Boom.

I got there surprisingly quick, too. Less than two hours for a level and a half and some of that time was even spent leveling my cooking. Why cooking? Mostly because I discovered you gain 5 skill points for a single orange recipe and that really itched my "max everything!" scratch. I'm not sure I ever worked on Cooking before either. To be honest, I only stopped leveling it at 200 because the next recipe required me to go fishing and even I have limits! Ah well. Perhaps there are recipes that provide lots of skill ups in Draenor!

I really did enjoy my questing time in Pandaria. The zones weren't as cool from a monster / visual standpoint (it was mostly just normal animals), but the quest lines were really interesting. In fact, the last quest line I was working on involved helping someone start his own brewing company! Yep, craft brewing has even invaded World of Warcraft. The variety of different quests was cool, too. One quest required me to rappel down a cliff to get some special barley. Another was getting revenge on the vermin that were plaguing a farm by ... collecting turnips, painting them the color orange, and then feeding them to the vermin. They were very upset when they took a bite and realized they had eaten turnips! One quest even had me train a variety of moves with an instructor and his class. I'm sure some people think these types of quests are annoying and just want to move on and kill more stuff, but I thought they were novel and fun.

Buying the expansion gives you a single use level 90 boost. You can use it on whatever class you like; if your character is at least level 60, their primary professions will be leveled up to 600 (if they're less than 60, you get nothing!). Now, I don't think that the profession bump to 600 is worth the time spent to level a character from 1 to 60, but I could be wrong. I have three characters that are 60 or above that I could potentially do this with (Death Knight 60, Priest 71, Shaman 70), but I think it makes more sense to do it on a level 1.

So then the question becomes what class do I boost? Druid, Death Knight, Priest, and Shaman are all out for obvious reasons. If I ever make a Monk, I'd like to see the Pandaren starting zone so that's out. I don't have much interest in a Rogue, Warrior, or Hunter (probably because my dad/brother played them). This leaves Paladin, Mage, or Warlock. I think I give a slight edge to the Mage over the Warlock.

Mage would be my first pure DPS class. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Paladin offers the ability to heal, tank, or DPS, similar to the druid. To be honest, I'm not sure what I would be using this class for. I think at first I would most likely only use them for the additional garrison (which I've heard is beneficial) and the professions (I plan on going with Inscription and Gemcrafting). I don't imagine actually playing the class very much until I ran out of things to do on my other classes which might even be never. Any thoughts on which class to boost, even if it's one of the ones I already have?

The march to 90

I'm halfway to level 89 already, and it feels like the levels have been going by pretty quickly. It's been taking just 1-2 hours per level (probably closer to 2 now that my rested experience is gone) which is much quicker than I had expected. For some reason I remember the leveling process taking a lot longer; perhaps that's something they changed in the more recent expansions?

With 90 approaching rapidly, I realized that my tradeskills were lagging behind. Laktose is skinning / leatherworking and while I have been skinning every mob I can, I didn't get enough leather from 80-85 to get my LWing high enough so that I can use the leather I'm currently skinning in Pandaria. I have a similar issue with First Aid - I didn't get enough cloth from Cataclysm to level First Aid up high enough to use the cloth from Pandaria. This leaves me with two options:

1) Buy the necessary leather / cloth from the AH
2) Go back to an earlier zone and farm for the leather / cloth

My initial thought was to just go back and farm for the mats. I need (I'm guessing) about 200-300 leather. This would cost roughly 450-675 gold from the AH. I have about 5,500 gold on Lak and ~4,500 combined on my other characters so I could certainly afford it, but it's not an insignificant amount. If I go farm it though, how long would it take to kill 300 mobs (and that's being optimistic that you get a piece of leather, rather than scraps, from each one)? And, more importantly, how much gold could I make questing in that time?

I think that the answer is that it's probably not worth the time investment to farm the leather myself. I'm making 10-13 gold per quest, and while I don't know that I will complete 50 quests in that time period, we shouldn't ignore the vendor-able drops that I'll be getting or the fact that I'll be getting closer to 90 (farming level 83-85 mobs will be much slower experience wise). If we assume it'd take 4 hours to farm that much leather and 4 hours to get to level 90 ... I'd much rather be level 90.

