Mahoni-chan
Raid-Boss
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Hello Frostheim! Thank you for your time. Why don't you start and introduce yourself with a few lines?
I write for my blog, Warcraft Hunters Union, and also handle the hunter column (and occasional other mathy posts) for WoW.com. I'm also working on starting up another blog on a less intensive posting schedule. I should also warn you that I tend to ramble. Seriously, I'm not kidding.
Most of the people out there know you as Frostheim from either wow.com or the warcrafthuntersunion.com. When did you start writing Blogs and why did you decide to do so?
I started Warcraft Hunters Union with my buddy Arust back in 2008, toward the end of Burning Crusade. The original impetus to start the blog was as an experiment in search engine optimization. I work in marketing and I wanted to do a practical test on how google handled blogs ... link velocity and all that. So that's why I wanted to start a blog, at first.
The decision to make a hunter blog was mostly because it's something that I'm passionate about, and felt like I knew enough on the subject to write about it without making a fool of myself. I couldn't just write a "here's what I did today" type blog, since that wouldn't answer my SEO questions. I need to write a blog for the kind of thing that people would search for on google. It helped that there isn't a lot of competition in WoW (I mean, there are a lot of WoW blogs, but not compared to, say, mortgage sites). It had always annoyed me that there was no one source of information on the hunter class -- and even the good resource sites were bloody murder to find what you were looking for... and when you did finally find it half the time it would turn out that the information was wildly out of date.
Ironically, a lot of the first "guide" type posts that I did on the WHU were for things that Arust and I wanted to be able to reference frequently (stat conversions, starting gear to go for in Wrath, etc).
To give the community some insight: How much time do you need in average to write a blog? Taking concept, research and writing into account!
Oof. There is no one answer to that -- it varies wildly, and it's different for the WHU than it is for WoW.com. Sometimes the ideas are just there, ready to write about. Sometimes I sit down with a complete blank -- I have to write something, but I have no idea what. And I update the WHU every mon-fri, always, no matter what. I remember the time that schedule was the worst: I was horribly sick and had to go to the emergency room and I was there all night and most of the next morning. I was terrified that I wouldn't get a post up and desperately sent a message to Arust (who quit blogging long ago) begging him to write something -- anything -- for that day. I could not let the site go without a post for one day; it's just against the rules.
So I need something new to post on the WHU every day. Now this might seem obvious at first, but the terrible, shocking problem with a daily column is that it comes up every, single, day. No matter what. It seems apparent, I know, but once you're doing it, it becomes a bit of a daily surprise. And I do not have a good idea for a post every day of the year. So sometimes there's filler posts. Just junk pulled out of my head after failing to come up with anything to write about. A decent amount of the time these are the posts that are most popular, which is a little frustrating in and of itself, I can tell you.
But I'm rambling.
The average simple post on the WHU probably takes me around 15-20 minutes to write. The more lengthy ones can take up to an hour to write. Most of the time the research for them is non-existant. It's stuff I already know, or something that happened in-game to spark the idea, or stuff I'm thinking about in the back of my mind anyway. Sometimes the research takes hours and hours and hours. I've stayed up all night -- literally all night -- at the target dummies testing things long enough to get an acceptable margin of error. Figure maybe the longest single research session for a WHU post was around 12 hours. Incidentally, the stuff that takes the most research often gets the least attention. But it's still gotta be done, alas.
A WoW.com post takes on average 2 hours to write. They are longer (and yet somehow I always go way over my word count -- I'm contantly waiting to get yelled at for going over every single week, but haven't gotten in trouble yet). They have a specific structure, they need to be more polished, and I have to go through them when I'm done and put in wowhead links for every bleeding thing in there. I'm serious, that's often a half hour right there. It's horrible. The research for them is usually less than for the WHU, either because it's stuff I already know or stuff I've already done the research one long ago. When it's about gear though, I can spend hours making a custom spreadsheet to compare every piece of gear an instance drops. I hate gear posts with a fiery passion. Gotta link all those buggers too.
