I’m kicking around the idea of a little old lady Pandaren – nosy, busybodyish, and constantly peddling all kinds of (probably disturbing) folk remedies. I have this image in my head of her wandering around with a big jar of 4 Thieves Vinegar with a dead bird foot in it, forcing it on anyone that even hints at getting sick.

I haven’t decided what class she’ll be (which probably means she’ll be one of the multitude of Pandaren Monks come Mists release). But I like the idea of having a slightly… unorthodox character, and that concept won’t require that she have any semblance of quick leveling to be successful in RP. In fact, it’ll be fun to do low level pick up RP with her. She’d peddle those remedies all through Stormwind (or whatever the major city of the next expansion turns out to be).

I’d love to hear what your Pandaren character concepts are though – brag on them (or just brainstorm ideas) in comments!

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Introduce Your Pandaren

Part and parcel of starting a new blog is, quite simply, deciding how you’re going to set up what you want to write about, and then naming your blog. Do you want to write about PVP? Maybe how to make tons of gold? Passionate about high-level raiding?

That’s all pretty easy to think about, but when you’re just getting started, quite honestly, you don’t know for sure what you’ll be writing about in three or six months. You also don’t know how limited you’ll find your chosen topic. Those things just come with time and practice.

So be careful, and don’t fence yourself in with a name.

Don’t pick a name like Pete’s Priestly Ponderings unless you are REALLY sure that in 6 months you’ll still have a priest as a main and not have run out of priestly things to say.

If you are even remotely tempted by alts, a class (or role) name may turn out to be too restricting. While some restriction is good, because it helps you focus what you want to write about, overly restricting yourself can set you up for the dreaded blogger’s block!

While it’s good to give yourself a focus, it’s not always good to name your blog after that focus.

We’ll take the example of Pete and his Priestly Ponderings. Say Pete really likes his priest right now, and has a list of 10 or so posts he thinks he could write about priests. So he queues up a new wordpress.com or blogspot.com blog and gets started. He manages to keep from being too enthusiastic and posting all 10 ideas in two days, and sets himself up on a posting schedule. In a few weeks, between his comments on other blogs and posts on twitter and other social media, he’s getting a few comments every week and his pageviews are going up. Then he writes a really excellent guide to Priestly Thingies just before a major patch, and his traffic skyrockets.*

That sounds pretty awesome right? Pete’s effectively set up an audience of other priests to create his blogging community.

But then… then Pete rolls a mage on a night when his usual raid is canceled. All of a sudden, mageing is really, really fun. It’s different! And new!

And his blog is all about priests!

What to do? Well, certainly for a few posts as a side project, there’s nothing wrong with posting about his mage alt on his Previously Primarily Priests blog. Most people have alts, after all.

But what happens when, after he gets his mage to 85, Pete decides to switch mains? That happens all the time – especially at expansion switches. (I know I’ve had a main switch with every expansion, though I was a shaman for both BC and Cataclysm)

Pete now feels kind of pinched by his Priestly Ponderings blog title. (Admittedly, if Pete doesn’t care, this doesn’t matter as much.) So he’s left to either write about mages all the time on a blog that labels itself about priests, or he has to switch blogs.

And switching blogs is, essentially, starting over – while some readers will follow you, you lose the continuity of community.

Of course this is a simplistic example. There are plenty of bloggers who picked a class and stuck with it, and other bloggers who picked a class name and are writing about whatever they feel like. But most bloggers go through some wandering before they settle on their true “calling” as writers.

It took me almost two years to get to writing much about RP, and that’s been my primary niche  (or was, but getting back into it is a topic for another post). It also took me two tries to come up with the name Too Many Annas, but the flexibility of the name has let me switch mains, switch topics, and even (for a little while) switch games.

There are plenty of guides out there about how to name a blog. (Google!)

MMO blogging has a lot of the same concerns, but if you want to set up for the long haul, be careful not to pick a name that you’re going to wish you could change in a month or two. You can pick things like factions, or a character naming trend. A favorite passion in game, a profession you like, or even a favorite item. While you CAN change your name (I did, after my first month of blogging), you take a setback in the form of readers and community.

