This Is Just To Say

I have edited

the paragraph

that you wrote

last night

 and which

you were probably

rather

proud of

 Forgive me

It was spot on

Insightful

and yet hated by the lawyers

Chapters 2-4

Chapter 2: Bored

Bohemond of Otranto was bored.  Bored of Otranto itself, of Norman Italy and the success of his late father's schemes for piecing together a duchy out of the petty principalities and exarchates in the toe and heel of Italy, much like his Uncle Roger had also done in Sicily, but mostly he was bored with the day-to-day business of being the disinherited son of a great man.  His younger half-brother had cheated him out of inheriting the Duchy of his famous father, Robert de Hauteville, whom everyone had called Guiscard -- "the wily one" in the French of his family's native Normandy.  If he were to rise to greatness, it would be through conquest of his own kingdom, much as Normans had been doing in the Mediterranean for the last 50 years.  But while Bohemond was stronger that Duke Robert Guiscard, he lacked the cunning that had taken Roger and Robert from younger sons of a nothing nobleman to the Count of Sicily and the Duke of Apulia and Calabria in the course of their lifetimes.  The problem for Bohemond was how to top their success, and it was a problem he could not solve.

 If only Bohemond had been born a generation earlier. His father and uncle had been destined for obscurity, the sixth and twelfth sons of a second marriage of a minor noble. But almost all of the Hauteville brothers had followed their centuries-old Viking roots, and taken to raiding, traveling to Italy to make their names and scrabble titles and lands to rule. Guiscard had been the most successful, but his even his much younger brother Roger had gotten the prosperous island of Sicily as a virtual kingdom.  If Bohemond had been born of that generation, then he could have used his ambition and strength to find himself a principality of some sort.  Instead, all of the petty princelings had been gobbled up by his elders and he was left to serve his younger brother, also called Roger, who’d usurped his rightful place in his father’s legacy.

 The Roman Empire had still controlled bits and pieces of southern Italy when the Hauteville clan arrived before Bohemond had been born.  With his father, he’d crossed the Adriatic and attempted to march on the Roman capital in Constantinople.  It always puzzled Bohemond why the Romans spoke Greek and why they did not rule the dusty, priest-ridden city of Rome to the north of his father's duchy, ruled by the Pope.  But that did not deter him from his efforts to conquer it.  He was made to conquer.  But to rule?  He'd not yet had the chance and things did not look good.  He'd led armies for his father in campaigns against the Empire, but they had all failed, and Bohemond, while noble in his efforts to make the best of a botched adventure, had come away with nothing.  When his father decided he wanted a new wife, he’d taken advantage of the fact that Bohemond’s mother was his too-close cousin, and thus Bohemond became a sort-of bastard, losing his patrimony to the children of his father’s second wife.

 So his chance at inheritance was gone.  And also gone were the days of a quick assault of a decrepit Roman fortress in Calabria or Apulia -- if he wanted his own County or Duchy, he would need to gather troops and try again to carve something out of the body of the Empire in the Balkans or the Peloponnesus.  And the Emperor of the Romans, Alexis Comnenus, knew the Hauteville family from their earlier attempts, and was wary.   So it was nothing doing there, at least not for now.

 So Bohemond was just bored.

 He'd even been given a boring name.  Not Bohemond, that was his middle name, one he'd chosen to emphasize to focus on a life of adventure.   His real name was Mark.  Who ever heard of King Mark?  No one would respect Duke Mark.  Mark, at best, was a petty knight with a tiny hamlet, Sir Mark of the Cattle-Crossing. Bohemond was a name destined for greatness, but was Bohemond going to find a way to fulfill his destiny?

And so he was stuck in Otranto, staring out at the Ionian Sea, frustrated and bored.  And then a ship came in, bearing the sign of a red cross on a field of white.  It was a new flag, unfamiliar to Bohemond, so he headed down to the docks, hopeful that this would add a little excitement to his otherwise dull, dull life.  What he found changed the world.