WoW.com articles more than WHU ones I often have a hard time figuring out what to write about. If I'm having a blank day at the WHU, I can just toss in an amusing story about my crazy roomate, or something someone said in a raid. If I'm having a blank day at WoW.com, I still need 1,200 words on a topic that will be interesting to the majority of hunters out there.
The longest a WoW.com article ever took was two days -- and I mean full days. I had gotten a ton of raw data from World of Logs, over half a million lines of raw data in an excel spreadsheet. And sorting and parsing all of that data took forever. But, that's probably the most read article I've ever written, and it was fresh information that no one had ever acutally seen or presented before.
How many personal feedback do you receive and what sort of feedback is it, that you like the most? Apart from those female dwarfen kisses of course
The best feedback is photos of scantily clad fans in the 'ol email box. None of those yet, however, but I continue to hope.
On any given day I get around 100-200 WoW-related emails. Some of those are junk (notice of someone registering on the blog, etc). A typical WHU post gets maybe 25 comments. A popular one gets 40-50, and the big ones go over 100. A WoW.com article probably gets at least 50 comments, popular ones go well over 100, with the most popular going over 350 comments. Furthermore there is a constant stream of comments on older articles, and comments posted on my YouTube videos. I get an email every time I get a comment any of those places, and I at least skim every one of those comments.
On top of that I get people emailing me directly -- figure maybe 5-10 of those emails a day. Most of these emails are questions about how to optimize a character, what gems they should use, which piece of gear is better, etc. I have to say my favorite ones (until those naughty pics show up, that is) are the ones where someone sent an email just to thank me for the work on the WHU. Sometimes it includes a story about how they're topping dps meters, or how they've gone from on the verge of being kicked out of their raid to being dps captain, sometimes there are cute poems or illustrations or screenshots, but most of the time it's just a heartfelt thank you. On any given day, there's at least one of these buried in with the trolls and questions and "First!" comments, and they really help me to keep going. There's really something to the thought that someone took the time out of their day to send a simple thank you email out of the blue, without looking for an answer to a question or advice, but just saying thanks.
Oooh, wait, no. Friendship bracelets. I get those from fans from time to time (it's an inside joke) and that is always totally awesome. We have an annual BBQ that readers are welcome to join, and this year a bunch of them brought me friendship bracelets. I'll occasionally get one in the mail to, which is also cool. It's like having awesome stalkers -- it's a tad disturbing how the heck they got my mailing address, but who cares when they send me presents.
Given that much time you're writing Blogs, what are the topics you remember the most? What were some bombs that you (or blizzard) dropped, that made the community go into berzerk mode?
Alas, all of the biggest secret information I've had has been things I've been sworn to secrecy on. So I had to stand giddily by, sitting on my hands to keep from spilling the news until it was officially announced.
Certainly the biggest storm I ever worked up was the post "Can Beast Mastery Raid?" At that time there were hardcore raiders who insisted that BM dps was so horrible they were not viable -- that they couldn't even manage enough dps to earn their spot. There were a much smaller -- but very, VERY loud -- group of BM hunters who continually insisted that BM could out-dps equally geared and skilled MM players. There was a lot of back and forth in the comments on my blog, and various other forums, for a long time.
So I wrote up this big article citing every bit of hard data that was available. I was ignoring the hearth wisdom and annecdotal evidence and getting hard data from multiple sources: logs of thousands of raid parses, spreadsheet data. In the article I think I did a good job of proving that BM was in fact raid viable for all normal-mode ICC encounters -- they could beat any dps check -- but at the same time it showed just how much less dps they did (a lot less).
It caused an uproar. The BM people yelled and cussed at me for saying they were not viable (the excat opposite of what I proved). To this day I have a stigma of a BM-hater, which annoys me since what I've been doing was trying to get BM buffed. But I do think I changed the conversation in the hunter community -- no longer did BM hunters claim to be able to out-dps MM, and the hardcore players stopped saying that BM couldn't make the checks (though still felt they were undercontributing and didn't want them along).
