Introductions...

I took up my sword and shield in the original closed beta of World of Warcraft, and never looked back. The warrior class attracted me from the start--something about standing toe-to-toe with death and emerging victorious wakened some ancient bloodthirst in my veins. Or maybe I just didn't want to deal with casting times and pushback for my abilities.

Tanking is my first, second, third, fourth...you get the idea...love of the game. I have a priest and a hunter in the way of alts, and have attempted to play other melee classes, but nothing has held my fascination like tanking has in this game. Still, I try not to be just another tank. I have tinkered with my spec, using hybrid specs and even occasionally a more DPS-oriented spec for my tanking. I consider myself an open-minded pragmatist, consistent with my INTJ personality type, and thus I am willing to take the road less traveled if it seems like it will get me where I'm going.

I started out on Whisperwind, and eventually transfered to Azuremyst due to my work schedule. In my tenure on Whisperwind, I was a guild officer who took on several different roles: raid leader, recruitment officer, forum admin, complaint department, etc. I was also a tank leader, and took it upon myself to train several tanks in the art of main tanking. I have some strong philosophies about tanking, which I will share in this blog so I won't discuss them in this post. I have tanked the bulk of the major content released for WoW, and look forward to new challenges. At the same time, I'm confident in my skills and know that there is no content that will be released that I could not handle tanking.

My character stubbornly remains an engineer in the (probably vain) hope that the profession will someday reflect my own personality, which is drawn to tinkering. Of course, my love of sparkly things (like any good raven) led me to the jewelcrafting profession, which has fortunately turned out to be more useful than engineering.

As far as real life goes, I'm in my late twenties, female, married to my best friend and healer Belenos, and friends with a fun little group of folks who put up with me despite my bad sense of direction and my tendency to ramble. I've been an avid gamer since my childhood, back when girls were made fun of even more than they are now for playing games. I do wish that gender had not been such an issue when I was growing up, but real life doesn't always work out the way we wish, and even in WoW it is more of an issue than I'd like it to be. I have a background in IT and management, which comes into play in my company as well as my time in WoW. I consider this game not only a fun thing to do but also as an interesting crucible for studying human interaction and management.

I consider myself a writer as well as other things, and have been known for marathon, "War and Peace"-style posts in forums and emails. I love ancient stories, and decided on my character's name based on the role of the raven Norse mythology. While CorvusMelori is my longest character name, my other characters' names are Latin as well and even more unpronounceable.

In my spare time, I enjoy starting land wars in Asia and going against Sicilians when death is on the line, watching Mr. Radar while drinking coffee, flying casual, and taunting stuffy English knnnnnigits a second time-a.