Chapter 3: Fat but Unhappy

Raymond of Saint Gilles should have been happy. Here he was, with a young and docile new wife, ruling over his warm, fertile lands of Toulouse and Narbonne. Just two autumns ago, his Uncle William had died and the inheritance had added much of the rich lands Provence to his growing principality spanning much of the Languedoc north of the Pyrenees. For a normal prince of his stature, life was good.

 But Raymond was not normal.  Yes, he had the girth emblematic of his rank, and had fathered children on all three of his wives, but inwardly he longed to make a great religious undertaking, and do Something Really Big for God.  His peers among Europe’s ruling nobility paid passing service to God in their words, and perhaps in their giving to the church.  But Raymond knew most of them were insincere, or at best motivated by fear of eternal damnation.  He, on the other hand, loved God, and as lord over so many souls himself, Raymond longed to do some great deed to prove his devotion to the only Lord he had ever known.  He’d taken a pilgrimage before.  He’d fought the infidel in Spain.  But he’d never found the one great deed worthy of his devotion to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

 So he was unhappy, despite his wealth, power, and tremendous good fortune.

 Elvira was already pregnant with another child, and indisposed this morning.  Rather than wait for her to emerge from her chambers, Raymond decided to go hawking. With the barest of retinues, he ventured forth from Toulouse and headed north into the countryside.  Coming up the main road from Cahors, he spied riders – one clearly with the Papal crest flying behind him – and when they reached him, he was excited to see he’d been summoned to Clermont, a church city far to the north, to meet with the Pope himself and with Adhemar, the powerful Bishop of Le Puy.  Perhaps this was his moment, his chance to do something truly great for the Lord.  Had the Church chosen him to bring Spain fully back into Christendom?  He longed to find out what his Holiness had planned for him.

 He sent a page back to tell Elvira to pack and meet him start packing, and to meet him in Clermont, several days ride to the north. She would be days in planning, what with her pregnancy and the general difficulty that came with a young Duchess eager to establish herself as worthy of her new titles.  Rather than wait for her, he and the rest of his train went directly north, eager to learn what St. Peter’s successor had in store.

 As they rode off, something strange occurred to Raymond. Suddenly he was happy.

   Chapter 4: The Disinherited Duke It wasn't just.  His uncle Godfrey had chosen him as to be his heir, probably because they shared a name.  And as heir to the title of Duke of Lorraine, that was supposed to make him, well, the Duke of Lorraine, the rich lowlands that stretched from Cologne to the mouth of the Rhine.  He wasn't an oldest son, that was his brother Eustace who had inherited their father's title of Duke of *Upper* Lorraine, but Uncle Godfrey, that old hunchback who couldn't father a child for all the gold in Christendom, had named Godfrey his heir.  And when he died, the King of Germany hd pushed Godfrey aside.  It wasn't just! As he did on most days, Godfrey stewed on this for several hours, ranting about how Henry IV, whom everyone knew would eventually be crowned Holy Roman Emperor , had basically just taken Godfrey's inheritance and given it to Henry's own son Conrad.  Now Godfrey was hardly any better off than his twerp of a little brother, Baldwin.  Henry had left Godfrey nothing but scraps -- the towns of Bouillon and Antwerp, little pinpricks on the map his family had controlled for eons, dating back almost to when Charlemagne had divided the empire and created Lorraine as the middle Kingdom between what was now France and Germany.   Bldwin would snicker now and then, which Godfrey knew was just to get him started again, but sometimes he couldn't help it.  It simply was not just.

In the first few years, Godfrey figured he'd keep pressing Henry for a fairer split of the lands and in the meantime he'd just carve out a bigger kingdom by fighting for it, but when he looked at the family map, he realized King Henry had chosen shrewdly.  In every direction, his lands were surrounded, either by his own brother's patrimony, or by Conrad's, and if he fought against the son of his liege, there would be no chance of any further redress from that quarter.  Godfrey was stuck.