Speaking of Cataclysm, the hunter-class has gone through many changes in the past and especially now with cataclysm a huge change lies ahead of ourselfes. In one of your most recent blogs (you on mana - i link that) you write about the old times. How do you feel about all those changes the hunter-class has gone through by now?
The hunter class has changed a heck of a lot from vanilla days, and for the most part the class has gotten better and better and the quality of life is much improved. On the other hand, this isn't unique to our class. I'd argue that other classes have improved more than the hunter class. The things that really make us unique, mechanically, include our huge weakness. But we don't really have any huge strength to compensate for that.
I'm hoping that Cataclysm will finally get us there. We still have our minimum range, which is a massive and unique weakness in the game. But now it's looking like in PvP we might actually get a unique tactical strength, in the form of Camouflage. In PvE -- where the min range still hurts us, but less so -- we're going to get the ability to fill in minor versions of tons of raid buffs via our pets, if everything goes as Blizzard has told us. So there'll be a reason to bring the hunter to the raid on all those fights where our min range hurts us (Lich King, Marrowgar, etc) instead of grabbing another rogue, or mage to fill that spot and do the same (or more) dps without the weakness.
Yeah, we can just hope for Cataclysm to become great. Until then we gotta skip time by doing something else in the world that is still intact. And if i recall correctly, recently you've invited everyone to participate in the WHU and get some epic feelings back into the game. Please tell us a few lines about WHU, how can any hunter participate?
The WHU is an all dwarven hunter guild with a self-imposed level cap (currently level 30). Every few months we organize a big giant epic event, like getting together to kill a world dragon. We usually get 300-400 hunters at each event. All the details of the WHU guild and how to join can be found here: http://www.warcrafth...0/04/whu-guild/
Okay then, i thank you for finding the time to answer my questions. It's been pretty much fun to me and i hope our readers will feel the same
I leave the last words to you Frostheim. Until we meet again being a low-level dwarfen hunter!
Thanks for having me. Remember that science is your friend, and elves are your enemy.
I write for my blog, Warcraft Hunters Union, and also handle the hunter column (and occasional other mathy posts) for WoW.com. I'm also working on starting up another blog on a less intensive posting schedule. I should also warn you that I tend to ramble. Seriously, I'm not kidding.
Most of the people out there know you as Frostheim from either wow.com or the warcrafthuntersunion.com. When did you start writing Blogs and why did you decide to do so?
I started Warcraft Hunters Union with my buddy Arust back in 2008, toward the end of Burning Crusade. The original impetus to start the blog was as an experiment in search engine optimization. I work in marketing and I wanted to do a practical test on how google handled blogs ... link velocity and all that. So that's why I wanted to start a blog, at first.
The decision to make a hunter blog was mostly because it's something that I'm passionate about, and felt like I knew enough on the subject to write about it without making a fool of myself. I couldn't just write a "here's what I did today" type blog, since that wouldn't answer my SEO questions. I need to write a blog for the kind of thing that people would search for on google. It helped that there isn't a lot of competition in WoW (I mean, there are a lot of WoW blogs, but not compared to, say, mortgage sites). It had always annoyed me that there was no one source of information on the hunter class -- and even the good resource sites were bloody murder to find what you were looking for... and when you did finally find it half the time it would turn out that the information was wildly out of date.
Ironically, a lot of the first "guide" type posts that I did on the WHU were for things that Arust and I wanted to be able to reference frequently (stat conversions, starting gear to go for in Wrath, etc).
To give the community some insight: How much time do you need in average to write a blog? Taking concept, research and writing into account!
Oof. There is no one answer to that -- it varies wildly, and it's different for the WHU than it is for WoW.com. Sometimes the ideas are just there, ready to write about. Sometimes I sit down with a complete blank -- I have to write something, but I have no idea what. And I update the WHU every mon-fri, always, no matter what. I remember the time that schedule was the worst: I was horribly sick and had to go to the emergency room and I was there all night and most of the next morning. I was terrified that I wouldn't get a post up and desperately sent a message to Arust (who quit blogging long ago) begging him to write something -- anything -- for that day. I could not let the site go without a post for one day; it's just against the rules.
