme floating around the WoW blogosphere. This one originates from Gnomageddon. I was tagged by both Glow and Chatmay.

The challenge:

Go into your image folder.
Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
Publish the image! (And a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couldn’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own.)
Challenge six new bloggers.
Link to them.

Unfortunately, my image and screenshot folders are scattered throughout my C drive in no discernible order. So I went through a couple folders.

In my WoW screenshot folder, the sixth image is this:

I took this while I was doing the Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest. I was trying to get it done before it was removed from the game, but alas, I wasn’t able to. I did get fairly far. I finished the quests for the Blue and Green Dragonflights, but never finished the Red. It was a very cool questline and I’m sorry I never got to see the end of it.

In one of my other image folders this was the 6th image in the 6th subfolder:

My kitties Poor Max just wants to have a nap in his hammock and Charlie decides he wants to nap there too. At least they’re good at sharing.

Now I need to tag six people. (As a side note, 6 is a lot! Wouldn’t a 3s meme made more sense?)

I’m tagging my guildmates:

Arolaide
Jacklalanne
Kaleri
Kurnmogh
Srsbusiness
Tikari

It’s very cool to be in a guild with so many bloggers. They just need to write more often. /glare

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Posted in Blogging, Fun, Link Love, Screenshots, Shared Topic

Tagged link love, screenshots, sixes

Still Here

Posted on January 28, 2012 | 3 Comments

I’ve been seriously slacking in the post writing department over the last little while. I’m still here! Things have been a little hectic for me – I’ve been spending a lot of time looking for a new job, looking at real estate and I’ve had some new things happen in-game too.

I hope things settle down soon and I get back into the right mindset to write. I do have a couple of things sitting in my draft folder, including a look at Bear tanks on WoL (another guest post), some UI stuff and information on healing Heroic Hagara.

But in the meantime, the fabulous Navimie from The Daily Frostwolf had her 2-year blogiversary not too long ago and was nice enough to write something as gifts for her readers. She wrote me a nice poem which made me feel all warm and fuzzy and I thought I’d share.

Ode to Jasyla

This one druid blog called Cannot be Tamed
Is also about hunters, or so it is claimed
If raiding as resto is your thing to do
Jasyla has great words of wisdom for you.

Gear lists and healing and boss fights galore
Add ons and haste points – do you really need more?
If World of Logs charts are confusing as hell
Jasyla’s got posts on how to read those charts well.

Good ol’ Jasyla’s a community leader
You should see all the blogs she’s got in her reader
She blogs and she tweets with a wine glass in hand
As she imparts her knowledge of raids 25 manned.

So pop in and read her, and soon you will see
How to be a great druid, and heal well in tree
Thank you Jasyla for taking the time
To visit my site, hope you liked the rhyme!

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Posted in Blogging, Update

Tagged poem, update

Two Years

Posted on December 30, 2011 | 11 Comments

Two years ago today I was sitting at my desk at work, exactly where I’m sitting now, and I decided to start this blog.

Over those two years I’ve written 260 posts, received 1,885 comments and somewhere in the vicinity of 200,000 visits.

This has been a great year for my blog, even better than the first. I’ve gotten new readers, people are commenting more and I became really involved with the WoW community on Twitter which has brought me all kinds of information and amusement.

I was looking through my blog posts from this year and there are actually a lot of them that I’m quite happy with and proud of. Here are a few of my favorite posts from 2011:

1. Have heals become too smart?
When I wrote this post I was sick of seeing my healing meters being dominated by Wild Growth. It’s not that I don’t like Wild Growth, it’s just too easy to use. It gives huge healing for very little effort. My problem wasn’t just about the nature these seemingly OP AoE spells but also about the nature of boss fights in Cataclysm. There are so many fights where everyone is stacked up on top of each other and raid damage is constant that casting Wild Growth (or Holy Radiance, Circle of Healing and Healing Rain) on cooldown is almost always the right thing to do. I wrote this post back in Tier 11 but this (in my mind anyway) continues to be a problem in Tier 13 as well. One of my favorite things about this post was that almost all my commenters disagreed with me. Some even had concerns that if too many people expressed these kinds of opinions about spells like Wild Growth they would be nerfed…oops.

2. Moonglow vs. Furor
This was one of my first real attempts at trying to do a mathematical comparison of two talents myself. The moonglow vs. furor question is asked often but I found that the answers given were never satisfactory. They were either a short, “x is better than y” answer with no explanation, or they’d cite some complex formula that went right over my head. I did a lot of work using real logs to determine spell usage and how the two talents would compare and hopefully made the issue a little easier for people to understand.