So be careful, as you get started.

Don’t fence yourself in!

*These are all good tips for new bloggers as well!

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Names: Don’t Fence Me In

In some ways, I feel a little silly – a little like the old granny raider, talking about how things were in my day. But then, Icecrown was really only two years ago, even if it seems quite a bit longer.

For me, what makes a dungeon epic is its ability to suck you in – immersiveness, if you will. The places I remember as feeling truly epic to be part of were all places that were their own worlds – Blackwing Lair, Karazhan, Black Temple, Naxxramas, Ulduar, Icecrown all were like that for me. Thinking back, those were all the “long” dungeons, the ones with lots of bosses and lots of things to see and do. Each had areas that were creepy, and little touches that made them consistent within themselves. They seemed “loved”, as though the developers really got to dig into what they were making. I’m reminded of all the alchemical horrors in BWL, the music in Karazhan (and all the scenery), the screams of Thaddeus’ victims in Naxxramas, the build up to killing friggin ARTHAS (and attempting to save Bolvar).

The dungeons I remember as epic didn’t have to be “hard” (25 man Naxxramas was certainly not particularly difficult), but they all felt like their own consistent zones. And there was a certain, sort of unquantifiable feeling of “Wow, I can’t believe I’m part of this” in each of them.

There was something lost in Cataclysm though, and I don’t wonder if it didn’t go with the larger raid groups. TRI didn’t sustain as a 25 man raid, splintering into three-ish 10 mans, two of which are still going. The core raid leadership wasn’t able to continue with the level of cat herding it was taking to keep people around, and that’s just how the cookie crumbles. (I was one of those people who couldn’t hack continuing to herd cats. Life happens.)

But our 10 man group, as fun as it was, really only tugged at half of the strings that keep me interested in a raid. We were having lots of fun hanging out and killing bosses, but between raiding with a character I didn’t RP with and the general lack of RP connection to anything in Cataclysm, I just never got those moments of epic.

That’s not to say that some of the fights weren’t interesting and fun. The Atramedes fight was really cool. Beth’tilac and Alysrazor were similarly memorable. But thinking back, even the Nefarian fight just didn’t have the same kick (probably partially because he was a recycled boss).

I’ve only experienced the Deathwing fight in RaidFinder, and I honestly think that made it lose some of the edge it could have had. Going on a raidfinder run doesn’t allow anyone to absorb anything about the actual instance – it’s the equivalent of speed running a heroic. You never really see what’s going on, you just pull bosses and roll on loot and try to ignore raid chat.

As an aside, I never did get to run Culling of Stratholme as an RP run, and I think I lost out on that. It’s too late now, with Arthas long dead, but from an RP standpoint, I think it would’ve been worth my time to make sure Aely experienced that.

Somewhere this is all connecting together in my head with the changes to raiding that made a 25 man a much more heroic endeavor to field every week. Maybe 10 man raids don’t ACTUALLY move faster, but it’s certainly seemed that way. I’m no huge fan of large swaths of downtime either, don’t get me wrong. But there was something about needing a large team of people, of having to coordinate those people, and of truly working things out as a team that appeals to me and, I think, increases the “epic” factor. *

And to bring all this back to Sindragosa, there are not any bosses from Cataclysm whose voice acting I remember. I can quote bosses from Molten Core and BWL, from Karazhan and Naxxramas, from Ulduar and Icecrown. (Suffer, mortals…) But if you asked me to quote any of the Cataclysm raid bosses, I’m honestly not sure if I could.

Maybe I’m just not paying enough attention. But maybe my attention just hasn’t been demanded as much.

*As I was writing this, I was reminded of this video – listening to the symphony of raid buffs brings back some really good memories.

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

What is Epic?

Which is sad, because this little corner of the internet has been such a staple of my video gaming for the last four years that I’m not sure really how to measure the effect.