So I need something new to post on the WHU every day. Now this might seem obvious at first, but the terrible, shocking problem with a daily column is that it comes up every, single, day. No matter what. It seems apparent, I know, but once you're doing it, it becomes a bit of a daily surprise. And I do not have a good idea for a post every day of the year. So sometimes there's filler posts. Just junk pulled out of my head after failing to come up with anything to write about. A decent amount of the time these are the posts that are most popular, which is a little frustrating in and of itself, I can tell you.
But I'm rambling.
The average simple post on the WHU probably takes me around 15-20 minutes to write. The more lengthy ones can take up to an hour to write. Most of the time the research for them is non-existant. It's stuff I already know, or something that happened in-game to spark the idea, or stuff I'm thinking about in the back of my mind anyway. Sometimes the research takes hours and hours and hours. I've stayed up all night -- literally all night -- at the target dummies testing things long enough to get an acceptable margin of error. Figure maybe the longest single research session for a WHU post was around 12 hours. Incidentally, the stuff that takes the most research often gets the least attention. But it's still gotta be done, alas.
A WoW.com post takes on average 2 hours to write. They are longer (and yet somehow I always go way over my word count -- I'm contantly waiting to get yelled at for going over every single week, but haven't gotten in trouble yet). They have a specific structure, they need to be more polished, and I have to go through them when I'm done and put in wowhead links for every bleeding thing in there. I'm serious, that's often a half hour right there. It's horrible. The research for them is usually less than for the WHU, either because it's stuff I already know or stuff I've already done the research one long ago. When it's about gear though, I can spend hours making a custom spreadsheet to compare every piece of gear an instance drops. I hate gear posts with a fiery passion. Gotta link all those buggers too.
WoW.com articles more than WHU ones I often have a hard time figuring out what to write about. If I'm having a blank day at the WHU, I can just toss in an amusing story about my crazy roomate, or something someone said in a raid. If I'm having a blank day at WoW.com, I still need 1,200 words on a topic that will be interesting to the majority of hunters out there.
The longest a WoW.com article ever took was two days -- and I mean full days. I had gotten a ton of raw data from World of Logs, over half a million lines of raw data in an excel spreadsheet. And sorting and parsing all of that data took forever. But, that's probably the most read article I've ever written, and it was fresh information that no one had ever acutally seen or presented before.
How many personal feedback do you receive and what sort of feedback is it, that you like the most? Apart from those female dwarfen kisses of course
The best feedback is photos of scantily clad fans in the 'ol email box. None of those yet, however, but I continue to hope.
On any given day I get around 100-200 WoW-related emails. Some of those are junk (notice of someone registering on the blog, etc). A typical WHU post gets maybe 25 comments. A popular one gets 40-50, and the big ones go over 100. A WoW.com article probably gets at least 50 comments, popular ones go well over 100, with the most popular going over 350 comments. Furthermore there is a constant stream of comments on older articles, and comments posted on my YouTube videos. I get an email every time I get a comment any of those places, and I at least skim every one of those comments.
On top of that I get people emailing me directly -- figure maybe 5-10 of those emails a day. Most of these emails are questions about how to optimize a character, what gems they should use, which piece of gear is better, etc. I have to say my favorite ones (until those naughty pics show up, that is) are the ones where someone sent an email just to thank me for the work on the WHU. Sometimes it includes a story about how they're topping dps meters, or how they've gone from on the verge of being kicked out of their raid to being dps captain, sometimes there are cute poems or illustrations or screenshots, but most of the time it's just a heartfelt thank you. On any given day, there's at least one of these buried in with the trolls and questions and "First!" comments, and they really help me to keep going. There's really something to the thought that someone took the time out of their day to send a simple thank you email out of the blue, without looking for an answer to a question or advice, but just saying thanks.