Weekly Wednesday Fitness Check-in

Let's see, where to begin. My average weight for the last week came out to 178.5, so not quite the half pound I was aiming for; and really, until now I hadn't noticed I was that far away from my goal! I will have to figure out how to adjust my numbers. I've alluded to the fact that logging exercise seems to be a crap shoot, and when I was cutting I went by the mantra of "underestimate on exercise" so I generally didn't log the full amount of time I spent doing non-running activities (e.g. sports, weight lifting, climbing). Running is fairly straightforward in terms of pace and distance, and most calculators seem to agree about the rate of calorie burning. But I always felt like it was a stretch to assume anyone knew how many calories I would burn playing softball (especially because so much time is spent standing around doing nothing!) so I generally erred on the side of caution. However, if I'm not gaining weight at the rate I want to I need to make adjustments and that is the most obvious place to do it. Backing up this idea is that, halfway through week 2 (unfortunately my weeks begin on Saturday which is inopportune for the purpose of this weekly update) my average is is just 178.4. Time to bump up my exercise logging and nom some more food!

For the third week in a row I skipped my long Saturday run. This time was not real-life obligation related, but rather was due to health reasons. I got back from my 6 mile run on Thursday and my hip was killing me. I'm talking 'hurts to walk' kind of painful. Yipes! So, I decided that a week off was likely a good idea. Since I'm not training for anything specific yet, there's no need to try and push myself through an injury. Honestly I'm not sure what caused it. I've never had any pain in my left hip before, so it's not like it's an old injury that I just aggravated somehow. My only thought was that perhaps my gait was slightly different for whatever reason? I suppose it's also possible that I hadn't been stretching enough with the colder weather and somehow that affected it. Either way, hopefully it goes away after this break.

It's very odd going from a purely strength based routine where the most reps for a single set was 5 to one that is aiming for some hypertrophy ... and where I'm doing 8-10 reps. Despite lifting much smaller amounts of weight, it's still really hard! My strength day this week was on Monday and, let me just say, I felt like poop. I had not fully recovered from the weekend but managed to drag myself to the gym anyway. I completed all my lifts, but didn't quite get the # of reps I was hoping for on the last set. I was so tired that night, I fell asleep at 9:30 with the lights on!

Next week I am out of town so I won't be tracking calories or lifting. It will be the first time in about 5 months I haven't done either of those things; I am curious how I will handle it, psychologically.

Pandaria ho!

I decided to check out Pandaria, mostly because I want to get to 90 as quickly as possible so I can check out Garrisons. They sound really interesting.

Mists of Pandaria starts off with an Alliance / Horde conflict that ends up on the island of Pandaria. You're sent in to help take care of the Alliance that landed on the island; the fighting upsets the locals, who dislike warfare. On the Horde side, you're tasked with eradicating the remnants of the Alliance and then ... and then you have to befriend some monkeys. Yea, monkeys.

This is basically where I stopped last night. I made level 86 and was quite tired so I went to bed early. I feel like that alone should give me bonus points!

The basic green quest rewards early on have been better than the epic gear I have from level 80 ... except my gear is enchanted and has gems. So I still have yet to replace anything other than my rings and a trinket, but it's definitely getting closer to happening.

I've heard the expansion has been popular ...

That was Friday night. Fortunately the queue didn't take too long and I was able to get in and play a bit. By the end of my play time on Sunday, I managed to make level 85, theoretically opening up the zones from Mists of Pandaria. I haven't finished any of the zones from Cataclysm yet though, so I'm not sure whether to try and finish up those zones or just move on.

Vashj'ir was the first zone I explored upon returning; this is the underwater zone I talked about previously. The art work for this zone was (is?) incredible. Every time I went to a new area, I'd pause, think how pretty everything looked, and take a screenshot. Getting around this zone is a little tedious though. Even playing on a Druid, having swim travel form available instantly, it's a little slower getting around than the typical zone. It's also a pain trying to find the entrance to the cave your quest givers are sitting in. There was one quest line in particular that I thought was very neat - essentially you end up playing/fighting as a naga!