I am a better raider for writing guides, a better roleplayer for writing guides and ficlets, a better writer in general for all the posts I’ve written. This blog got me a job with the Azeroth Advisor (which is sadly no longer in effect, but that’s OK, it was very very fun while it lasted) and has made me a number of friends – the kind of friends who bridge the gap between “internet friend” and “real life friend”.

Right now, though, I’m not sure what the eventual direction of Too Many Annas will be. It’s a time of transition for me (new job, changing game, expansion soon, Diablo III, Star Wars), and that’s always been when I’ve had trouble figuring out what to write about.

I’m not playing Star Wars much anymore – there are a number of factors at play there, but the short version is that I’m finding it hard to connect to the world and to feel sucked in by the quests. When I log in and play, it’s fun enough, but I don’t have any burning drive to log in and find out what’s next. I am playing WoW quite a bit, from leveling Annie Mae, Annalira (which is probably a post, my priest is back to her oldest name, with a new haircut and a new spec), and Annata… and possibly Annylais too. I’ve been fishing and cooking, working on Angoleth’s gear.

There’s still a lot to do in WoW, and a lot of people I really like to do things with, I’m just not sure what to write about it. It feels like so much of that has already been done, if only because I’ve been doing this for four years!

So I figured now’s as good a time as any to ask YOU GUYS what you think. You’re the ones doing the reading and commenting, so I’d love your input.

What kind of posts do you like best? What would you like to see more of? Is there anything you’d like me to revisit or start doing again?

Let me know in comments or via email (toomanyannas at gmail) – I promise to read all of them, and I’ll do my best to incorporate what you guys like into the future of this space.

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

In which we turn 4

Clothing was casually purchased in Goldshire, a few herbs in Westfall. She used the extra time to make sure various poisons were ready as well, not that she thought she’d need them, but you could never be too careful.

She read and reread the notes she’d taken:

“Twenty years old, human male, short red hair, average height, solid build. Tanner Circle, sunset”

When it came near to sunset, she put together the first disguise and went to see about buying bread in Tanner Circle.

The woman who left her apartment was easily in her late 60’s, hair mostly grey, tied back in a kerchief. She was plump in the middle and wearing well mended clothing, laugh lines crinkling around her eyes and mouth. She carried a basket in one arm, with another on her back, as she walked the streets.

Arriving at Tanner Circle just before six, she found the bread merchant busily sorting through loaves. It was probably an hour before sunset, and the square bustled with people going to and from homes and jobs, purchasing food for that night’s dinner. The pub on the far corner was picking up a fair crowd as well.

She winked at the baker. “Hullo dear, what’s best for an old Nana today?”

He didn’t notice. “The sourdough, though I still have a few baguettes.”

“I’ll take two sourdough loaves then, of course, and one of those baguettes. Figure if there’s a few left, I might as well enjoy the treat!” Handing over a few coins, she wrapped up the two loaves and tucked them in the basket on her back, before tearing off a chunk of the baguette. It was slightly stale.

It took a bit of time to locate Trias’ little cheese cart and a fruit cart as well, and she allowed herself to get sucked in by the herb seller, ending up with a large handful of fresh sage and thyme. Using the knives hidden under her ample belly would have made eating the cheese a lot easier, but that was, of course, too obvious. Instead she opted for breaking off a hunk, finding a few old crates to sit on, and settling in to watch.

Her target showed up just as the clock struck six-thirty, coming in from the eastern side of the square.  He had two others with him, both with the odd, strung out look so common to those addicted to lotus, but the red haired man seemed well aware of his surroundings.

All three of them went to the bar, but her target left shortly after, leaving Annata sitting in the deepening dark.

She left the tiny lantern in her basket, thankful for the gas lamps lining the street, and watched him as he continued straight up Dryden as far as she could see without moving. A similar looking man passed through the open plaza a few moments later, heading towards Landen, but she couldn’t be sure it was the right one or not.

The two friends finally left the little pub around eight and walked down Bulwarks Street towards the canals.

The little old woman on the crates lit her lantern and walked home.

*****

On subsequent days, Annata took advantage of her preparation.

