What’s Been and What’s Coming

The (recent) past:

I’ve been grinding along in game.  No new posts recently because nothing interesting has happened since the fun little questline early on the path to the legendary daggers.

For what its worth, I am just 1/3 of the way done with the Dragon Soul collection quest, Cluster Clutch.  Since this is the last raid in the expansion, and I expect interest in WoW to gradually wane as people get bored with this content, it seems reasonable to me that I will not have a shot at getting the legendary daggers.  I simply won’t be able to run DS enough to get through the two collection quests.  This is as I expected.  In general, casual raiding guilds just don’t kill enough bosses to get the legendaries.

I spend most of my time working on gold making.  I’m just about to hit 500,000 gold, which was my goal.  The gem market has bottomed out because people aren’t getting much new gear anymore.  As the lull between now and MoP stretches out, more people will play alts so I’ll always have the glyph market to rely on, but I don’t think I’ll be raking in the gold any more until we see pandas.

The (near) future:

My guild is 5/8 in DS on 10 man normal.  Blizzard announced that DS will be gradually nerfed, so we’ll get through the rest one way or another, either pre-nerf or post-nerf.  After that happens, it would not surprise me at all to see some of our long-time players drift away from the game.  Its sad, but its life.

This blog will probably continue the zombie-life that it has.  I made only 58 posts in 2011, and considering the new raids and such that really is not very many.  With the homogenizing of the game, there is very little rogue-specific information for me to convey.  Between the Dungeon Journal and LFR in game, there is less need than ever to tab out of the game and find information.  What information is needed is covered nicely by Elitist Jerks.

I’m keeping the blog alive so that it can return as a valued source of information when Mists of Pandaria hits.  I did the one-year commitment, so I’ll still be around.

Besides, I’d like to see the blog hit 1,000,000 pageviews (not counting feedreaders) and that will happen in another couple of months.

Dinaer casts Mass Resurrection on “Forever a Noob”

Its been over a month since I posted anything here.

Its not that I went away or stopped playing.  It was really two things…

• Demands on my real-life time were so great that I barely had time to play the game, and never has a moment to write about it
• I used to write some posts during down time at work, but my schedule this year has prevented that
• There has been nothing compelling going on in the game that has me excited enough to write about

I’ve been playing the game about 3-4 nights a week (down from 6-7), mostly just logging on to raid, and then logging off after the raid had completed.  I was tired of the troll heroics and had nothing to gain by accumulating JP and VP.

My guild has continued to raid.  We just killed Ragnaros (10 man, normal) this week, which was a great achievement for us.  The guild has two raid groups going.  My group is moving on to Dragon Soul now, and the other is still finishing Firelands.  We didn’t manage to get the caster legendary staff from Firelands yet, but we’re going to continue working on it (we’ve never gotten a legendary while it was current content, so the fact that we’re close is exciting).

I won’t be playing SWTOR.  A lot of my guildies will, so my fingers are crossed that we don’t lose them.

The only non-raiding activity that was really keeping my interest was making gold.  I’ve had a glyph business since Wrath, but I have been slowly ramping up my JC/Enchanting activity.  I did a lot of work to prepare for patch 4.3, and I’ll probably pull in almost 100k in the span of the week following the patch.  I’m at over 300k gold now.  Go for a million?  Probably not, unless the next expansion offers some exciting new markets.

Patch 4.3 has brought new attention on rogues due to the presence of the Rogue legendary daggers available in Dragon Soul.  A lot of people have rolled rogues lately, so there are a lot of new backstabbers trying to learn the craft.  Also, there are a lot of experienced rogues aiming for those daggers.  Those are the issues which have brought me back to the blog.  I’ll try to post more… at least during the lull in school/band/little league baseball seasons while I have some free time.

 

What are the oldest WoW blogs left around?

We’ve seen a wave of notable WoW bloggers hanging up their keyboards lately.  It got me to thinking – how many old WoW blogs are still left around?