The second zone I checked out was Deepholm which I think I may have enjoyed more, quest-wise. The artwork was really cool; not so much pretty as it was "oh man the world is going to end." I think there are three main quest lines there to get back three different fragments, and I've finished the first two.

I even got another quest from the Quest Board in Orgrimmar that directs me to a third zone, Uldum. I am torn between trying to finish up the quest lines I have in Vashj'ir and Deepholm, checking out some of the other Cataclysm zones that I haven't seen (Uldum, and I believe there is another one - Tol Barad), and just going to the Mists of Pandaria zones.

It seems likely that I will not be able to finish all the quests or zones from Cataclysm and Pandaria before I hit level 90. Upon hitting 90, I think I would be hard pressed to continue leveling in old content rather than check out the new expansion Warlords of Draenor. So, I think it probably makes the most sense to go to MoP at 85 and check out Uldum / Tol Barad on a different character. MoP will have better gear and better experience, I believe.

What would you suggest doing?

Mobile Banking

Something that I think was in the works when I stopped playing WoW before the release of Cataclysm was the ability to access the Auction House from your phone. Well, 5 years later, it exists!

I downloaded the World of Warcraft Armory app the other day and it's really cool. I have the mobile authenticator on my phone as well, and the Armory app automatically pulls your login code from that app - very easy.

Once you login, you've got a variety of options to choose from:

A lot of these options are pretty straight forward and I haven't tried others out yet. But I have used Browse Items to check out all the glyphs that are available, as well as the Profile page and Auction House.

The profile page actually shows all your gear, your gold, your achievement scores, etc. Tapping on an item even shows the exact details of your weapon in a little popup. Clicking Upgrade shows similar items that would be an upgrade for that item, and View Details tells you the iLvl, what it disenchants into, and how it is obtained.

The Auction House is, well, the Auction House. You can search by a variety of different categories and filter the results just like you can in the normal AH. Tapping on an item brings up an exact description as well as the same View Details ability. For these glyphs, View Details showed who made it, the Item Facts (Item Lvl, Item Cost, and Sells For), as well as the Required Reagents. Tapping on the Reagents allows you to search the AH for those.

All in all, very cool stuff. I'm sure this isn't new to anyone who has been playing for a while, but I'm pretty impressed!

Have you heard that there's an expansion coming for World of Warcraft?

If not, you probably live under a rock. Not only have the commercials for Warlords of Draenor been all over the TV, but Blizzard did a fun publicity stunt in Times Square:

My characters haven't reached Mists of Pandaria (the last expansion) zones yet, let alone WoD zones, so I have no personal experience with the new features. One thing that sounds very impressive and cool though is the new Garrison features. I'm still a little fuzzy on how the whole thing works, but essentially each character you have can have their own Garrison. Garrisons are customizable and provide game play benefits in the form of crafting/gathering bonuses, bodyguards, followers that will complete daily quests for you (I may have misunderstood something for this one), extra chances for gear (raid level!), and a whole bunch of other stuff. I haven't gotten too in depth with research about WoD since I'm still easing my way back in, but I did come across this graphic the other day on Reddit. It breaks down all the different Garrison choices and what bonuses they provide: http://blog.askmrrobot.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Garrisons4.png

It's definitely worth a bookmark, in my opinion!

Weekly Wednesday Fitness Check-in

I finally started my bulk this week (eating a caloric surplus in order to gain weight). The goal is half a pound a week, so I'm aiming for a ~250-300 surplus. I'm interested in seeing how this actually works out, because I don't plan on worry about caloric intake for special events (weddings, parties, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc). Counting calories is a rather inexact science at times (I don't have a scale and some physical activities are hard to log accurately), so it's entirely possible that I balloon up in weight with that philosophy, or I might just end up gaining a little extra weight than I anticipated.

At any rate, the last week before my bulk I averaged 178.2 lbs so that's my starting point.

