Repopulating the Old World: Cross Realm Zones

Sometimes I think you want me to touch you.
How can I when you build the great wall around you? - Tori Amos, China


In a move that surprised everyone, Blizzard has announced that they are going to begin testing Cross Realm Zones in the Mists of Pandaria Beta. I love this idea like a big sloppy Dwarfling kiss, and given the subject of my last post, the timing of this announcement is particularly serendipitous.

I am a unrepentant Wrath Baby; I created my first character in the very twilight of the Burning Crusade expansion, mere months before Wrath of the Lich King went live. Because of this I have never experienced the Old World as the thriving, vibrant place that it was in Vanilla.

For me and thousands of other people who joined the game late, levelling in World of Warcraft is a solitary experience. The wilderness of Azeroth outside of the major cities is filled with bears and bandits and monsters of all types, but even on busy, highly populous servers, meeting another character is something of a rare occurrence. It's a lonely life, being a lowbie in Azeroth, but the new Cross Realm Zones aim to change that.

The way that Blizzard is trying to implement this is quite brilliant, if you ask me. Basically, certain realms will be linked together based on population, and each of those realms will share certain zones that are flagged as "Cross Realm". Using the Barrens as an example, a character on Sargeras would walk out of a realm-exclusive Orgrimmar into a Barrens shared by 5 other servers, and would see and interact with characters from all of those realms normally, just as if they were all on the same server. At the same time, Blizzard will have the ability to keep highly populated zones (Cities, to be sure) exclusive. This way Stormwind won't be crushed under the weight of thousands of people standing at the fountain oogling the fifteen thousand naked Night Elves dancing on the mailboxes.

I think this feature is fantastic. Not just a technically brilliant solution to make an older technology scale and adapt to the changing reality of the current, max-level focused state of the game, but also as a step to the ultimate goal of eliminating realms completely. I talked about this back in January, but the elimination of the barrier walls around the different realms is a very clever way for Blizzard to extend the life of the game. Right now, if Blizzard chooses to do so, the only realm-specific areas are the main cities, the Auction House and any zone that is going to be populated enough not to be a concern like the Cataclysm zones and the new Mists of Pandaria zones.

As a social, massively multiplayer game, it is always a little bit odd to run around the world outside of the two major faction cities of Stormwind and Orgrimmar and see, well, nothing. By repopulating the Old World, new players will finally get an experience that is close to what older players experienced when WoW was new and when having a maximum level character was rare: A world that is full of people to interact with.

It really doesn't matter that there are no group quests in the game any more, nor is there any real need to team up with people to defeat the quests that people are given. Having a lot of people busily running around doing there own thing is exciting. It adds an immense amount of flavour to the game.

Like the bustling sidewalks of downtown New York, it's all about vibrancy and life and activity; it's about the soul of this game, which is missing in the low level zones. Bringing that kind of life back to zones other than the cities is going to go a long way to help make new players—and old players who love lowibe alts like myself—remain excited about this game for years to come.

After all, it is World of Warcraft. Bravo, Blizzard. Well played.

Scribblings of the Clueless Noob

"There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life." - Henry David Thoreau

Earlier this month I wrote a rather long essay on the feelings of burn-out that I've been dealing with lately in which I offered ten different things to do to combat them. For those of you with the fortitude to actually read through all 3300 words, I congratulate you; that post was a monster.

Like many people, I don't always follow my own advice. As I was writing that post and thinking about the different things I could do to clear my head and find a happy place with WoW again, I realized that at the time I wasn't really doing any of them. Oh sure, I was playing a different game and taking a bit of a break—which was what the post was all about, after all—but the other things I talked about were merely theoretical. So I figured that I should put a few of those ideas into practice and see what happened.


SCRIBBLING ON THE CAVE WALL

I'm not sure anyone has noticed but I have been on a bit of a posting renaissance lately. This post marks the fourth post in January, two more than I managed in the whole of October, and I still have two more posts that I would like to get done this month. It seems as if my brain has a WoW infection and has been using my fingers to vomit all over my blog. Gross.

I started out this year with the idea of getting Battle Medic back to where I'd like it to be by posting smaller posts more frequently. Ideally I'd like to get back to doing about ten to twelve posts per month, so the frequency is better but still not where I would like it. The length, on the other hand, I've failed utterly and completely. So far in 2012 (not including this post), I have written over 5700 words and seem completely incapable of keeping a post under 1000. I guess we'll see how this one turns out, although with the amount of things that seems to get added in as I go I'm not hopeful—I'm already at 400!