Playing WoW in the early days was quite a different experience than it is now.  There were not countless online information sources for you to browse through to learn every little detail about the game.  Your information came from Thottbot, or maybe Allakazam.  Wowhead came much later.  There were almost no YouTube videos.  There was no accessible Elitist Jerks forum.  If you wanted to learn about your class or a raid boss, your best bet was to read blogs.

WoWInsider goes back to November of 2005, so its the grandfather of WoW blogs.  However, none of the original authors are still with them.  Their structure makes it so they can be continuous even with frequent writer turnover.  Tobold goes back even farther but his blog is not just a WoW blog.  There was a huge surge in the number of personal WoW blogs in 2007, which is when I discovered the expansive depth of the WoW blogosphere.

I remember the first few blogs I encountered and read by in my early days of WoW – Resto4Life, Parry! Dodge! Spin!, BigRedKitty, and Frostbolt.  All  of those have long since shut down.  However, Frostbolt is still viewable, even though it is not being updated.  I started my historical research project there – looking through antiquated evidence on the corpses of dead blogs.  I decided to check out Frostbolt’s blogroll.  It is still listing the blogs that he read back in those days.

I went down his list of blogs, and the only two that were listed there that are still posting now are Kinless’ Chronicles and Gray Matter.  Kinless has switched to Rift.  Does that mean that Gray Matter is the oldest from the wave of early WoW blogs?  His archives go back to September 2007.

On a hunch I went to check Big Bear Butt.  I know I’ve been reading his stuff for a long while.  His archives go back to August 2007, so he started just before Gray Matter.  Maybe his is the oldest personal WoW blog still running.

Looking further, I found that one of my favorite bits of WoW entertainment, Need More Rage, has posts going to July 2007.  Could this be the oldest active WoW blog?

Nope.  Checking around some more, I found that Mania’s Arcania has posts going back to April 2007.  Mystic Chicanery has posts from February 2007.  Leafshine goes back even farther – to January 2007.

Kaliope’s WoW Crafting Blog goes all the way to November 2006.  I remember reading that blog when I first disocovered online WoW research tools.  I was kind of surprised to see it still up and running.  I know that WoWHead has satisfied all of my crafting research needs.  Its neat that she has kept her niche in the online community.

After lots of browsing around, the longest-running personal WoW blog that I could find is Blessing of Kings.  Coriel started the blog in December 2005 and has continued to post regularly until now.  That’s a pretty amazing feat of longevity, especially when you consider that the focus and high level of content has not diminished in all that time.

Have I missed any?  Are there any that have been around longer than Blessing of Kings?

Milestone and some history

I never got into blogging to get lots of pageviews.  Yes, its nice when people want to read what I have to say, but sheer numbers are not a priority.  I never installed Google Analytics, I have no idea how many people read the blog in a feed reader.  Its nice information, but its not my main focus.  The only statistic I have is the view counter that’s build into wordpress.com.  Is that accurate?  Beats me.

For what its worth, it hit 500,000 views last week.  That’s pretty cool.

I’ve been playing since March 2006.  I started reading WoW blogs after a little more than a year of playing – sometime in late 2007.  I started the Forever a Noob blog in January 2008.  Back then, there were very few WoW blogs (mostly druid blogs, as I remember) and the math of WoW wasn’t as widely known.  It was all there in WoWWiki for anyone who took the time to research it, so there was a niche for new bloggers who wanted to collect and disseminate all that information for the masses.

In its first month the blog had 39 views, almost all from Valenna at the defunct Parry! Dodge! Spin! rogue blog.  My first post that got some attention was discussion about playing WoW with your spouse.  The first time I got linked by numerous other blogs was when I observed that PvP realms were lagging in progress on the Quel’Danas dailies.  What really launched this blog, though, were my Karazhan guides for rogues.  Those remain some of my all-time most viewed posts.  They later inspired me to do Naxx guides (also very popular), Ulduar guides, and ICC guides (still unfinished).

My all-time most popular post, which still gets over 100 hits a day, is my explanation of hit rating in WotLK.  That one post has had more than 50,000 views.

