Happy Blogiversary to me!

A little over a year ago, I decided to start a blog. A year ago today was when my boyfriend finished setting it up and I posted my very first posts! The first day, I posted 4 mini-posts, mostly analyzing the 3.1 PTR patch note changes. This also means that I have been in my current guild, Conspiracy, for almost a year, too!

Since I was already pretty well known amongst druids from my long time posting (& stickied leveling guide) in the druid forums, this blog really started out with a bang and has continued to pass my expectations every day. On March 24th (Only a short time after starting the blog), I got linked on Wowinsider, and my first huge jump in hit #’s (4,300 visitors in 1 day). Then, every other large jump in my analytics is usually either a patch day or another day I was linked on wow.com. I even had to change hosting services in my first month (that’s the strange dip at the beginning of April that analytics didn’t pick up readers for that day). Good times!

Here is the analytic break down by day across the last year:

And my hope is that over the next year, these numbers are going to get even bigger. With Cataclysm coming, and so much changing for WOW and the druid class, I can’t wait to see what Restokin will bring over the next year! I have slowed down my posting speed a little bit compared to the rapid pace that I was pushing out articles in my first couple months of blogging. However, I have also worked to increase the quality of the posts that I release, and I frequently work to update my leveling and healing guides.

I really just wanted to say thank you to all the druids AND non-druids out there who read my blog. I wouldn’t be who I am today without all of you. I love being part of the WOW community and the blogging community. Even with all the fancy charts and numbers, I still take the time to respond to people who talk to me in-game, on twitter (@restokin), in comments on my blog, on the forums, or by e-mail. I’m here to be part of a community and I enjoy playing (and writing about) world of warcraft with all of you.

Here’s one of the early screenshots of my druid, back when I was a newer level 60 (in 2005). It really feels amazing that I’ve been part of this community for so many years! It’s so nice to take the time to remember where you came from, and to think about how far we’ve come. Unfortunately, in all that time, I’ve still managed to have a lot of dead animals on my head… Oh well.

So, there has been some chatter around the internet amongst bloggers about how much they write about their guilds. Since I started out as a fairly prominent druid community member before I started blogging, I didn’t see the point in trying to hide my in-game identity – instead, I capitalized on the readership I already had when I started the blog (by re-posting, cross-linking between my stickied guides & here). Since my forum identity also comes with an armory profile & guild name, it’s not like I can actually hide my guild. Instead, what I do is I keep all the things I say about my guild in a positive tone. It comes down to something my mom always said: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all!” This is pretty much a moto I use to blog by. If I say negative things, it’s usually about game mechanics, not about individual people.

One of the things that I’ve been doing is posting boss kill pictures, mostly because I like to highlight something that people can already tell just by looking at public armory info, because I’m already judged by my armory. Honestly, I really just enjoy being in my current guild.

So, congrats Conspiracy on recent Putricide & Blood Prince kills! Yes, I know the Blood Prince pic is a bit old (sometime in February). It’s been a while since I did an update.

The lunar festival is the last one that I need to finish off for my meta achievement. While I’d participated in this holiday a little bit before, I had never explored and gotten all the elders.

So, in my quest for Elders, I discovered that some of them hide in hard to reach places. The hardest one for me to find was the one outside of Scholomance. It’s not inside the instance. It’s not beyond the locked door. It’s actually on top of Scholomance outside… For as many times as I ran instances there, I don’t ever remember going up to the roof. I don’t remember ever noticing the doorway that led up there. I didn’t ever realize that building had a roof. I spent probably 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get to that elder.  When you go into the first hallway to get to the entrance, instead of going inside the locked door on the left, you turn RIGHT and wind your thru some confusing hallways and up some stairs. Then, you eventually end up on the roof of Scholomance.  Why an elder would want to stand up there, I have no idea.

I hope you guys have a good holiday, and that you are able to honor all your elders in those hard to reach places! In general, the right answer to “where is the elder”? Is “up there somewhere”. I think they’re trying to be closer to the sky.