On Thursday a college student in the magical arts was seen in Tanner Circle, idly practicing something that didn’t look to be going well, his robes ill fitting and magic-blasted. On Friday, a pregnant woman stopped by the flower cart just after six o’clock. On Saturday it rained, and so she sat in the bar and talked with the barkeeper. On Sunday, an old soldier with a pronounced limp went there to buy herbs.

Each disguise kept her mind busy as she created characters in her head.

The student was book smart but had no common sense and drank too many shots at the bar, or so it seemed. The pregnant woman’s feet turned out and she leaned backward in a sort of uneasy walk that suggested she really didn’t need to be walking all the way to the square, but damn if she didn’t want flowers. The old soldier really needed painkillers, and didn’t anyone have any help for an old woman with a rotted out hip?

She started to piece together the story of the man she was following.

The student tripped and fell in front of a group of men at the bar, who laughed at him wildly for drinking too much. Her target saw the fall and left the bar. The pregnant woman was advised not to take the bruiseweed flowers, for fear they might start her labor early. The target was nearby, but said nothing. The old soldier’s plea for a stronger painkiller was obviously overheard, but earned her only a sidelong glance from a woman in the crowd – the target wasn’t anywhere nearby that she had seen.

Each day she saw a little more of the red haired man.

The barkeep referred to him as Augie or Oggy or Oogie or something of that nature. He wasn’t ever alone, though sometimes he followed behind one or two others and sometimes he had company actually with him. He never left via the south end of the Circle, always heading North or West, usually down Dryden or Bulwarks, and often he made two or three passes through.

And so, by Monday, she was ready to tail him properly.

*****

Of course, it rained. Thick, heavy drops threatened to run down the back of her boots, soaking the hood of her cloak and deadening the sounds of the usually vibrant square. It was already dark when the clock rang six and her target came into view, this time tailing a thin looking man with glasses and a tweedy jacket.

Don’t you look ever the accountant…

She stepped into the shadows to watch them cross the square, the usual six o’clock crowd thinned out by the perpetually dismal dripping. Out of nowhere, two teenagers came bolting through the streets, shouting. The first cleared the square without incident, but his friend – or enemy, it wasn’t clear – careened directly into the little money-peddling lotus dealer that Augie was trailing, sending both of them sprawling into the street.

Annata froze.

Augie lept.

In a matter of seconds the teenager found himself on his back in the rain, staring up into the face of a man who looked, for all extents and purposes, murderous. Augie knelt down next to him, and, but for the arm planted squarely in the young man’s chest, appeared to be trying to help. He waited until the seedy man was safely into the bar.

The young man struggled. “Let me up!”

“You gotta problem?”

“What? Let me go!”

“Not until you tell me what’s your problem. Don’t make me ask again.” He pushed harder, his hand inching up towards the man’s throat.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It was an accident! I swear! I slipped and… and…”

Annata stepped in. “Are you alright? Do I need to call a medic?”

Instantly Augie stepped back. “I think he’ll be alright. He just needs to… be. more. careful.” The last three words dripped venom. With a snort, he turned and walked toward the pub.

Bastard.

The young man scrambled to his feet with her assistance. “Are you going to be alright?”

“Yeah I’m fine. What the hell?”

“Don’t worry about it, he’s an asshole. Just be careful where you’re running. Old Town ain’t as safe as she used to be.”

“You sound like my mum. Thanks lady.” After giving her a withering look, he trotted back the way he came.

She caught a glimpse of Augie leaving the square, headed up Sorefoot.

Now, let’s see where you really go all these evenings…

She tailed him up Sorefoot, past Thane’s boots and the Silver Shield, and into the Canal district. Then across the bridge, and around the Dwarven district, back to Old Town. He looped around that way several times, and slowly edging his way towards the harbor, finally sidling into another little pub – a wooden dolphin sign proclaiming it as The Flipper – and Annata paused, ducking behind some crates that smelled of rancid shellfish.

The rain doubled its efforts, thunder crackling overhead.

Time to wait.

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Heads I Win…