Well alright then!

I finally got my mage far enough along that I can have a second small building in my garrison. Since he's actually got Inscription, I went with the inscription hut. And what did I discover?

That the weapon I had taken up Blacksmithing for, at the expense of Jewelcrafting, was actually made by Inscription after all!

Some Fantasy Football Analysis

Several weeks ago, my dad asked how many "elite" players there were at each position. This conversation led to an attempt to identify the "elite" players at each position. Now that the season has ended, here's what I came up with:

The first step was recording the scores of all the starting players - a starter in this case is any player that should have been started based on his points for the season. So, for example, there are 12 teams and one QB spot, so the top 12 QBs should have been started. Similarly, there are 12 teams and two RBs spots, so the top 24 RBs should have been started. We also start 2 WRs and just 1 TE, D/ST, Kicker, and a Flex.

Once I had all that information in excel it was pretty easy to analyze the data. I started off by setting my arbitrary "elite" line at 80% of the #1 player's point total. This worked well for RBs, WRs and TEs, but not so well for QBs (the top 7 QBs were considered "elite" with a cut-off of 80%). When I hiked the limit up to 90% for QBs, just 3 were considered elite. The final tallies for "elite" players by position were:

QB: 3
RB: 5
WR: 4
TE: 2
D/ST: 3
K: 3

General drafting strategies tell you not to draft a defense or kicker until much later in the draft so that leaves us with 14 "elite" players in the beginning of the draft. RBs tend to go off the board quickly in the first round while TEs rarely do so, so it certainly seems possible to end up with two "elite" players regardless of where you draft in the first round. Which positions should you target, though?

This is what I found most interesting about the numbers:

If you look at the difference between what the #1 player at each position scored and what the last startable player scored, the numbers make sense and are what I would have guessed ahead of time. The smallest difference is between the #1 and #12 QB; the largest difference is between the #1 RB and the #24 RB. However, the thing that surprised me is that if you look at that difference as a percentage of what the #1 scored (so, in effect, the percentage of points you lose if you were to get the last player instead of the first). RBs, WRs, and TEs were all around 50% (58.7, 47.2, 51.3, respectively). Quarterbacks, though, came in at 24.9% which is more in line with where Kickers (20.95%) and Defenses fell (28.5%).

So what does that mean?

It means that you should focus on drafting RBs, WRs, and getting a top TE early on and wait on QB. The difference between the #1 qb and #12 was just 5.5 points, where the difference between the #1 rb and #24 rb was 10.8!!

Just some quick updates!

I've managed to upgrade my Lumber Mill, Salvage Yard, War Mill, and Barracks to level 3. Getting the blueprint for the level 3 Lumber Mill required you to create 75 work orders, and this enables you to chop down Large Timber in the world. Upgrading the Salvage Yard required you to open 100 salvage crates; level 3 gives a higher chance to recover salvage boxes from missions as well as enables the ability to get player items from them (the highest iLvl I've seen from this so far has been 610 which, at this point, isn't very useful). The level 3 War Mill requires you to have 20 level 100 followers and gives you one free seal of tempered fate (this is essentially a bonus roll for gear for raiding). The Barracks upgrade requires you to have completed 50 patrol missions and allows you to have 25 active followers instead of just 20 (this helped with the War Mill).

I also managed to craft my first piece of leatherworking gear. I opted for the legs simply because they were my worst piece of gear at the time.

New legs!

Along those lines I also went ahead and purchased two pieces of PvP gear: belt and cloak (again, simply replacing worst pieces of gear).

I've managed to farm enough Apexis Crystals for my epic ring upgrade, so my next goal will be doing the second part which is finishing three heroics. I used this guide to do UBRS for the first time and that was fairly successful, so I'm optimistic that the others won't be too tough. We shall see on Monday!

Merry Christmas!

Weekly Wednesday Fitness Check-in

My new gym is closed for two weeks over the holidays (it's a University gym, so I suppose that makes some sense) so I've been going to Earth Treks instead. They don't open until noon, so I've been going after work which isn't so bad outside of the traffic. Due to Christmas this week, I flip flopped my normal schedule for lifts and my strength day is on Friday instead of Monday; so no PR updates this week! My weight continues to go up so that's good.

Earth Treks doesn't have some of the machines that I am used to using (Leg Press, as an example), so I'm taking this opportunity to work in some other exercises that I haven't done in a while. Nothing like lunges for the first time in ... months? years? to make you feel sore the next day.