In terms of strength, I ended up missing my strength day last week, so I'll just start with this week's numbers (from Monday morning):

Bench Press: 205 x 4
Overhead Press: 120 x 4
Squat: 225 x 6
Deadlift: 285 x 3


I should note that I dropped my strength day weights down a bunch from where I was before the marathon because I took a couple weeks off and wanted to build back up slowly rather than rush forward and hit a plateau sooner. I suppose it's also worth mentioning that I just recently switched to working out in the mornings. I'm not usually a morning person, but I've enjoyed how empty the gym is at least.

In terms of running, I've been getting my week day runs in (3 and 6), but have run into issues with the longer weekend run the past two weeks. So hopefully this weekend I'm finally able to go for a nice long jog.

Tonight is the final night of social sports for the year - kickball playoffs! We've potentially got a double header, assuming we win the first game. I'm looking forward to the extra free time; since we generally meet at the bar beforehand to eat dinner and grab a few drinks, it usually takes up the entire night.

Don't get overwhelmed

Despite feeling completely overwhelmed and lost when I logged in Sunday for the first time in almost 5 years, I managed to stumble across the Warchief's Command Board in Orgrimmar which pointed me in the right direction. I've been told that it essentially provides you with a quest to head to the right zone to continue leveling up. It wasn't until I got to the quest zone that I finally broke down and picked some talents and glyphs, something I had been putting off because I didn't know what to pick. I'm fairly certain I picked some of my talents wrong, but I just decided not to get bogged down in trying to make the perfect decision right away. There will be plenty of time later on to research the best specs and play styles!

Really I just wanted to get back into actually playing, do some quests. It was great. The new zone I'm in is essentially all under water. As a Druid with aquatic form (well, travel form under water) this wasn't an issue at all, though one of the first quests gives you under water breathing and increased speed. The landscapes are really nice, and I love all the wild life swimming around. I even saw a shark swimming around with a sea turtle in its mouth!

Once I started fighting monsters I realized that I needed to re-do the position of some of my skills. It's funny that despite having not played for almost 5 years I still have some muscle memory of old combos skulking around in the recesses of my mind. Some of the skills have changed though, and it was a bit hard adjusting to that. I was only able to play for about 45 minutes though so I am sure that will get better with time.

One of the first quest lines ends up giving you a new mount, a seahorse. I don't know if it's just the relative newness of the game or just some Pokemon style "gotta catch 'em all!" vibes going on, but I love this new guy. He's awesome!

I finally did it

Yep, on Sunday I finally resubbed to World of Warcraft. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but the biggest surprise was ... how much I had forgotten. Remember when I was trying to decide what character to play first, one of my three 80s or a new character? Well, as it turns out ... I don't actually have three level 80 characters!

I had actually come to this conclusion toward the end of last week as I spent more time trying to remember the previous two expansions. I have very clear memories of raiding and PvPing during TBC, but very few memories of anything from WotLK. Eventually I decided that I must not have played much in WotLK.

Sure enough, when I logged in I saw that I had just a single 80, and apparently had just started to level my priest when I decided I was bored and quit WoW altogether. Apparently I even started a Death Knight!

Then I logged in and checked the /played time on my druid and he had over 10 days played at level 80 and his bags were full of epic gear (both PvP and raid). So either someone hacked my account and spent a lot of time gearing him up or I spent more time playing in WotLK than I thought and still just can't remember it. Ah well.

The second thing I noticed was that my druid does not look at all like he used to. They updated the character models and apparently my old look no longer exists. Eventually I found the Barber in Orgrimmar and updated his look to something a little more pleasing to the eyes.

My actual play time last night was somewhat limited, so I mostly just logged into my different characters to get a sense of where they were and to try and remember what they had in terms of gear, mounts (apparently these are shared across characters now!), gold, etc. One thing quickly came apparent - everything was different.

The talents are all different (they aren't even laid out the same way), specs are different, some skills are different, some gear is different (apparently idols no longer exist for Druids), and you can apparently fly in the old zones now! Embarrassingly enough, it took me about 45 minutes to realize they had combined the Druid's Flying Form with Travel Form.

