As you may already be aware, Resto4Life- quite possibly the greatest healer blog out there, closed it's doors about a month ago. Phaelia's blogging community, including readers and colleagues alike shall miss her witty yet quite informative posts, her treeshirts, and well, allover- her.

BRK - BigRedKitty- is also locking up due to real life changes that require a bit more of his time than he had previously allowed them.

I'm writing this post because BRK is -the- blog that introduced me to the WoW blogging community. No, I have never had a Hunter main, or, even a Hunter alt, really. So how did I come across this, and why is it important to me? Because it was the first thing I ever looked at that took WoW more seriously than any other game. After I read through the first few post, I became interested in my own class - as a class rather than this thing that I push buttons and do stuff with.

My friend that introduced me to WoW was a Hunter. He loves to talk about class mechanics and changes and how awesome he is. He would constantly refer to this...BRK thing and I would have absolutely no idea what he was talking about. I would just /nod and go along with it. One day, he posted a link to a future patch note discussion thread and told me to go look at the Hunter changes. The link, as you can probably guess, was BRK. My first reaction to seeing this blog was something along the lines of..."oh, hey this is neat". And then I read his posts. And I guess it was then that I sort of realized what 'class mechanics' actually were. Different rotations are better. Different specs are better. Different gear is better for different specs. You can't just faceroll and expect to give a significant contribution to a group.

So, then I- as a fresh 70 Mage, and still a total n00b- looked up gear lists. Looked up specs. Looked up consumables, enchants, reputations...everything. I found the Elitist Jerk forums, and I read them. I found Frost is the New Black- and I loved it. Even though I wasn't raiding at the time, nor did I really plan to, I still tried to gear myself, and play to the best that I could. I farmed for hours....days...years it seemed to make the Frozen Shadowweave set. I loved the Frost spec, see, and didn't care that it wasn't the top dps spec because I wasn't in the situations that that really mattered in. When I did start raiding...I farmed for hours of days...of days...and made the Spellfire set. Which I think I used twice. Then I decided I hated the Fire spec. So I respecced back and ended up out DPSing most of the people, anyways. When I started leveling my Priest to meet the needs of the guild, I found Ego and her wonderful blog.

Whenever I begin leveling an alt, or talking to another person about healing a fight, or speccing for certain circumstances, or anything at all related to WoW, I can generally find a blog post somewhere that answers those questions.

I guess what I'm really trying to get here is...

BRK- because of you, I am no longer a complete n00b.
Good Luck in all you do.
Cheers,
Fae