2007 Blog Facts, Numbers, and Wrap-Up

I know it's already January 4th, but I had a fel reaver filled party to recover from, and better late than never, right? Besides, this one post will take care of two topics: stats on this blog in 2007, and my New Year's resolution to shake off the mask of anonymity by adding in the names for my guild, my characters, and my server.

Let's get started, shall we?

About You
48,902 people visited Girl Meets WoW this year! That's
68,498 visits, for a total of
112,117 pageviews.

Much of the traffic came from posts about Brewfest, Hallow's End, and patch 2.3.

About Me
Since I started this blog on September 25th, I've made 85 posts and received all kinds of great feedback in comments and emails. (If I haven't replied to your email, fear not - I'm slowly but steadily going through my current backlog, but I'll get there.)

I've also finally been found out as a blogger by my guild just a few days ago, which means my New Year's resolution of telling my guild about my blog and my blog more about my guild is complete as of this post.

My Guild
I've been playing on Dark Iron with the fine folks of Annarchy since August 2005. We're a huge but close-knit group of mature players who span the spectrum from hardcore to casual (however you like to define those terms).

We rolled up as part of the larger Penny Arcade Alliance on DI, and are sworn rivals of the awesome but outnumbered horde of Panda Attack and Djork (the fine fellows who came out for our New Year's party the other night).

My Characters
Firkin is my mage, and has been my PvE raiding main since I rolled on Dark Iron. I'm starting to PvP with him a little bit (I need some more stam gear for Hyjal), but he's mostly a squishy carebear.
Inaara is a shadow priest I created to play when my boyfriend first joined the server on his warrior, Pyetr. I've been playing some 2v2 arena with her, and generally trying to become a more competent PvPer in battlegrounds and arena as well. I also take her to farm-status 25-man content on occasion, and flip between mage and shadow priest as my Zul'Aman group needs change from week to week.
Ramekin was my very first character, a hunter who I server transfered to Dark Iron and recently leveled to 70. I've written more about him here, but right now I'm not sure what my goals are for him besides grinding out quests for money.
Hooloovoo is my leveling alt, a level 39 enhancement shaman. He's a lot of fun to play.

For some reason none of them seem to be displaying correctly in Armory at the moment, which is fine with me since I think I logged Firkin out in his laughable PvP set last night.

So that's that. A little anti-climatic, perhaps, but I didn't actually intend my blog anonymity to last this long. I figured at least one of my 300+ guild mates would find me out within a month or so, but it ended up taking three and a half. Go figure.

Anyhow, it's been a blast so far. This blog's popularity has far exceeded my expectations, and I've had a lot of fun reading through the comments and talking to my guildmates about it over the past few days. I hope you'll all stick around in 2008!

Quest Discoveries

My shaman's the fourth character I've gotten past level 30 -- fifth if you count the paladin I "borrowed" from The Boy, really -- so I've spent a lot of time in Azeroth by now. One of the things I've really been enjoying about post-2.3 leveling is the fact that quest givers now show up as yellow exclamation points on your minimap, which means that here and there, I find a few cool Easter egg quests I've never done before because I never knew they were there.

The screenshot above is me standing underneath the Thandol Span, the bridge that connects Arathi Highlands to the Wetlands. (Yes, water walking is fun, what can I say?) If you take a look at the piece of bridge directly behind my shaman, you'll see that it's broken on both ends, completely unconnected to the rest of the structure. Sitting in a small alcove in that section of bridge is this fellow, Foggy MacKreel:


Getting to him was a pain in the space-goat tail. There's a section of bridge on the Arathi side that has a broken-off overhang from which you can just barely make the leap. I had a guildie tell me she did it just fine with no speed increase, but even with ghost wolf on, it took me three tries. (If you screw up like I did, swim under the bridge and east a few more yards to climb back up on the northern bank.)

To be honest, MacKreel is singularly unconcerned about his placement as Least Accessible NPC in Azeroth.* What he is concerned about is his massive hangover, and how he's going to get his shipment of moonshine to Southshore in time. Except, wonder of wonders, some hapless adventurer just happened to hop over to his section of the Span.

You've got 15 minutes to get MacKreel's Moonshine to Southshore, and there's no way to jump back where you came from, so it's either swim or hearth from there.

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*If you have an alternate contender for this title, please leave me a note in the comments!

Call of Air

Battling a cold this week (a parting gift from The Boy before his business trip to San Francisco), so I've been going through lots of tissues, leveling up my shaman, and generally feeling vaguely miserable and sorry for myself. I'm not a very stoic person about being sick, but WoW at least makes for a decent distraction.

I don't know how I'll spec him at 70, but my shaman is currently enhancement for leveling and has been a lot of fun to play so far. Just yesterday I completed Call of Air, the level 30 quest to get an air totem (and with it, arguments over whether groups should get Windfury or Grace of Air). As a bonus, the quest giver also gives you a cool buff that lets you fly down from the top of the Exodar to the bottom (plus an hour of increased attack speed).

I'm really enjoying the new buffs to leveling; it feels like we have a lot more choices to make about where we go and what we do in Azeroth, without actually sacrificing XP efficiency.

Hallow's End Alt Fun

I rolled a Draenei paladin today in preparation for patch 2.3 — a bunch of us are creating bank alts which will each lead their own one-person guilds. Then we can use them to purchase 3 guild vault tabs of our very own to hold all our characters' excess stuff. At 110 gold plus bag costs, I expect it'll be a popular new storage strategy.

The only challenge for me was coming up with a name — since my server's several years old now, a lot of the good mule names have already been snatched up. I took a stab at 'Acquisition' and 'Depository' before finally scoring a win with 'Stockpile,' then played around a bit on Azuremyst Isle.

Leveling another Draenei gives me a chance to appreciate just how much effort Blizzard put into the 1-20 starter quests. The Stillpine Furbolg quests and the quest that has you disguise yourself as a tree are favorites of mine, but even just some of the NPC conversation text out here is particularly well-written. If you've never ventured out into this starter area before, you owe it to yourself next time you're thinking of rolling a new character. The novelty alone almost makes up for that eventual long trek to Ironforge.