Perhaps the worst feeling of all was that I've forgotten how to get around. Thankfully, my Druid's hearthstone was set to Orgrimmar so it was easy to get back there. But my Shaman is in Shattrath and I have no idea how to get back to anywhere from there; ditto with my Priest, who is in the starting zone in WotLK. I'm not even sure they need to be going anywhere at the moment, but it was very disconcerting to realize you've forgotten so many basic things like that. It didn't help that they have changed the layout of Org, so even there I felt lost.

Fortunately, once I got back to Org a quest popped up for my Druid to head to what I assume is the area to level from 80 to 85. I hope that once I get back into actually questing I won't feel so lost. Looking at my characters again last night I waffled between who I wanted to play first. They all seem like so much fun! I may start with the Druid simply because he's the highest.

Movember!

That's right! This November I'm growing out my mustache to raise awareness for Men's health issues (plus, c'mon, mustaches are hilarious). If you'd like to read more about it here are a couple of links:

http://us.movember.com/mens-health
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movember
http://www.no-shave.org/#!what/cjg9

(is it weird that I consider "a couple" to be 2-3?)

Some company

So on Tuesday I went climbing with my brother and after about an hour finally confessed to have downloading and installing WoW again. I use the word confess because that's actually what it felt like - oddly embarrassing, like something I needed to keep secret.

I'm not entirely sure where that emotion came from; perhaps simply because I've talked a lot about it recently but still haven't resubbed? Or perhaps simply because going back seems so ... defeating in a way. You know, because for several years I thought I was done with World of Warcraft for forever.


And then this morning I woke up to a text from my brother saying he had spent an hour last night looking through old screenshots and reliving memories and was under full out nostalgia attacks. He's in his final year of college, so I doubt he'd have time to play now, but after graduation? Perhaps the band might be getting back together after all!

Weekly Wednesday Fitness Check-in

Well that was a mouthful of a title.

My plan going forward is to bulk (eat a caloric surplus to gain weight) for the next ~4 months. If I do it slowly, that will be about 8-12 lbs. The goal is for most of that weight to be muscle rather than fat. So my lifting schedule will be 4 days a week - the typical hypertrophy focused brosplit (Push / Pull / Legs) and then one day a week where I do a full body strength workout (following the 5/3/1 rep scheme). I'd like to continue to run three times a week, and the current plan is one short (3), one medium (5-6), and one longer (8-10).

What's throwing a wrench into my plans is trying to fit climbing with my brother in during the week. Ideally, I'd do the PPL split Mon-Wed and then the full body routine on Friday. Running would be short run on Mon or Tues, medium on Thurs, and long on Saturday. Climbing is generally a 2.5-3 hour endeavor during the week though, due to traffic, so how can that be slotted in?

I'd prefer not to lift on the same day as climbing, so with the routine mentioned above, Thursday probably makes the most sense. I'd then have to switch my running days around, potentially doing either Mon/Wed or the short run on Thurs after climbing. Of course, this week my brother could only go on Tuesday, and in that scenario I'd need to flip the timing of the workouts (so strength is on Mon, PPL on WThF).

Needless to say, this might be an overly optimistic schedule on my part. My bulk begins on Saturday so I'll update next week with the starting weights.

Well this is kinda crazy

You'll have to forgive a fantasy football themed post, but, as the title says, I thought this was pretty crazy and was worth sharing.

Over the weekend, the one undefeated team in our league ("My Hittas My Hittas") had a rough day. He started Philip Rivers (-5.05) and the San Diego Defense (-3.36), so he was likely assured of losing regardless of what the rest of his players did. The other players he had going in the early games didn't step up to the plate, with 3 of them combining to score just 16.9 points. Around 4 pm, he posted a joking message on the message board of our league, apologizing for the shoddy performance of his players and vowing that there would be changes made to ensure that never happened again.