But Godfrey was the direct heir of Charlemagne himself (well, through  female line anyway), and he was not one to let a setback like this last too long.  Sure, he had been moping about Bouillon for over a decade, but now it was time to act.  Well, soon anyway.  Baldwin pointed out he'd been saying that it was time to act for almost a decade since the first decade had passed, and that Godfrey was getting old and maybe even a little hunched himself, just like the Uncle who'd given him such a worthless paper title of Duke of Lower Lorraine.  Godfrey and Baldwin had probably spent too much time together and things were getting a bit tense.

 For some reason, as the morning drifted into afternoon, Bouillon was suddenly abuzz. This was particularly unusual because Bouillon was pretty much never abuzz.  Godfrey dragged himself away from his full afternoon of self-pity and went to see what was going on.  Baldwin tagged along of course; Baldwin was like his  annoying shadow sometimes, almost an ever present reminder that despite his inheritance, Godfrey was also just a lesser son of a great house.

When they reach the courtyard, Godfrey got the news -- Pope Urban in Clermont, far to the south, had called for a great pilgrimage in force to liberate Jerusalem from the Saracens. On everyone's lips was a new word -- Crusade -- a taking of the cross as a sign of commitment to this great pilgrimage.   And Pope Urban particularly wanted the nobility who could afford to leave their lands in the hands of the others, or better still who did not have lands to leave behind, to lead this Crusade. Godfrey had land, yes, but Bouillon and Antwerp had never been much to speak off and it wasn't going to hold him back now.  Then he chuckled -- he'd give it to Baldwin and let him stew by himself while Godfrey set off for Jerusalem and a new chance for greatness, one that King Henry could not take from him this time.

The First Crusade, a teaser

Chapter 1: The Storm Gathers

Stephen of Blois lived in fear of his wife.  This morning he had crept out of bed silently, well before dawn, in hopes of a small amount of peace before Adela awoke and began her daily ritual of heaping scorn and abuse upon poor Stephen.  Though poor was probably a word rarely used to describe the Count of Blois, one of the richest men in France, in this case his marital unhappiness was enough to overcome the riches he possessed and beggar him, at least in terms of happiness.

Stephen had been reckoned lucky when he married Adela. Her father, after all, had first been William the Bastard and then more recently William the Conqueror, King of England and Duke of Normandy.  William was dead now, and his son, William Rufus held the throne, but the true spirit of the Conquering William had passed directly to his youngest daughter, Adela. So while she brought with her a great alliance between Blois and Normandy (plus William’s recently conquered kingdom in England) and a good deal of prestige, she also brought the urge to rule over most men as befit the daughter of a great king.  And the man she ruled over the most was Stephen.

As a count, it was difficult for Stephen to have any time alone, so these pre-dawn escapes were a Godsend.  Soon the normal stirrings of his household would begin, with a steady build of noise and commotion, but for now the night was almost still, save for the sounds of the nearby forest, carried by the wind.  If he were to leave his antechamber, he would wake the servants sleeping just outside his door and start the morning’s routine, but he wanted to hold out as long as he could because once the servants were awake, Adela would certainly follow close behind.  He head throbbed a bit at the thought of her browbeating, tapping out a sort of clip-clop, clip-clop on his temple.  Soon, however, Stephen realized that the sound was actually coming from outside his troubled mind; there was a rider approaching his castle.  He waited for the challenge from his gate keepers that would indicate whether the rider was a messenger for him, and soon it came.  He roused himself and headed out to face the day, the messenger, and Adela.

Gordoorso’s Guide to the “Deaths of Chromie”

First tip: The Chromie scenario is designed to be a bit of a grind.  If you come in expecting to win on try one (or even try 10) you’ll probably be disappointed. If you instead see it as a progression, almost like a one-person raid, where you expect to wipe a lot and only slowly gear up and get better and then eventually win, it will be more fun.

 There are a total of 8 events you will need to win the scenario, so you can think of it as an 8-boss raid.  Eventually, you have to beat all 8 within 15 minutes, but there are ways to (1) automatically defeat a boss and (2) to extend the time, so you might only have to defeat 3 or 4 of the bosses and you might have 20 minutes or longer to do it. And as you’ll see, Chromie will make it easier and easier for you to do this as you improve her skill tree through grinding.