Either way, writing about WoW is a wonderfully self-sustaining process.  I've got more to write about WoW because I've been writing about WoW, which in turn makes me more interested in WoW and makes it easier to write about WoW. It's a positive feedback loop that has done wonders in making me feel better.


LOOK AT ME! I'M THE CLUELESS NOOB AT THE BOTTOM OF THE DPS CHART

Virtually every second of my WoW experience at maximum level has been spent healing. My first max-level character was a healing priest, the main that I ended Wrath with was my Holy Paladin and now, as Cataclysm draws to a close I've added a Resto Shaman to the mix as well. I love healing, and I have no plans to stop doing it any time soon, but in retrospect, my entire WoW career has been extraordinarily one-dimensional.

Oh sure, I've fooled around with other roles. I even managed to get my warrior tank into a couple of raids back in Wrath—an experiment that ended rather badly, I might add. Retribution, likewise, was used for levelling and then discarded upon reaching level 85. My Paladin has been unable to kill anything efficiently by himself ever since. I am the guy that always hears, "Oh, Fannon's on so we've got a healer" when he logs into Mumble. Simply put, healing has been the absolute focus of my attention for a long time now. And even as experienced as I am I still find it challenging and realized there is a lot for me to learn and improve upon.

However, doing the same thing for two years can get a bit monotonous. Imagine eating the same sandwich for lunch everyday for two years; I don't think you'd end up looking forward to the noon hour if that same damned ham on pumpernickel with yellow mustard was the only option. I think at least some of the reason that I was feeling burnt-out in the first place was because every time I was in a group setting I was doing the same thing that I always did.

And so I decided to do something completely different—for me, at least. I dusted off my badly geared, poorly understood Enhancement off-spec on my Shaman and took it for a spin in some dungeons and the raid finder.

Oh my, what a different world. As a healer, I have the luxury to say away from the boss where it's relatively quiet and I can play undisturbed. Not possible in melee range. It's wonderfully chaotic; at times the sheer amount of spell effects that are going off completely obscure both the mob I'm hitting and my character.  It feels odd trusting the health of the party to someone else, and I get damned nervous when my health dips. But then I realize that I'm only DPS, so I'm expendable, which makes me giggle to myself and want to hit the boss even harder.

I suck at it though. Yes, I am that noob at the bottom of the DPS meters in that heroic you're doing. Yes, I am in your dungeon group wearing that gear, horrible as it is. You'd better believe that I'm the one standing in fire or accidentally pulling mobs or doing any one of a hundred things that would make me pull my hair out if I were healing me. Yup, that's me.

And yes, I'm laughing the whole time I'm doing it. Sorry.

But I'm really enjoying whacking things with my giant beer steins. I'm enjoying the new challenge and the new responsibilities (or lack thereof) that come with dealing damage. It's given me something completely different to look forward to when I log into the game.

I'm still raiding as a healer, and it will always be my first, passionate love. But, if I can encourage infidelity to the game itself, why not cheat on my preferred role, too?

After all, unlike real life, in the gaming world, monogamy isn't good for the soul.

This post weighs in at 1029 words (not including the opening quote or this postscript). Close enough to call this one a win for brevity.

One Year Later...

“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.” - Abraham Lincoln 

One year ago Sunday, I was sitting in my office at work. It was a cold, snowy, miserable Saturday in December, ensuring that only the bravest and most motivated customers would dare visit the lot. In an attempt to stave off a level of boredom that would have resulted in me falling asleep at my desk, I started casually fooling around with Blogger to see if I could find a blog design that would catch my eye. An hour and a half later, I had the basic look that you see here now (unless you're on a feedreader) and my first post up. The rest, as they say, is history.

I've talked before about what motivated me to begin writing Battle Medic, why I chose the name and who my influences were - all really excellent topics for an anniversary post, but I'm not going to go into all that again. But I have been doing some pondering on my experiences and feelings about this whole blogging thing.


SOME VITAL STATISTICS

Because I'm sure there are people out there dying to know...

Over the past year, as of this writing Battle Medic has seen over 41,500 pageviews according to Blogspot's statistic's page. The best month I had was June with 6,136 views. As well, I have a good number of subscribers to my feed, although I don't really have an accurate way to track that. Google Reader tells me that 188 people are subscribed to the blog.