The typical fantasy league back and forth then occurred, which was humorous but nothing worth sharing. Until a long-time friend (also in the league) messaged me today. To paraphrase:

LTFriend: I think the message board has been more entertaining than the actual league this year. For me anyway [since I'm in last place].
Me: Yea, I like these new guys. (My Hittas is new, right?)
LTFriend: He is. That's former Orioles pitcher Steve Johnson.

... what?! WHOA!

Now, if you're not from Baltimore you may not know who Steve Johnson is. He didn't play for long, but I remember his performance in 2012 when the Orioles made the playoffs for the first time since 1997.

Thinking this was pretty cool, I immediately messaged another friend of mine who is probably the biggest Orioles fan I know. Reading that makes me sound like an excited school girl, which probably isn't too far from the truth.

His response? "Woah! I saw him tweet out his score!" And sure enough, he had!

Starting back up

I've started thinking about what class to play when I start WoW back up (did you catch the change from "if" to "when"?).

Apparently there have been a ton of changes to all the classes over the past 2 expansions (3, if you are counting soon to be released WoD) and I've been told that I might not even recognize the gameplay of my old characters. So with that in mind, here are the options!

1. Pick one of my old characters to level.

I've got three level 80 characters with varying degrees of nostalgia attached. A druid, shaman, and a priest.

The shaman, a troll named Bringo, was character I created on the day WoW was released and was my first level 60.

I spent most of my time in Vanilla playing Bringo, though he fell by the wayside a bit in the latter expansions. He also happens to have a sexy Ivory Raptor, the original epic mount that was later removed. So throw in a few bonus points for originality or old school-ism or whatever you want to call it.

I originally named my undead priest Phineas, after Phineas Gage, the guy who got a railroad spike through his skull and lived. That name wasn't available after transferring to play with my extended family, so I went with Crescendo (because I like to think I'm clever and a shadow priest's power, reliant on DoTs, grows over time; actually my Dad suggested it, he's much more clever than I am). I don't have a ton of old nostalgia with him, to be honest. He always seemed to be the second fiddle, though I did manage to get the class specific staff Benedict/Anathema which apparently has since been removed, and I also got to partake in some really fun all priest WSGs.

The final choice would be my Tauren druid Laktose (I told you I'm not so clever). This is the character I spent perhaps the most time on at level 80, doing Arenas with my brother as Feral/Rogue and raiding as a tank .My brother was better at PvP than I was and I'm sure he did a fair amount of carrying, but we made it to Duelist which I was really proud of.  I remember really enjoying the ability to do a variety of different things in PvP as a feral druid, and I like to think I was halfway decent. And I did manage to get the epic flying transformation quest done (I think?) with the help of some family members.

So yea. Of those three choices, I think I would be leaning toward the druid, Laktose. Obviously all three classes would be able to heal or DPS, but he would be the only one who could tank. I did enjoy tanking previously and it seems like it would offer me the most flexibility. That being said, there are other options!

2. Use the auto-level to 90 feature on a new class

Purchasing WoD allows you to skip one class to level 90. I figure it makes no sense to use this on a level 80 character, and so I would do it on a brand new one. Old habits die hard, so I'm not sure I could ever really play a rogue (my brother's character) or a hunter (my dad's). From past experience it seems as though I've enjoyed the hybrid tanky characters, so perhaps a Paladin would be interesting! Warlock or Mage also pique my interest, with mage slightly ahead. Death knight would also be pretty cool, but I'm not sure if they still start at 55 (which would limit the effectiveness)?

(I just noticed that I've gone from not capitalizing the class names to capitalizing them. Strange progression!)

3. Start a new character and check out the new zones

Not only did I miss the reshaping of the starting zones in the Cataclysm expansion, but I also missed out on the new races of Goblin, Worgen (apparently this is an Alliance race!), and Pandaren. I've been told it's worth leveling a new character just to check out the changes from Cataclysm and the new races would be a new experience as well.

Overall, I think I'm leaning toward just starting off with my druid again. Leveling a brand new character does sound fun, but I figure I might as well start off with the expansion content when it's brand new in case I have the time to get into some dungeons. I do plan on using the auto-90 on some class, but I'm not dying to try something new so I figure they can wait.

What would you suggest?