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About Me

About this Blog

You can blame the WoW Ladies Live Journal community for the creation of this blog. I’d been a long-time LJ member and found that community pretty soon after I started playing World of Warcraft in January 2005. I quickly became a frequenter commenter and occasional poster, and specifically got hooked on creating surveys and polls around holidays and in-game special events.

I’d long been someone with a binder full of WoW notes. I’d plan my post-patch talent builds, create my gear wish lists, and track my rare crafting recipes manually — be it on loose slips of paper and sticky notes or in epic posts on my guild forums.

Eventually, I decided I’d like to find a better home for all those loose slips of paper, and focus my previously scattered blogging energies on WoW, and thus Bible of Dreams was born in October 2008.

It is important to note that although my primary character throughout this blogging adventure has been my undead shadow priest, this is not, in the strictest terms, a shadow priest blog. You’ll see posts about all of my characters here, and about professions, guild leading, and myriad other WoW topics. And screenshots. Many, many screenshots.

About my Primary Characters

Alliance

Psychocandy, Night Elf druid.
My first character in WoW. Raided as a healer with a hybrid build of my own devising, and kicked butt doing so right up until her transformation, with patch 3.0, to Boomkin. Raided in vanilla midway through AQ; in BC midway through Black Temple; and in WotLK after a post-Naxx hiatus, came back and cleared through ToC and attained Kingslayer after completing ICC.

Horde

Anexxia, Forsaken shadow priest.
My first horde character, always shadow, never dabbled in healing despite that unused dual spec. Nexxi primarily laid dormant up until the end of Burning Crusade, at which point I server transferred her to play with some folks I’d met through WoW Ladies. Over these past two years, she cleared through all raiding content in WotLK as it was current, and became an officer in the server’s oldest still-active horde guild. You can blame her officership for all the guild leadership posts you see here.

About Commenting

Thanks to the proliferation of SPAM, all comments on this blog are now screened. Prior to publication, I read all comments and make sure any links are not pointing folks to SPAM or keylogger websites. I also make sure you’re not violating standards of civility or the DBAD rule. If you want to make catty remarks or be insulting, start your own blog! That doesn’t mean I don’t publish comments from folks who disagree with me — I do that all the time. But the key is making courteous, well-informed comments.

Contact Me

The quickest way to get in touch with me is by dropping me a note on twitter. I’m @anexxia on there. You can also leave me a personal note in a comment. Since all comments are screened by default it won’t be shared with the world until and unless I hit publish on it.

If you wish to republish screenshots or any other material on this site please note the contents of this website are all protected under copyright so please contact me on twitter to ask for permission. Thanks!

About SWTOR

After six years of playing World of Warcraft, it’s not surprising that I am looking to branch out into more MMORPG playing, specifically, Star Wars: the Old Republic. To that end, I’ve created another blog, Inquisitor’s Roadhouse, that is focused exclusively on SWTOR. As I noted in a post on this blog, it just didn’t feel right to mix the two worlds together.

Guild Leadership

A guide to guild leadership topics within this blog.

 

Administration

Recruitment

Retention

  • Guild Retention Strategies.
    There’s no magic bullet to keeping your guild members happy and engaged, but here are some ideas to increase the likelihood of that happening.
  • Care and Feeding of Your Guild Volunteers.
    Volunteers — be they called officers or not — are the backbone that keeps your guild running. Here are some thoughts on how to help ensure they stay energized and excited about their unpaid and sometimes even thankless leadership roles.

Misc.

Friday Five: Five Good WoW Deeds You Can Do Today

It's never too late to do something nice for someone else. You just might make their day! And given how many folks are in the pre-Cataclysm slump, we could all use some good cheer, yes? Luckily, it takes no more brain or physical energy to do something nice than it does to snark or bitch and moan in our blogs. And thus, I give you today's list:

  1. Add someone new to your blog roll.
    That's right. That neglected list on your blog's homepage with links to blogs that haven't updated in half a year? the one that doesn't actually reflect who you read and retweet on a regular basis? You don't have to prune the dead weight to add links to some newer reads. And it's guaranteed to bring a grin to that blogger's face the next time they visit your blog.
  2. Stop lurking! Start commenting!
    You don't even have to have something witty to say. Or anything significant to add to the conversation. Just say hello. Tell a blogger that the content made you laugh, or that you could relate. Just take the plunge and start some dialogue.
  3. Raise your hand to do something for your guild.
    By now, your officers and GM are probably wincing under the strain of burnout and could use a hand. You can volunteer to help moderate your guild forums, or to organize the bank, or schedule alt runs, or to throw a social event. Most guild leadership teams appreciate the offer of a fresh pair of hands wanting to help out. 
  4. Inject some fun into your next guild event.
    Whether you raid or hang out in a social guild, the next time you get everyone together for an event, inject some fun. Examples: set out a small feast and turn everyone tiny. Bust out those leftover Halloween wands and turn everyone into ninjas and pirates. Share your sandbox tiger toy with your group, and watch folks take turns riding that adorable playground toy. Have naked unarmed dueling matches. Start a new raiding tradition. Or just bombard people with leather balls. The point is — try to find a way to inject some fun into the day, in a way that's true to you and the spirit of the guild.
  5. Just say yes.
    It's easier to say no when someone is asking for help in G. Or when someone suggests running a retro raid. Or doing any number of other activities that were not on your list of things you could do while standing around in Dalaran chatting. But try saying yes the next time someone asks for help or tries to get a group together to do For the Horde! You never know — you just might even have some fun while doing it.

Happy Friday!

Raid Leadership

A guide to raid leadership topics within this blog.