4 of my Top 5 all-time posts in terms of traffic are unsurprisingly due to being linked by the 800 pound gorilla of the WoW blogosphere, WoW Insider, which always results in a 20-fold increase in traffic for a day or two. However, the post that is hanging on in fifth place is my most controversial post, but also the one that I am most proud of writing: On Raiding Disappointment: An Open Letter to Blizzard. Although some people didn't agree with the content of the post, I think that in terms of the way in which the ideas are expressed it is my most powerful bit of writing. I'm glad that it's managing to hold on to a top spot, despite not being linked by WoW Insider.

I'd like to give a shout-out to my top referrers while I'm at it. WoW Insider is, of course, the site that has sent me the most traffic, although it's not as extreme as you might think. Blessing of Kings - the big daddy of Paladin blogs - is second, even beating Google. It appears that a lot of you use Rohan's Blog Roll to find your way here, and I credit getting listed on his site as what really got Battle Medic off the ground in terms of traffic and exposure. Thanks, Rohan! Orcish Army Knife, Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon round out the top referrers.

I am extremely proud that Battle Medic is listed on so many Blog Rolls around the blogosphere, and I thank everyone who thinks enough of my writing that they would add me to their site. It's a thrill every time I run across a blog that I'm unfamiliar with and see my blog listed there as something that they read and recommend.

All told, I have been extremely satisfied with the amount of people that are seeing what I write.

Traffic, however, is not that important if the people visiting are not finding the content engaging, and the only way to really know what you, the reader is thinking is the comments. There are a lot of reasons why a person wouldn't write a comment, but the only thing that is going to make someone (especially someone viewing a post in a reader) to stop what they're doing and respond to a post is if it has a compelling message. Agree with me or not, I value every single comment that I have received on Battle Medic, and over the course of the past year people have commented 572 times on the blog. Now I just need to be better at responding to them.


IMPRESSIONS AFTER THE FIRST YEAR

I can honestly say that Battle Medic has not quite turned out the way I anticipated. Don't get me wrong, I am very proud of the posts that I have written, but I hoped that it would have turned into more of a Kurn-esque resource blog rather than the personal game journal that it is now. While I would like to do more analytical posts, I think one of the most important lessons that I learned is that while those how-to and resource posts bring in a lot of views from the search engines, regular readers are more interested in what a blogger thinks about something. It's the personal opinions and viewpoints that keep bringing readers back.

That idea has shaped the evolution of Battle Medic more than anything.

Well, aside from the Dwarfling. I've written about this numerous times - it's almost to the point of getting quite stale - but my life, and consequently my ability to focus on my blog, has changed remarkably since I started a year ago. There have been far too many of the "I'm tired, no time to write" posts for my liking. The last thing I want is to turn this post into another of those, but the Dwarfling certainly has had a big effect on my posting and gameplay.

Still, I have enjoyed writing this blog more than I ever would have thought possible. Before starting it, I didn't realize how much I enjoyed the process and creative release of writing. More importantly, though, I didn't realize that I had something to say. I have opinions on this game and my experiences playing it, and I had no idea that there was a burning need to express them until I started writing about them. It's made me think about the game quite differently.


COMMUNITY

Writing a blog is fun, but interacting with the readers is much more rewarding. It's that interaction that begins to build a community, and the WoW Blogging community is great. It's diverse, engaging and very supportive. I don't think there would be much point in blogging in a void.

Everyone I talk to, whether it be on Twitter, forums or through comments, has been amazing. Support, advice and sympathy have been offered whenever I've been feeling like a grumpy Dwarf, and congratulations are never in short supply when something good happens. And, of course, there is nothing that will generate conversation and comments like posting a picture of the Dwarfling; the internet certainly seems to be taken with her.

I was planning on doing a list of people who have been influential to me and the blog and thank them, but honestly, there are far too many to list. The post would either get too long (it already is... this was supposed to be a short post!), or I would end up forgetting someone important, and I would hate to do that.

However, if you are reading this blog regularly, I thank you. I appreciate how special it is that someone takes time out of their day to read the drivel that I spew onto the interwebs. I hope that what I write is informative, enlightening or at the very least entertaining.

If you have ever commented on Battle Medic, I thank you. Believe me, I know how hard it is to comment on a post. Personally, I find it much harder to write an interesting comment than I do an interesting article. Know that each and every comment, regardless of whether I get off my tuckus to respond to it or not is read and appreciated. In fact, I get a shiver of anticipation every time I see that there is a new one.