I’ve been following the coordinates from the wow.com lunar festival guide. The coordinates are pretty easy to follow if you have some sort of coordinate addon (I downloaded ct map mod just for the event). Wowhead also has a neat guide for the lunar festival with all the locations mapped out for the elders.

I got through all of Eastern Kingdoms, and I got bored when I started Kalimdor. Sometime before the end of this holiday, I’ll finally be able to complete “What a long, strange trip” meta-achievement to get my drake. However, like last year, I’m pretty busy over this part of the semester, so it’s going to get dragged out a bit…

So, the Love is in the Air holiday started over the weekend.

For info on how to do the holiday quests and such, there is a great deal of info on other sites (like wow.com). Instead of writing yet another guide, I thought I’d have a little more fun.

First, apparently, love is in the air even for the turkeys & rabbits of the world. The Spring Rabbit holiday pet can apparently fall in love (and mate with) the Thanksgiving turkey pets. We found this out in our raid, when I couldn’t figure out why my turkey was going so crazy. The rabbit stopped having hearts over it’s head & making baby bunnies when I put my turkey back into it’s stable. It’s actually fun to see pets interacting with each other.

Also, if you want another new pet, you can head over to SFK and summon the new boss encounter out there, and learn the meaning of “tough love”.

I don’t have the meta-achievement yet for this holiday yet, so I still have a few things left to do that I didn’t finish last year. I like the new version of this holiday. They took out a lot of the randomness of the “love is in the air” holiday, and made it just come down to doing daily quests (or killing random mobs if you want to speed up your token acquisition).

So, Conspiracy was able to make some progress in ICC this week. I’m also a little behind in posting my progression updates. One of our tanks finally had his characters restored after being hacked over a week ago, so we was able to raid again this week. We were able to get down both Rotface and Festergut for the first time this week.

Rotface and Festergut both feel like DPS races, and they were ones that we struggled with a lot, since we don’t have super geared people (I’m still in a lot of 10-man TOC gear). However, we managed to work together and pulled out the DPS that we needed to do, and finally conquered the two bosses that look exactly the same (I only tell them apart because I repeat to myself “right is for rotface”. I’m not even sure if I labeled them right in the boss kill pics…

Conspiracy doesn’t get world-first boss kills, and doesn’t always choose to do hard-modes for bosses. However, one thing that Conspiracy does have is a great group of officers that helps the raid be an enjoyable environment. We do progress, but it’s at our own pace. We raid the 25-mans only 2 days a week, and we don’t always push to be the most cutting-edge of progression…. and that’s okay with me. If I wanted to be in a hard-core, cutting-edge guild, I would be. However, I’m in Conspiracy because I genuinely enjoy raiding with them, and I finally feel like I’m “home” in a way that I haven’t felt since before Burning Crusade. Logging into raid with Conspiracy is really a lot of fun, even if I don’t always like the raid mechanics – I like the people I’m raiding with.

I also have a couple other pictures: One is the achievement shot from our Sarufang kill. We didn’t pause long enough for a boss kill picture, as everyone charged into the portal, and I should have posted this a while ago… and then one of our paladins sacrificed themselves to the blue wall of death the first time we were able to …

Also, I got a close up of our guild’s druid that got the legendary. Since we have had so many of our healers return, Ang had to go moonkin for some of the ICC raids (especially for the DPS race ones), where we had to cut down from 7 healers to 5. So, here’s Ang doing moonkin DPS with his legendary healer weapon when we need more DPS… just to make everyone jealous. If you want to see Ang stop being a moonkin with the healer legendary, I think we could use another ranged DPS guild member. Feel free to apply.

I have been trying to figure out how to turn into Christmas Tree form for the last few years. I finally figured it out! (well, maybe not really).

Today is the official start of Winter’s Veil!

My druid already has the meta-achivement, but I still plan to have lots of fun over the holiday. My shaman hasn’t finished everything yet, and there are still lots of things you can do: turn into a  festive gnome, stock up on snowballs, cook up some holiday grub, questing, and more! I enjoyed this holiday even before there were achievements to earn!

I thought about writing up some how-to guide, but Allison Roberts over at wow.com did such a great job that I think I’ll just suggest reading it over there.

Happy Achievement hunting!