Since I’m traveling down memory lane, here are some screenshots of my playing days.  Unfortunately, I didn’t discover the screenshot function until 2007 – almost a year after I started playing.  My first screenshots are just before BC dropped, so I don’t have any shots of my first 60 levels.

The first screenshot I have saved is this…

For those who don’t know, that’s a 40-man world boss that is summoned as part of a Silithus questline.  Someone in our guild found him in the desert, and we gathered a whole bunch of us to try to fight him, and failed miserably.  It was the first big “event” that had happened after I joined my first guild, and it was a blast.

A huge event was the opening of the Dark Portal when BC was released.  For the days just before and right after the opening, the space in front of the Portal was a huge world PvP free-for all.

Here’s an early shot of me and my wife while leveling in Zangarmarsh.  I like the way we are looking at each other.

Here’s me standing over the corpse of Grandmaster Vorpil in Shadow Lab.  I’m pretty sure that no one leveling now even sees Shadow Lab.  If you’ve never been in Shadow Lab – imagine an instance (not a raid) that could take upward of 5 hours to complete, with bosses that challenged even pretty well-geared groups.  And that’s on regular, not heroic.  Vorpil was our bane back in the day.

This next shot is our first ever pull in Karazhan.  This followed a night of drama, as picking the 10 who would go into our first raid caused some ruffled feathers and eventually a split in the guild.  Unlike Wrath raids, Karazhan was a challenge right from the start.  On our first night of raiding we never even made it to the first boss.  It took months of raiding to progress through Karazhan.

After the first foray into Karazhan, I got pretty heavily into raiding, so most of my screenshots are of boss kills.  I won’t include those.

My last screenshot is a little more recent.  This is the world event in Stormwind just before WotLK, where the new SW harbor was opened up and attacked by the Lich King’s forces.

This is a good reminder for those who are new to WoW that Blizzard does fascinating lore events leading up to new expansions.  They did it for BC and Wrath, and I expect something equally cool for Cataclysm.

Thanks to everyone who has read my blog.  I’ll keep it up if you keep reading.

Happy Trails, Zaltu

Its a sad day when a blogger hangs it up.  I want to salute Zaltu for his contribution to roguecraft through his blog, One Rogue’s Journey.  He’s announced his retirement from the blog and WoW.

When I started blogging a couple of years ago there were very few active rogue blogs.  The only one I knew of at that time was Parry, Dodge, Spin! (that blog is still there, but Valenna hasn’t posted since last December)

Over the past year a number of rogues have added their voices to the internet, and its been a great exchange of thoughts and ideas.  Zaltu, through his entertaining writing style and his contributions to Big Hit Box, became one of the more visible rogue writers.  Now that he is giving up the blog and the game, his insights will be missed as we go into the new patch and then Cataclysm.

/salute

One Year and Counting

I started this blog on January 25, 2008… just over a year ago.

The first comment came about a week later, written by Valenna on my post about playing WoW with your spouse. Valenna gave me a lot of great advice on blogging, and helped inspire me to continue past that first month.

Two days ago, on January 27, 2009, just past its one year anniversary, the blog got its 100,000th page view.

Thanks to those who have followed along with the tales of my rogue, my alts, my guild, and my thoughts on the game. I hope to continue this for a long time to come.

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Forever a Noob Facts…

There have been 203 total posts, at an average of 3.9 posts per week. There have been 577 comments left.

The most popular post in the past year (by far) was A Rogue’s Guide to Karazhan, and all of the follow up posts associated with that. When raiding was harder, a lot of people went to the internet to learn fight strategies and get advice.

The most viewed posts more recently have been Mutilate Build in the Patch and WotLK and Hit Rating for Rogues in Wrath. Clearly, in the expansion rogues were looking for a variety of opinions about their new talent trees, new abilities, and changes in the number crunching. Rogues min/max more than any other class, and I’m glad that I was able to clarify some of that.

Happy raiding to you rogues and non-rogues. Let’s hope we have a great 2009 in Northrend.