If we have ever interacted on Twitter, I thank you. I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon quite late - I still haven't had one year on that yet - but I have a really good number of followers. In my wildest dreams I didn't think that there would be that many people interested in what I have to say.

If you are a blogger and have added me to your Blog Roll, I thank you. If you've ever ReTweeted, linked or written a response to one of my posts, I thank you.

If I have influenced you in some way - to start a blog, join Twitter, think about screenshots differently, or even to ditch all the other races in favour of the clearly superior Dwarves - I thank you. I write this blog for myself, but to know that there are people out there who enjoy what I write enough that it inspired them to do something themselves is very satisfying. I'm glad I could help, and I thank you for valuing what I do here.

And if you read this blog and didn't like it, well, I thank you anyway. Honestly, I get a lot of positive feedback here (the WoW blogosphere is very supportive), and I would love to get some idea of what I'm doing wrong. So thank you for all the constructive criticism in advance.

There... I think that covers just about everyone.


THE FUTURE OF BATTLE MEDIC

Back on that blustery day last December when I pushed the Publish button for the first time, I had no idea whether I would enjoy blogging or whether I would keep up with it. So many of the projects that I take on start out so brilliantly and then fizzle into a small, grey lump of nothing, and I'm glad that I've managed to keep Battle Medic as active as I have, given the circumstances.

I will continue to write this blog as long as there are people reading it. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to increase the frequency of the posting around here, as it's been much quieter than I'd like since August. I look forward to writing another of these posts next year!

Day Eighteen: Favourite Outfit?

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days. We're on the home stretch now!


DAY EIGHTEEN: FAVOURITE OUTFIT?

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” - Oscar Wilde

I can honestly say that I don't have the first clue how to respond to this question, so this post will be nice and short.

Being a Wrath Baby, I don't have any tier sets from Vanilla that I keep to memorialize the sixty-seven Molten Core runs that I did. Tier 9 was the first set of tier gear that I ever even had the opportunity to collect, and it was sharded or sold as soon as it was replaced with something better.

Robes by Armani. Shoulders by Gucci. Off-Hand by Louis Vuitton
Not Pictured: Christian Loubouton Combat Boots

As such, I don't really have a Favourite Outfit for any of my characters. If I was held at gun-point and forced to choose one under threat of death or worse (like hearing a Rebecca Black song), I would probably choose the one that Fannon finished off Wrath of the Lich King in and is still wearing today.

There is no real reason for this: It doesn't match, it's not best-in-slot or particularly noteworthy in any way other than the fact that I've had it and been looking at it for so long. Although, that being said, I do think the Tier 10 Shoulder designs are far nicer than the T11 ones: Who wants to carry around bowls of water on their shoulders, anyway?

This outfit is in the photo in my Blog Header, my Twitter profile picture, and in my "signature" on my guild forums; so I've become very familiar with it. And because I've used it so much it has become almost a logo of sorts.

In the end, it will be sold off as I begin levelling Fannon through the Cataclysm content and finding replacement gear. In fact, there are already a couple of new lvl 80 items sitting in the mail waiting to be equipped, so very soon Fannon will have a different look. I don't really get all that sentimental over my gear or what my characters are wearing.

Yesterday, DAY SEVENTEEN: FAVOURITE PLACES IN THE WORLD (OF WARCRAFT)
Tomorrow, DAY NINETEEN: THE STUFF IN THE VIRTUAL ATTIC

Day Seventeen: Favourite Place in the World (of Warcraft)

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days. Originally I had hoped to do one post per day, now I just hope I get them all done in the same month.


DAY SEVENTEEN: FAVOURITE PLACE IN THE WORLD (OF WARCRAFT)

"I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own." - Andy Warhol

When I first stepped foot into Azeroth as a new Dwarf, I found myself in wide-eyed awe at the world that I found myself in, and wandered the snowy wastes of Dun Morogh for hours soaking in all the details. I was amazed at how large the world felt, and how it had a definite sense of place, as if it actually existed in reality. Since then I have become quite attached to the little virtual world we inhabit, even as it grows smaller from familiarity.

Before the great Shattering it would have been very easy for me to tell you where my favourite places in the game world were. They were the places that felt unaffected by all the chaos in the world; little pockets of normalcy in a world gone completely bonkers. They were the places where you could see a little snippet of normal life in Azeroth - where the biggest problems that the people have are other people's prize-winning pigs, finishing the construction of a bridge, or the gigantic yeti living in the hills above your house and eating your livestock. You know, everyday-type stuff.