Oooh, wait, no. Friendship bracelets. I get those from fans from time to time (it's an inside joke) and that is always totally awesome. We have an annual BBQ that readers are welcome to join, and this year a bunch of them brought me friendship bracelets. I'll occasionally get one in the mail to, which is also cool. It's like having awesome stalkers -- it's a tad disturbing how the heck they got my mailing address, but who cares when they send me presents.
Given that much time you're writing Blogs, what are the topics you remember the most? What were some bombs that you (or blizzard) dropped, that made the community go into berzerk mode?
Alas, all of the biggest secret information I've had has been things I've been sworn to secrecy on. So I had to stand giddily by, sitting on my hands to keep from spilling the news until it was officially announced.
Certainly the biggest storm I ever worked up was the post "Can Beast Mastery Raid?" At that time there were hardcore raiders who insisted that BM dps was so horrible they were not viable -- that they couldn't even manage enough dps to earn their spot. There were a much smaller -- but very, VERY loud -- group of BM hunters who continually insisted that BM could out-dps equally geared and skilled MM players. There was a lot of back and forth in the comments on my blog, and various other forums, for a long time.
So I wrote up this big article citing every bit of hard data that was available. I was ignoring the hearth wisdom and annecdotal evidence and getting hard data from multiple sources: logs of thousands of raid parses, spreadsheet data. In the article I think I did a good job of proving that BM was in fact raid viable for all normal-mode ICC encounters -- they could beat any dps check -- but at the same time it showed just how much less dps they did (a lot less).
It caused an uproar. The BM people yelled and cussed at me for saying they were not viable (the excat opposite of what I proved). To this day I have a stigma of a BM-hater, which annoys me since what I've been doing was trying to get BM buffed. But I do think I changed the conversation in the hunter community -- no longer did BM hunters claim to be able to out-dps MM, and the hardcore players stopped saying that BM couldn't make the checks (though still felt they were undercontributing and didn't want them along).
Speaking of Cataclysm, the hunter-class has gone through many changes in the past and especially now with cataclysm a huge change lies ahead of ourselfes. In one of your most recent blogs (you on mana - i link that) you write about the old times. How do you feel about all those changes the hunter-class has gone through by now?
The hunter class has changed a heck of a lot from vanilla days, and for the most part the class has gotten better and better and the quality of life is much improved. On the other hand, this isn't unique to our class. I'd argue that other classes have improved more than the hunter class. The things that really make us unique, mechanically, include our huge weakness. But we don't really have any huge strength to compensate for that.
I'm hoping that Cataclysm will finally get us there. We still have our minimum range, which is a massive and unique weakness in the game. But now it's looking like in PvP we might actually get a unique tactical strength, in the form of Camouflage. In PvE -- where the min range still hurts us, but less so -- we're going to get the ability to fill in minor versions of tons of raid buffs via our pets, if everything goes as Blizzard has told us. So there'll be a reason to bring the hunter to the raid on all those fights where our min range hurts us (Lich King, Marrowgar, etc) instead of grabbing another rogue, or mage to fill that spot and do the same (or more) dps without the weakness.
Yeah, we can just hope for Cataclysm to become great. Until then we gotta skip time by doing something else in the world that is still intact. And if i recall correctly, recently you've invited everyone to participate in the WHU and get some epic feelings back into the game. Please tell us a few lines about WHU, how can any hunter participate?
The WHU is an all dwarven hunter guild with a self-imposed level cap (currently level 30). Every few months we organize a big giant epic event, like getting together to kill a world dragon. We usually get 300-400 hunters at each event. All the details of the WHU guild and how to join can be found here: http://www.warcrafth...0/04/whu-guild/
Okay then, i thank you for finding the time to answer my questions. It's been pretty much fun to me and i hope our readers will feel the same
Thanks for having me. Remember that science is your friend, and elves are your enemy.