Blocked!

As of today I can no longer access my blog from work, as it has been blocked by Websense. I do most of my blogging during breaks at work, so this is a problem.

I won’t use a proxy because my administration has threatened severe action against anyone who does so. That leaves me either blogging from home in the evenings or trying to move the site to a new domain that isn’t blocked.

Its possible that my already unpredictable postings will be a little less common while I work this out.

Guild Alliance: first impression

In my previous post I said that we were planning to do a joint Kara run with another guild. That happened this weekend, but not without some stops and starts. In the end it was a successful endeavor.

First, we had trouble agreeing on a raid time on Friday evening. They wanted an earlier time, whereas we are used to slightly later starts. So we compromised on about 8:00 server time (9:00 local for me). We were bringing four players and they were bringing six. That seemed like it would work

At the agreed-upon time, my four players were online and ready to go, with three of us waiting outside Karazhan to start summoning. No sign of any of the other guild. It turns out that their healer had not logged on yet so we were on hold.

Over an hour and a half later, their healer finally logged on. Unfortunately, by that time a number of their members had started to run heroic Sethekk Halls, and now they wanted to finish that. So the raid was called. This gave us a bad first impression, and we were a little shaky about the whole thing, especially since our druid has spent 25g to respec to boomkin for the run. However, the officer from the other guild assured me that we would be able to do the run on Saturday evening instead.

So on Saturday evening they contacted us and said that we would run at 10:00 server (11:00 local for me). That’s pretty late, but fortunately my kids typically allow me to sleep late on Sunday mornings.

This time it started smoothly on time. We were all summoned, went in and went to work. From a gaming perspective, it was a good run. We did quick one-shots of Curator and Illhoof, then wiped twice on Shade before taking him down. We had some trouble coordinating our placement on Prince, but finally got him down as well.

I think we made a good showing on the run. Our hunter had his best dps night ever. He and I were #2 and 4 on the damage meters for the run (they had an enhancement shaman that did insane damage!). As a rogue I always have a hard time keeping up with BM hunters, and this time I also fell behind a MM hunter in full Gladiator PvP gear. However, if we take away the first attempt on Shade where I died in about 10 seconds (noob mistake!!!) then he and I were almost even.

Our resto druid was amazing. We did the run with only 2 healers (plus a shadow priest using Vampiric Embrace) and the healing was never an issue. She said that she never even came close to running out of mana. I didn’t think we’d be able to do Prince with only two healers.

From a non-gaming perspective it was a little uncomfortable. They seem like nice people, and you could tell that they probably joke around a bit normally. But since we were all strangers on Vent the run was pretty quiet. It was an uncomfortable silence at times. I would think of something funny to say, but not say it because I didn’t want to come off as a goof if they were not a goof-loving guild. By the same token, their guys would occasionally swear in Vent, and they were probably uncomfortable because they didn’t know if we were a PG-13 guild. So the run was mostly quiet.

Also, we made off with a load of loot. Specifically, our hunter, who had always had terrible luck on Kara drops, got three upgrades. He took Girdle of the Prowler from Illhoof, his T4 gloves from Curator, and the Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix from Prince. It was such a good loot night for him that he refused to roll on the T4 helm that Prince dropped, since we didn’t want to come off as loot whores.

Hopefully they were impressed enough to invite us back. We didn’t even have our best dps player with us (SV/BM hunter) or our two Kara-geared tanks (Prot Warrior, Feral Druid). Their guild is almost ready for Gruul’s so if we continue to put our best foot forward there may be a 25-man raid in our future.

Thanks for the links

I would like to thank Valenna, Phaelia, and BRK for linking to my site over the past couple of weeks. I had been reading their blogs (and others) for a long time before I ever decided to start one myself. Being acknowledged by them (and others) is pretty cool.

Also thanks to those who have commented on my posts.  When I started this I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it going or if I even had anything worthwhile to say.  The feedback has made me want to continue posting and (eventually) improve the site.  There’s more rogue-ish goodness to come!