Dun Morogh, Loch Modan, Southshore in Hillsbrad and Redridge Mountains were some of my favourite spots because of this.

Loch Modan in particular felt like a vacation spot: beautiful scenery, a big lake with lovely water-skiing potential, and not much to worry about other than the odd trogg or ogre who kept to themselves for the most part. I always thought of it as the place that my character would retire to when he was done adventuring. The most alarming thing (aside from the smell of the ogres) about Loch Modan were the five or six Dark Iron dwarves trying to blow up the dam. But I always got the feeling that they weren't all that serious about it, and that they were just doing a half-assed job to keep their supervisor off their backs while they chilled by the lake and smoked the Dark Iron equivalent of a doobie.

For Sale: Vacation home with scenic view of mud, murlocs and giant, rotting fish carcasses.
Dirt cheap or best offer.

And then Deathwing came and blew it up for them. Goodbye serene, beautiful lake, hello slimy mud pit.

Aside from the occasional attack by ninjas, unstoppable undead killing machines, or an army of frothing-at-the-mouth Horde players bent on massacring every Alliance lowbie in the area, Southshore always felt very peaceful; a piece of untainted Lordaeron that escaped the ravages of the plague and remained a reminder of that once great kingdom. It was so peaceful that in order for the quest givers there to have anything for the players to do, they had to send them to an entirely different zone.

Mourn for Southshore. Plague slime stains are impossible to get out of your tattered, zombie rags.

That is, until the Forsaken needed a new toxic waste dump. I mourn for the people of Southshore. People like Bartolo Ginsetti and his weird fascination with ravaging the local Yeti population to make sure that everybody was dressed as badly as he was.

On the other hand, as favourite places go, I also enjoy the forlorn, tragic lands of Lordaeron that were devastated by the Scourge. The Plaguelands had an emotional hold on my heart-strings since the day that I first read about them; the stories that were told there were extremely touching. Mournful tales of loss, heroism, betrayal and death were everywhere. Places like Andorhal - destroyed by it's own food supply, Caer Darrow betrayed, corrupted and ultimately destroyed by the very people charged with protecting it, and Darrowshire and the battle that condemned its defenders and its daughters to a mournful unlife. Sad, wonderful tales that tell of the suffering of the people of that dead land.

What the hell? Where are my zombies? I come to the Plaguelands for
hordes of ravenous zombies, not corn!

Of course, with the death of Arthas and the fall of the Scourge, the cleansing of these zones is well underway. There is still a lot of wonderful stories here, but the Plaguelands have lost the tragic air that made them so compelling. There is something deeply unsatisfying in cleansing a farmer's field of angry mutant pumpkins when compared to a horde of mindless, pitchfork-wielding zombies.

Duskwood is another great, atmospheric zone that ranks high in my list of favourite places. I have always loved the undead as a villain, and Duskwood was packed to the gills with them. Before Blizzard reworked the zone you would spend hours upon hours in the Raven Hill Cemetery surrounded by ghouls and skeletons of all sorts. Duskwood had terrors aplenty for the level-appropriate soul: Stitches periodically wandered the road, ruthlessly slaughtering anyone not paying attention; Mor'Ladim wandered the cemetery and would dispense his elite, undead fury on anyone who got within his incredibly large aggro radius; and the rare spawn Commander Felstrom who annoyingly resurrected himself just when you thought that he was dead.

But at least there's always Raven Hill Cemetery. Fewer ghouls than before,
but always good value for your undead hunting pleasure.

With the rejiggering of the questing experience, however, the zone has lost a lot of its dark charm. While the Embalmer storyline still exists, it ends in an phased battle against Stitches in the burning town of Darkshire, removing the ever-present danger of randomly meeting an elite abomination ten levels above you. The sheer number of undead haunting the graveyard, and the time spent questing there has been drastically cut. It's still one of my favourite places, and the stories being told are still great and the flow of questing is smooth and flawless, but the atmosphere that they create is not as captivating as it once was.

In the end, with everything taken into consideration, the place that holds the most emotional attachment to me is Dun Morogh. The snow-covered peaks of the Dwarven starting area are gorgeous, quaint, homey and have a majesty to them is only rivaled by the much more greatly detailed Howling Fjord. I'm sure that my fondness for this zone has to do with it being the first zone I set eyes on, and walking its roads evokes the memories of those first innocent days of playing the game.

