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.