On a positive note, I also tried jumping onto the highest box they have and succeeded! I had never tried that one because I didn't think I could do it. I'll update this later on with how high it actually is, but it's somewhere between 30" and 42".

Raidin' it old school

As part of Blizzard's celebration of World of Warcraft's 10 year anniversary, they re-did Molten Core. It's still a 40 man raid, but now the monsters are level 100+. As a reward for completing MC, you get a sweet looking mount, an epic hat (iLvl 640), and a tiny little fire elemental pet. Of course, to take part in the new MC, you need an iLvl of 615.

There are several ways to get there. Quest rewards from Nagrand that get upgraded are usually 615. Gear rewards from Garrison missions are usually 615 as well. In fact, once you get a follower's iLvl above 615, you'll start getting tougher missions that offer better rewards:

iLvl 630 robes from a 615 mission

The third option is doing heroic dungeons. This requires ilvl 610 which took a while, but on Friday I realized I had finally hit that mark! I already knew I wanted to do Upper Blackrock Spire first, since you get an epic follower for completing this heroic. Of course, when I went to queue, I was met with this:

Woops!

Turns out that you need to complete the Silver Proving grounds before you can enter a heroic. I was a little nervous about this because last time I had attempted Bronze it was really tough. Turns out that it was mostly a gear problem:

I actually found the DPS one to be tougher than the Tank, mostly because I kept getting stunned by the floating globules. I beat the tank on the first try, but the DPS took me three tries. I was pretty nervous about my first Heroic being one that I had never even tried on Normal before, but it went pretty well. I'm not sure whether if changed UBRS around a bunch compared to how it was in Vanilla, but I didn't remember most of what we went through. Likewise, the epic follower that you get for completing UBRS tugs at some memories in the back of my head, but I can't quite grasp them. I won a couple of items and hit the 615 mark. So Saturday I hopped into queue for MC. I thought it might take a long time, but after only about 5 minutes or so the queue popped. At first it was really exciting, just being back in MC brought back a lot of fun memories. I got a little crazy with the screenshots, you'll have to forgive me:

Don't worry, eventually I hid the Raid parties

Poor Majordomo Executus.

Correction: poor Ragnaros!

We did wipe several times though. A combination of a bunch of people who have never played before doing content they had never done and trying to rush as much as possible. It took about 2 hours overall. And because I know you were dying to see the new mount:

Good puppy!

I've stopped playing wow ...

And have started playing Pokemon:

Fighting a level 1 Dung Beetle outside of Orgrimmar

One of the buildings you can have in your Garrison is the Pet Menagerie, but this can only be unlocked after completing a quest. The quest is to defeat three level 25 pets in your Garrison. When you first get a pet they are only level 1, so I knew I wouldn't be able to beat any of them. This led me to Orgrimmar, where you can talk to the Pet Battle Trainer and unlock the ability to fight with your pets!

When you first begin, you have access to just one Pet Battle Slot. As you unlock certain achievements pertaining to Pet Battles, you can unlock the second and third. This allows you to use three different pets in the same battle. Each Pet has a different Type and its abilities are more effective / less effective against one Type of Pet. Just like in Pokemon, where certain attacks would be better against certain types of monsters ("it's super effective!"). Additionally, at level 1 your pets have access to only one skill. At level 3 they gain a second and at level 4, a third.

You can see that the Adder's first skill, Bite, is more effective against Critter types and less effective against Flying types. I've unlocked all three battle slots and tried to fill them with a combination of different types (plus my Dark Whelpling, which was always a favorite). And because it wouldn't really be Pokemon if you couldn't capture the creatures you're fighting, once you get a pet below 35% health you can attempt to capture them with a Pokeball! Errr, I mean a box.

Pokeball or Box?

Adding to the similarities, the Pet Battle Trainer gives you a quest to defeat a Trainer located right outside of Orgrimmar. Once you defeat that Trainer, he gives you a quest to defeat another ... and so on it goes. Very reminiscent of traveling to different towns to defeat the different Trainers in Pokemon.

It's honestly been a lot of fun so far. Leveling up pets, collecting new ones ... all of it plays into that "completionism" desire a lot of people have. I think you can battle other people too, at some point, but I haven't tried my hand at that yet. They don't have any impact on the rest of your gameplay, but it's a fun little wrinkle in case you need a break from Raiding or Grinding or whatever else.