Getting My (Blogging) Groove On

You know, I really have no idea what that means, but I think it’ll get a lot of search engine hits. (Yes, I’m kidding…sorta.)

Okay…back to serious bidness here. I know it’s been a while (so long, I am afraid to look) since I’ve posted anything really significant here. Now that the holiday season is behind us, I really do want to get back into regular, meaty blogging. I’ve been keeping up with a lot of blogs lately (less than 100 unread items in my reader right now; trust me, that’s not many at all!), and I finally realized that everything anyone could possibly want to know is not yet written.

Newsflash: This Is a Priest Blog

I think part of the reason for my relative absence has been my struggle with the realization that I no longer have two main characters, as I (mostly) did in Burning Crusade. I had the opportunity, very soon after the expansion, to declare Kestrel, my Beast Mastery Hunter, as my raiding main, and I passed. However, that decision still left me with a lot of dissonance. I love questing on Kestrel: Stuff dies, and dies fast. Not so much with Osprey, the forever-Holy Priest. Stuff dies, but the process is slow. On the other hand, I’ve proven to myself that Osprey can handle almost as many mobs at once as Kes can.

And of course, Osprey can heal. And heal. And heal some more. Before Christmas, we hit Naxx-10 once (over 3 nights); I loved being back in a raid instance. And I’ve really enjoyed healing heroic 5-mans, although I’m still not a big fan of HoL. (Yes, Loken, I mean you; and yes, everyone else, I know the mechanics are not that tough.)

So, for all of you who have Kestrel’s Aerie in your blogrolls under “Hunter”…better change that to “Priest.” Of course, that doesn’t mean I might not still have huntery things to say, but I’ll be even more focused on the healing art than I have been previously.

Yes, I Really Am A Raiding Priest

Hopefully, we’ll be back in Naxx this week, and even better, we should be able to field two full 10-mans. My fear is we’ll start doing 25-man Naxx before we get everyone geared up via the 10-mans. I just don’t see what the rush is. (And why don’t people ever want to run regular 5-man instances instead of heroics all the time? There are some damn fine upgrades to be found in regulars!! For example, Ancient Measuring Rod.)

One idea I’d been toying with was going to a Discipline-heavy build for raiding, or at least experiment with it. However, one of my very favorite bloggers, Vonya, the Egotistical Priest, did the heavy lifting on this idea. As I commented there, I’ll be sticking with my current Holy build. We have at least one healadin in the guild now, and a Disc Priest, as well as a couple resto druids and a healing shaman. As long as one of the DPriests or Healadins is in the raid, I can assign him to the main tank, and I can do what I enjoy most, and do best: Keeping the raid alive. While I’m confident in my ability to MT-heal, there are specialists better suited to that task, and I’d rather have one of them doing it.

Once we get dual-specs (this is starting to look like vaporware, frankly), I’ll go deep discipline for my alt-spec. But until then, I won’t be playing with it.

But I Also Like My Questing!

I enjoy raids and heroics, but I enjoy doing quests more. Right now, our trio of Boomkin, Firefrosty and yours truly is about a third of the way through Icecrown. We spent most of last night flying around doing the very cool dailies we picked up, together with the more mainstream quests we encountered. I love shooting gargoyles outta the sky, I must say! (And, I am damn good at it. Not so good at the bombing thing though. But that will come!)

We’ve done every quest in every zone up through Storm Peaks, and we’ll finish all of them (except the PvP daily to kill 15 Horde) in Icecrown. But all three of us enjoy raiding, and we enjoy heroics. We generally don’t enjoy four or five in a row though. I don’t know about the others, but the pressure of keeping everyone alive in a heroic is pretty draining for me. I was totally burned out last week when we did four in a row on New Year’s Day.

Currently, Osprey’s Exalted with Wyrmrest Accord (as of Saturday; so of course last night I headed to Transitus Shield for the dailies…d’oh!), Kirin Tor, and the Kalu’ak. I’m working on Sons of Hodir, Knights of the Ebon Blade, Oracles (revered now) and Argent Crusade. In fact, yesterday I spent 32g on the Robes of Crackling Flame from the Kirin Tor, because it looks so much better with Ebon Blade tabard than the Robes of Hoarse Breaths, which has exactly the same stats. (Let’s be honest: the RoHB is ugly, period.)

All About the BLOB

One of the things I did last weekend was to finally get the Twisted Nether Wiki’s Big List of Blogs (BLOB) updated with the 20-something additions that came in since the start of November. (My apologies to many of you who waited several weeks for me to get busy on this; I will endeavor not to let it happen again! Of course, the doubling of my pay from Fimlys & Breana was a good incentive.)

There is still a lot to be done with the BLOB. A lot of blogs were added from blogrolls, before we had a standardized format. A lot of blogs don’t have RSS feeds linked. In fact, there is a LOT of standardization to be done. And my long-term project for this year is to get that done. Want to help? Read on!

If you’re already listed in the BLOB, feel free to create an account at the TNB Wiki and update your site’s page however you’d like. If you aren’t listed, then send an email to wiki AT twistednether DOT net and let us know about your blog. But to make it easier for me, your friendly neighborhood wikibrarian, please follow the format shown here.

Elsewhere in the Twisted Nether

Yesterday, Fim approached me about an idea he and Bre had for the blogcast. Coincidentally, I’d had a similar idea myself. Great minds, with but a single thought? Perhaps…

At any rate, I’m going to be adding a segment to the podcast in the very, very near future (maybe not this week, but certainly by next week). I’ll be discussing a WoW UI add-on in each segment, hopefully with some sort of accompanying article at Twisted Nether. I may also reblog the article here; haven’t really gotten that far in planning yet.

I haven’t decided on the initial subject of my segment yet, nor have I determined exactly how to present it. And the medium of voice-only rather limits me there: No screenies! But I’m determined to make it informative, useful, and, I hope, entertaining as well. So if you have any thoughts on add-ons you’d like to see reviewed, send an email to wiki AT twistednether DOT net. Please include “Kestrel’s Corner” in the subject, since we normally only get BLOB additions at that address; I don’t want to dump your suggestion in the spambox! (If you prefer, you can use the contact form here at the Aerie; it’s not like I’ll go all whirlwind on you!)

And Finally…

Coming full circle, back to the Aerie: I’m very interested in what kinds of topics you’d like to see discussed in 2009. Yes, I plan on talking healing, for raids and heroics. Any particular bosses you want to talk about (or rather, want me to talk about)? What heroic gives you the most trouble? What about gear? Want to me to discuss the rationale behind my gear wish-list? Good! Because I plan to do exactly that.

But I still want to hear from you, if there’s anything you want to know about. So use the comments (I read, and try to reply to, every one of them) or my contact form. I love e-mail!