[General] ThinkTank 2009 retrospective

Happy New Year!

First, some tooting of my own horn. This year ThinkTank had, according to analytics, 594,000 visits over the year with 850,000 pageviews over that time.

Wow.

Average views per day were about 1500, with a peak of 2500 on April 24th - which was likely based on a post that got linked on wowinsider.

The most popular posts are things like the Icewell Radiance post, gear analysis for cats, and other loot lists. Not a big surprise, that; the first one is linked in my wow forums sig just so I don't have to explain over and over how druids aren't screwed by losing 20% dodge. :)

Pretty amazing to me that there are that many people reading this stuff. Thanks, guys - you really make this special, and you really make writing this worthwhile.

This year I changed guilds, changed my primary focus to DPS, changed jobs multiple times (stupid economy) and played on 4 different computers. I downed the hardest bosses in T7, T8 and T9 and earned two server first titles (though to be fair, our server is a bit ass). It was quite the tumultuous time. Thanks for reading through all that. :)

I wanted to quickly look back at some of the articles I wrote this year and revisit some, or at least point out some nice ones that I was particularly proud of.

10. How to: Sarth3D. While a lot of druids had done Sarth3D with big stam and external cooldowns, only a handful up to this point did it with resist gear - mostly because the resistance math was so unknown. Thanks to Shamgarr's really excellent work we were able to figure out the sweet spots and how to get there. I really like this one mostly because I know of at least 3 guilds who had trouble with this who switched to this strategy and knocked it out of the park. :) I expect this to be relevant for at least Sindragosa.

9. The antitank series. While this is almost entirely defunct (other than using it for heroic farming) between the awesome picture of Russian antitank dogs and the concept of just doing massive DPS while tanking, it was good times.

8. Toggling Maul. I really like this one just because it's so simple; how to toggle maul so that you can choose to use it all the time - or not. Hopefully this becomes not an issue in Cataclysm.

7. Sample values of stats for threat. This was simple, fairly easy to understand and got right to the point - and illustrated very quickly what was best for threat and also how badly bears scale with threat stats. I liked it because it was definitely a guiding point for a lot of people who weren't quite sure how best to go about getting threat.

6. The Future of Block. I like posts like this in general, and this one made me think the most of all the posts this year. It'll be interesting come Cataclysm to see how close I got.

5. Glyphs are the new Flask. I still think people don't do this enough, which is a shame. Glyphs are cheap enough to make (though usually not cheap to buy directly) that getting a guildie to make you a stack or two of glyphs and swap accordingly is almost always the right choice. I typically toggle maul glyphs or growl glyphs (ohai, Saurfang).

4. Savage Defense analysis. There still aren't a lot of math models around SD, and this was one of the first - and it turned out to be largely correct. Another one that dismissed a lot of bad math and conceptions that people had on forums. It's still not perfectly accurate but it's on a reasonable order, and showcases both how good armor is and how decent SD is.

3. Icewell Radiance. Another hugely popular post, I'm happy with this because it seems to basically end arguments about it. People reference it regularly to defuse bad thoughts about bears. It's useful, informative, and the math isn't so complex that it throws people.

2. Nerfing Stamina the right way. This was another post that started from the wow forums and continued here, and I liked both the reasonable math associated with it, the other commenters providing information, and the actual conclusion I got (which was oddly one of the most popular posts I ever wrote)

And my favortest post of all:

1. Phat Lewts. Nothing could remotely top this, and I thank all of you for the well wishes and feelings. He's just over 9 months old now, is very healthy, happy, and I love him. He's the best thing I've ever helped make.