The great Dwarven city of Ironforge.

I always imagined that my dwarf priest Fannon lives there in a little home tucked away high on the shoulders of the mountain that Ironforge is carved into. In the only piece of Warcraft fiction I've ever done, I wrote a little bit about that in a post from last month.

It's odd which zones will capture your imagination. In thinking about this article I'm trying to come up with the specific things about Dun Morogh and Ironforge that appeal to me so much to make them my favourite zone in the game, and I can't really think of anything. I can't point to specific quests that are charming, although I always found Brewnal Village fascinating: a whole town that is so drunk on Barleybrew that they can't even be bothered to construct any buildings, but are content to live in tents as long as there is beer to be had.

The feel of this zone is, to me at least, undefinable. It's home, and that's what matters.


Yesterday, DAY SIXTEEN: WHAT I MISS POST-CATACLYSM
Tomorrow, DAY EIGHTEEN: MY FAVOURITE OUTFIT?

  

Day Thirteen: People I Admire

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days and I, foolishly, have decided to take up this most daunting task because clearly my schedule is not full enough.


DAY THIRTEEN: PEOPLE I ADMIRE

When I started thinking about this topic I started compiling a list of people that I respect and admire in my head. After about an hour - once the blinding, searing headache went away from trying to remember all those names - I decided that a monolithic list of people was not the way to go with this post; especially since most people will just scan those to see if their name is mentioned and not actually read it. So I started to think of a different way to approach this topic.

The people I admire are the people who do the Thankless Jobs™ in our game. I'm talking about the Raid Leaders, Role Leads, Recruiters and Guild Leaders out there.

These people are responsible for an job that has been glibly compared to herding cats, but would be more accurately described as herding short-tempered, egotistical badgers who are fine when left alone but viciously attack anyone who pokes them with a stick. It's the leader's job to figure out how often it's possible to poke the badger without your face getting ripped off.

I have led online communities before (successfully, I think), and it's not an easy job. There is enough drama to deal with to make a young William Shakespeare quit the theatre and take up chartered accountancy. Often you're trying to provide direction to people who seem determined to remain directionless. Just trying to make yourself heard over the relentless din of internet chatter is often impossible; and on the occasions that you succeed you're often called a tyrant.

So my hat is off to you folks. You're doing a tough job requiring exceptionally clear communication, but doing it in a medium that makes everything you say easy to ignore or misinterpret. Considering most of you volunteered for this job speaks volumes of your character. Selfless, some would say. Noble, even. Masochist? Certainly.

Yesterday, DAY TWELVE: A DAY IN THE LIFE
Tomorrow, DAY FOURTEEN: THIS UPSETS ME

Day Ten: Blog and Website Favourites

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days and I, foolishly, have decided to take up this most daunting task because clearly my schedule is not full enough.

DAY TEN: BLOG AND WEBSITE FAVOURITES

If there is one thing that I have learned after getting plugged into Twitter, it's that there are far too many WoW blogs and resources to ever keep up with. Everyday it seems that I run across another new or new-to-me blog that is exceptional and worthy of being in my feed reader and my blogroll. It's impossible to keep up with all the excellent writing out there, and every morning when I open up Google Reader I am a little daunted at the sheer number of posts to get to.

There are, however, several blogs out there that I make sure to read whenever there is a new post. These are my essential blogs, most of which I have been reading well before I started blogging myself. All of these blogs are linked on my blogroll, of course.

Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon by Ophelie

Kurn's Corner by Kurn

Blessing of Kings by Rohan

Muradin Musings by Janyaa
Revive & Rejuvenate by Angelya

(Un)holy Randomness by Endyme

There are more, of course, but those are the ones that I go out of my way to read as soon as something new shows up.

My blogroll is quite small at the moment, but I plan to do an overhaul very soon and expand it greatly.

Wowpedia, Wowhead, Tankspot and Youtube are all essential resources when you need to find out some factual information on the game, of course, and I use them all as often as needed. When I need to dig into the nuts and bolts of a class or spec, it's off to Elitist Jerks and the PlusHeal forums. And I spend more than a little time everyday reading WoW Insider WoW.com WoW Insider by Joystiq or whatever the hell they're called these days.  One day I will be linked by them, oh yes... one day.

And last but not least, I check my guild forums frequently throughout the day to see if anything is going on.