3. Raids – Business or Personal?
When I wrote this post I was frustrated. The night before I had been in a raid where people just weren’t performing as well as they should have been. It made me think about what I want from a raid group and how I think raids should be run. The best part of this post was the comments. It was really great to have so many people offer their thoughts on the issue and help give me a better perspective.

4. To the Ground
Another post written while I was very frustrated. When the blanket nerfs to Firelands were announced I felt a little robbed and very discouraged at the progression (lack of progression, actually) my guilds had made before they happened. The reason this is one of my favorite posts is completely self-indulgent. 56 comments! That’s the most I’ve ever gotten on a post. I felt as popular as Beru for a second.

5. Heal Sniping and Meter Padding
One week in August I kept seeing posts that mentioned heal sniping. Posts on small blogs and big websites. Posts that condemned the practice and posts that encouraged it. I felt the need to speak up about how stupid I thought the whole concept was. I had a lot of fun writing this post, and arguing with people who continued to dwell on the term.

6. What’s Wrong with this Picture?
I usually shy away from issues like sexism in video games, but after seeing Blizzard’s leader portrait of Tyrande Whisperwind, I needed to say something. This post let me vent some frustration and be snarky (two of my favourite things!). I also really enjoyed all the discussions I got to have with people in the comments.

Looking back at my favourite posts of the year, I’m reminded of two things. First, being frustrated is great for my writing. And second, I love everyone who comments here (or on Twitter). Being able to have discussions, agree, disagree and be forced to think of things in different ways is my favourite part of blogging. So to everyone who has commented, thank you. This wouldn’t be nearly as fun without you.

Here’s to year three.

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Posted in Achievements, Blogging, Update

Tagged 2 years, favorites, link love

Ten Things You Don’t Know About Me

Posted on December 9, 2011 | 13 Comments

This is Day 8 of the 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge.

This one is tough…hard to think of 10 things that most people don’t already know about me that I want to share. Here goes.

1. I’m an only child. Sometimes I loved it, because I got spoiled; sometimes it was a little lonely.

2. I used to be a blonde. I’m definitely not blonde anymore.

I seem unsure about why this boy is kissing me.

3. I worked in the game industry for a little while, in QA. When I first got the job, I thought it was amazing. Getting paid to play video games? Sign me up. But it wasn’t all that great. The games I tested…they were bad. I got to play games like Warpath (a Halo knock-off), Land of the Dead (based on the movie), Playboy: The Mansion (The Sims with boobs – I actually kind of liked testing this one) and the bane of my tester existence, WWII Combat: Iwo Jima. Ugh, that game was so bad (really, read a review if you don’t believe me). What made it worse was that we’d often spend a week testing a single build when we were used to getting new builds every day. I’d often just flat-out refuse to continue to play it and instead go through the bug tracker and point out terrible spelling and grammar in the other testers’ bugs. As you can probably guess, I made a lot of friends this way.

4. I always ask for the same thing when anyone asks me what I want for Christmas or my birthday: a pony. I’ve yet to receive one.

5. I was an offensive backfield coach for my high school’s football team. I ran drills during practice and sometimes called plays during games. I also kept track of player stats. It was a lot of fun. I was never big on playing sports myself, but I was all for telling football players what to do.

6. I like things to be in order. My movie collection and library are organized alphabetically. The clothes in my closet are sorted by colour. I’ve been known to reorganize the shelves in bookstores if I find something out-of-place. This is likely related to number 7.

7. My first job was at Chapters (a Canadian bookstore). I worked there for 4 years. I loved working with books and seeing all the new titles coming out. My customer service on the other hand, was hit and miss. I could be the best employee ever and make all the customers love me, but I could also be downright mean to the rude customers (no, the customer is not always right). I used to do things like announce over the store intercom that people should put their books back where they found them if they weren’t going to buy them rather than leave them in giant pile near Starbucks. Luckily, my managers loved me, so I could get away with that kind of thing

8. I’ve been fired from one job – when I was 2 years old. I was booked for a Pampers commercial, though I no longer wore them. As soon as the camera started rolling I’d tear off my diaper and proclaim “I hate Pampers!” My mom pleaded with me and tried to bribe me to pretend I liked them for a couple minutes, but I held to my convictions. That put at end to my acting career (though I was in a Mr. Christie cookie commercial previously – I had no problem eating cookies on camera).

9. I love games. Any games. Video games (I’m sure you knew that one), card games, board games. My dad taught me how to play poker, euchre, thousand and cribbage by the time I was about 8 and we used to play them all the time (also Risk and chess – two games which I never, ever managed to beat him at). In high school I played cards every day at lunch – usually hearts.

10. I have a single tattoo. I got it when I was 19. If you know what it is, you win my respect. My tattoo