Mastering tanks, one boss at a time.
With Legion coming to a close, I figured I needed something less demonic as my blog header, so here’s a pretty Niuzao.
If anyone has met me in person (or seen selfies), you recognize him as a colorized version of my tattoo! The artist is Melanie Steinway, and I did the color (which I will probably iterate on).
Five years ago today, a talented young bear tank posted the first thing to her brand new blog: A Sunnier Bear. It was a guide to heroic Magmaw 25. It was really an excuse to get views on her kill video.
Eventually that blog morphed into Sunnier’s Art of War and that talented young bear tank morphed into a less-talented, less-young brewmaster.
It’s been three years of blogging about my favorite leather tanks. I’ve been through two classes, three races, five guilds, and six realms in that time. I guess I’m a blog veteran now. The last year has been one of stability and growth for Sunnier’s Art of War. I think I can blame all that growth on Icy-Veins and my friends and readers who have graciously plugged me and my blog.
As my tradition goes, here are some interesting stats (for previous years’ stats, visit the two year anniversary and the one year anniversary).
If you’re a frequent visitor on my site, you may have noticed that some pages have been moved around. The home page has changed from displaying my latest posts to displaying the Brewmaster Guide, and the posts themselves have moved to sunniersartofwar.com/blog/. The navigation at the top also shows different pages. Also, I (hopefully) fixed some of the layout ugliness that occurs on tablets.
We’ve got some changes to Invoke Xuen and Chi Brew. A nerf to our Tier 16 bonus and Keg Smash, but an upgrade to our legendary tanking cloak. Some exciting glyphs have been datamined. And some Sunnier things!
On March 2, 2011, I published my first blog post to “A Sunnier Bear”, which makes this close to my two year blogging anniversary.
My goal when starting this blog was to write timely boss guides for tanks. That goal has sort of fallen by the wayside because this recent tier was so huge and my progression has been unstable and not exactly where I want it to be anyway. Instead, I spent the last year writing about topics that interest me, like Brewmasters and active mitigation.
It’s finally here! The new website I’ve been working on for weeks.
I wanted to move to my own hosting service so that I can learn more about how that stuff works, and so I can have much tighter control over how everything looks. I also wanted to change the domain name so that I wouldn’t feel wrong talking about non-bear stuff on a bear blog.
The name of my new blog is a pun off of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which is an ancient Chinese treatise on military strategy. The whole thing is super applicable to many things, not just warfare. You can pretty easily apply it to video games, especially in PvP. Also, since many of my posts are guides on how to defeat big bad guys, you could say I’m writing my own Art of War about boss encounters (though much less timeless). Finally, if I end up rerolling monk then it fits with their Asian-inspired theme.
You may be able to tell it’s not your conventional WoW blog done with WordPress. It’s a blogging framework called Octopress. Very fast, generated HTML 5. No databases, no easily hackable WordPress. They say it’s for hackers, but you don’t need to know that much about programming (you just need Ruby installed and some basic CSS skills). If you want to see something cool you should go to the site and resize your browser — stuff moves around and readjusts! (Okay that’s just exciting to programmers I think, but I love it.)
I’ve transfered all of my old posts over, and I won’t be posting at sunnierbear.blogspot.com any more. I can’t transfer comments, which bums me out, but I still use the same commenting system.
If you follow me through an RSS feed, you shouldn’t need to update anything. If you have me bookmarked, you should probably update that.