Yesterday, DAY NINE: THE FIRST BATTLE MEDIC POST
Tomorrow, DAY ELEVEN: BAD HABITS AND FLAWS (Part One of Six)

Day Nine: The First Battle Medic Post

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days and I, foolishly, have decided to take up this most daunting task because clearly my schedule is not full enough.


DAY NINE: THE FIRST BATTLE MEDIC POST

Looking back on the first entry that I posted on Battle Medic I am struck by how extraordinarily timid it sounds. It really comes across that I was unsure what I was going to write about and that I was really unsure if anything that churned out of my keyboard was going to be worth reading.

I asked the question, "Why does the WoW blogosphere need another healing blog?" Four months and sixty-two posts later I think I have a better idea of the answer to that question. My experiences in writing this blog has really shown me that the subject of the blog really isn't that important - the real reason that each new blog is important and needed is that each voice adds something unique to the community. I hope that I've managed to add something positive to the discourse.

Re-reading the first few blog entries, I can really see the writing grow as I went through the process of trying to figure out what to write about. I pumped out a lot of posts in the last two and a half weeks of December. My favourite posts of those first, fledgling weeks are Slowing Down is Hard to Do, The First Annual Peevie Awards and First Lesson from Heroics - Communication. There is actually some readable stuff in there.

Yesterday, DAY EIGHT: 10 THINGS ABOUT THE BATTLE MEDIC
Tomorrow, DAY TEN: FAVOURITE BLOGS AND WEBSITES

Day Five: Favourite Items

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days and I, foolishly, have decided to take up this most daunting task because clearly my schedule is not full enough.


DAY FIVE:  FAVOURITE ITEMS

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book." - Marcel Proust

I always find these posts the hardest to write.  I've already written at length about my love affair with Shields, which could certainly qualify as my favourite items in the game.  If I just wanted to phone-in this 20 Days challenge I could simply link to that post and be done with it.  Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

But no, that isn't really keeping with the spirit of the challenge.  Battle Medics never do things the easy way, or else I'd still be playing my hunter.

"Books, young man, books. Thousands of them. If time wasn't so important, I'd show you something -- my library. Thousands of books." - Samuel T. Cogley, Attorney-at-law, self-professed crackpot and fictional Star Trek character

I think my favourite items and objects in WoW are all the books.  I've always thought that the strongest and most compelling thing about World of Warcraft - and what sets it apart from other MMOs - is the story. The lore of Azeroth is incredibly rich, deep and varied.

Dwarven bookshelf designers
are incredibly sadistic.

One of the most clever things that Blizzard did was scattering books all around the game world that tell little snippets of the story - in particular parts of the overall story that happened behind the scenes or in the previous Warcraft RTS games.  As well, occasionally as part of a quest the player will receive a book that goes into more depth about the story that the quest is telling, such as The Story of Morgan Ladimore or The Legend of Stalvan.

I've always really enjoyed these books, and made it a point to read them all.  The achievement Well Read was the very first "nothing" achievement that I put real effort into accomplishing.  I remember hitting level 60 on my warrior and entering Scholomance by myself in order to get the last couple of books that I needed; finally getting them by jumping over the balcony and getting swarmed and overwhelmed by a horde of ghouls several times.

The little tidbits and stories that are expanded on in these books are completely useless in game terms, but absolutely wonderful in giving the world depth and flavour.

Probably the single most brilliant and evil books in the game are the ones that randomly spawn in Dalaran for the achievement Higher Learning.  The books required for the achievement give details of the different magical schools practised on Azeroth, and are informative in themselves, but the real joy of this achievement comes from the "dummy" books that randomly spawn in place of the achievement books.  Such intriguing titles as Portals are NOT Garbage Bins, several issues of the Kirin Tor Monthly, three parts of the biography of Archmage Antoniadas and the long and interesting Old Wizard's Almanac that details quite a number of the races of World of Warcraft.  There is a lot of great lore information in these books, as well as a lot of colour, humour and charm - and they're well worth the hell that is needed in order to see all the books and get the achievement.

From a gameplay standpoint, there was absolutely no reason to put these books in the game.  They serve absolutely no useful purpose and they don't help anyone get shiny, purple slot-fillers, but they help bring Azeroth to life in a way that loot dropping off of a boss could never do, which is why I enjoy them so much.

Yesterday, DAY FOUR:  THE FONDEST MEMORY
Tomorrow, DAY SIX:  THE BATTLE MEDIC'S BATTLE DESK