About the Red-Hatted Rogue

Rfeann is a level-90 night elf rogue on the Sentinels (U.S.) server. Her pixels first coalesced in October 2008. It took her a little more than a year to reach max level during Wrath of the Lich King, because the guy who pushes her buttons is not the most efficient leveler — he’s always been more of a “it’s about the journey, not the destination” kind of person.

Hi. I’m the guy who pushes Rfeann’s buttons (a.k.a. The GWoPsheR). I will remain nameless, because I feel uncomfortable tying my actual self too closely to my virtual self (probably because I spend way too many of my work hours updating this blog, prowling around the official forums and Twitter-stalking Blizzard employees.). But here’s what I’ll tell you: I’m in my mid-30s, I live in the New York City area, I work in health journalism/media, and I have a cat who likes to sit on my arms and chew my headset cords while I’m raiding.

As a WoW player, I don’t think I’m all that much different from anyone else. I just so happen to *really* like collecting, organizing and sharing information about the rogue class. Which is why this blog exists, as well as my stickied thread over in the official WoW rogue forum.

I’m a mostly casual player. I usually put in between five and 10 hours of game time a week, with periodic binges and purges.

I vastly prefer PvE to PvP. I’ve gone through periods where I give wanton murder of my fellow players a shot (usually in random battlegrounds), but it ends up giving me heart palpitations and nightmares, so I usually stop within a week or two and curl up into a ball for a couple of years until I decide to try it again.

In PvE, I really like to raid. I enjoy the teamwork, the challenge, the camaraderie of a well-prepared, well-led, coordinated raid group, and the feeling of accomplishment from being pushed to perform at the top(ish) of my game and sometimes managing not to suck at it. I tend to hang with a small core of similarly minded players on my backwater PvE server and hold out hope for those beautiful periods when my group comes together long enough to start making some real progress.

When that doesn’t happen, I’m mostly a solo player. I run LFR, do quests and dailies, explore the pixellated world around me, periodically dabble in achievement hunting and solo-raiding, and sometimes level my alts (very slowly).

This blog isn’t here for me to tell you what I think you should do or how you should feel about the rogue class. I don’t have the first-hand experience, boss-kill bonafides, World of Logs rankings or PvP accomplishments to claim that I know better than anyone else. I’m just a casual player wading through a vast, sometimes overwhelming universe of expertise and information, and I get an unsettling amount of enjoyment out of keeping track of it and making sense of it.

This blog is mostly about me reporting what is, and letting you decide how to feel about (or what to do with) that information. I only comment on what I think should be when I really, really know what I’m talking about. (Or when I think I do. Which admittedly happens a lot more often than it probably should.)