Raid Performance Management

Progression Raiding

Raid Attendance and Recruitment

Raid Alumni

  • When Raiders Only Partially Depart a Guild.
    Tensions can flare when you have raiders who depart the guild on their mains, only to take up residency in your guild forums, bragging about their new conquests. Here are some suggestions on defusing this drama bomb.

Loot Systems

  • Loot Systems Pros and Cons.
    In any sustained raiding environment, when it’s time to move beyond need/greed rolling, you have a few different loot system options to choose from, with their pros and cons laid out here.

Misc. Raiding Tips

Friday Five: Vacation Five

For the first time in forever (or at least a year) it's vacation time! Which means missing a few raids in the pursuit of leisure.

But I do have a few things I hope to accomplish in game before the week off is up:

  1. Get the warlock to 65 and get started on her last big engineering push.
  2. Actually be online at the same time as Milchel so I can run him through SM (yeah for having an Alliance friend testing the horde waters! WTB more of same!)
  3. Eek out another level each on the Alliance Mage and Shadow Priest.
  4. Actually write up and send out the two WoW-related freelance pitches that have been on my mind.
  5. Get through my screenshot backlog (rename and organize the shots from this year.)

BONUS: My guildie Naie gave me her extra eye of shadow, so if I am actually on at the same time as Axe, I have a willing paladin co-conspirator to help me take a crack at Majordomo in MC for the other piece I need to be able to do the Benediction quest line!!

What's on your WoW to-do list?

Would you post a link to your blog on your main’s armory profile?

@Anea, from Oh Look, an Alt posed this question in Blog Azeroth's Shared Topics this week: "If you were given the option, would you post a link to your blog on your
main's armory profile?"

To me, this is closely related to how widely do you disclose to your guild that you have a blog. If you're someone like Matt from World of Matticus, there's no way to get around it. You run the guild, and everyone knows about your blog. In fact, many of your members may have even joined because of it.

But Matt's case is an outlier I'd guess. Most of us folks who blog about WoW are not Internet famous. We're just folks who play WoW and love to write, and share screenshots or fiction or what have you with other like-minded folks via our blogs.

Some of my guildies know that I have a blog, as do all my Officer colleagues. Ditto for my twitter account. I don't have a link to my blog in my signature file, because I like to point to our raid logs instead, since that is something I want more folks to go peek at. I maintain my craftables lists on my blog, linked out to from our forums, and on a couple of occasions, other guildies have mentioned my blog and tossed out a link to it.

But it just doesn't feel right to promote my blog or specific blog posts in our forums. I feel that those who are interested in what I have to say will make their way here. Similarly, in answer to Anea, no, I don't think I'd include a link to my blog from my armory profile were that option available.

I would be concerned that were I to have a link to my blog in my armory, my SPAM comment load would increase. I would expect gold farm spammers to harvest those links and post malicious links more often. I'd also expect crazy comments from fail PUG members, or from declined guild applicants to be on the uptick for folks. Mostly though, I don't see that it would cause an increase in good conversation on the blog due to the reasons folks look you up in armory (from grouping with you or inspecting your gear) don't seem to usually match up with why folks make their way to my blog (because they are interested in raid topics or shadow priesting.)

All this said, I am hoping that the new Battlenet allows for creating a user profile, that you can control privacy levels on, so that you can share your contact information, including blog links, IM clients, twitter IDs, toon names across forums, etc.) with friends who you choose to grant that access to. I miss some of my Alliance buddies that I almost never get to see and would love to have an easy way to drop them a note or keep up with what they're doing. A facebook style update feed for those folks, that I could comment on, would rock!

On Spreading Yourself Too Thin

This weekend, our raiding team is going to be attempting ToGC. It’s Sunday morning, and I really want to go, but I’m not coming. I can’t commit to it. Why? Because I realize I am spreading myself too thin.

I have a big outside of game “to do” list, and a very busy job that has seen an uptick in urgent projects. Add to this my raid commitments 4 nights per week that I schedule around, and I am simply running out of time to do everything I want to do.

I plan to take a week off in April, with a goal of hitting up a ton of movies at our local international film fest. And this will also give me time to work on the recipe and scrapbook and photo board projects I have sitting around in varying states of completion. But until then, I am also going to try to do a better job of managing my time in game.

  • If I am standing around chit chatting, I better be crafting something or doing a daily. No more standing around in Dal talking in /o!
  • I know I want to do both Alliance and Horde pre-expansion questlines, which means getting the two Alliance 70s up to 80 and getting the 80 some better gear and replenishing their depleted banks. This also allows me to have some time to chit chat with the Alliance friends who have not yet made the leap to the horde and to further work on them in that vein. Consolidating all my characters back into the friends and family guild I love was a great step I made in this direction a while back. Realistically, you can only keep a pulse on so many guilds at one time.
  • I want to work on my horde alts so they are all in a good place gear-wise for the expansion. Realistically, the horde is where my playtime focus is, so they will get the bulk of my spare time.
  • In order to have some spare time to do the above, while managing to have quality time outside of the game I need to stop trying to do everything all the time. This one is hard for me because at the heart, I am an overachiever IRL. But I don’t want to be in a place where I become one of those people who overcommitt and underdeliver.

Warcraft Year in Review Meme Goes Shared Topic

I forgot to mention it here earlier, but my Warcraft Year in Review Meme, in addition to spreading organically through peeps tagging each other with it, was the holiday time shared topic over on Blog Azeroth. Lots of great year end wrap-up posts both in my post’s comments and on the BA site.

If you’re not familiar with Blog Azeroth already, and you’re blogging about Warcraft, I encourage you to head over there and check it out. Lots of good resources for many of the popular blogging platforms, plus lots of ideas for getting post ideas flowing, including the weekly/biweekly shared topics. They also maintain a twitter warcraft blogger list.