 First you need to get the process started.  You need to head out to Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight (in Northrend -- the WotLK zone).  There is a portal down in the basement of the Legion version of Dalaran – right in the center.

 You should see the quest indicator and you’ll be given a series of intro quests

:

The Day That Chromie Dies: http://www.wowhead.com/quest=47543/the-day-that-chromie-dies

 Rewind: (same quest, basically, try #2): http://www.wowhead.com/quest=47545/rewind

  The Many Advantages of Being a Time Dragon: This is the first real shot, where you port back 15 minutes before Chromie’s death and (in theory) can win.  But of course, you can’t win unless you are amazing.  Just use it as practice.

 After this you’ll be given another quest (Preserve the True Future: http://www.wowhead.com/quest=47904), but it’s going to just sit incomplete for a while, because you have to get 4 bosses down in your 15 minutes, but it’s a good goal to shoot for as you progress.

 Ok, so once you’re into the “Preserve the True Future” you’re officially grinding.  When you restart the Chromie Scenario she’ll freeze time at the start and you can check out her buff/progression.  From this point on, you’re basically working towards killing the 4 initial bosses, each of which unlocks a harder follow-on boss, so you’ll have to kill 8 in total.  As you work through this, you will get various shortcuts, some permanent, and some temporary.  So, for example, once you kill the main boss of each of the outside shrines, from that point on you can short-cut right to that boss when you re-run the scenario, and this lasts across runs.  Other short-cuts drop in the form of “Sands of Time” (a drop that results in a random benefit buffand these are only good for the run they drop on.  Finally, as you go on you improve Chromie’s ability to help you with buffs.  

So basically your initial goals are to beat the four shrine bosses (so you get permanent short-cut) and to kill lots of things so you can improve your reputation.  In the course of each run, you’ll also gather Sands of Time, and depending on where you are in the process you’ll use those to boost your reputation with Chromie, or to get buffs for the current run, or to get treasure, some of which include pets that last beyond the current run.

Also, getting Chromie Reputation is critical early on, but becomes much less important later. Chromie has a research tree and while the first few levels have no reputation requirement, the good ones will require you to be on Chromie’s good side.   

 Ok, so the scenario starts.  What do you do?  First check Chromie’s abilities.  You should be able to choose the first two tiers right away and get the third tier researching (it takes a day) even without any reputation with her.  Get that started and by the time 24 hours has passed, you should have enough rep for the next tier.

 For now, don’t worry about the perfect path, just choose

·         Tier 1: Time Stop

·         Tier 2: It depends

o   For Non-Healers: Rapid Recovery (so Chromie will heal for you).  

o   For Healers: Accelerated Aggression (so Chromie will tank for you).  

·         Tier 3: Get research started on Dragon’s Determination.  It will take a day and in the interim you’ll be working on learning the missions and gaining reputation.

The full path instructions are at the end of this write-up as an addendum.

 Ok, after the research is set, hit “Done” and then tell Chromie to start you 15 minutes. Mount up when it lets you (on a flying mount) and by the time that’s done, one of the four quest givers should have a quest for you.  Grab it and then head to 57, 52, which is about where you should find “Bonesunder” which is a mob that drops a guaranteed Sand of Time.  He’s one of 5 Mangataurs that you can kill in the scenario and he’s easier than the 8 bosses, so you might as well get his loot right away. He roams around the base of Wyrmrest Temple.

 He’s tough but not impossible.  Loot his corpse and immediately click on the Sands of Time he gives you.  Since this will be the first time you get one of these, now it’s time to explain what they give you.  You rpriorities will change over time – at first you’ll focus on reputation, then on short-cut items and buffs, and then, once you’ve won, on loot drops.  So for each I indicate the initial priority and then explain if it changes.

 Sand of Time always offer 2 choices, from the following list:

·         Time-Lost Keepsake Box: This is the absolute best choice and you should always take it over whatever else you can get if you have not yet won the scenario.  (Even after you win, these are pretty sweet assuming you want to finish in time again.)  It lets you short-cut the four harder “portal” bosses and I think you need at least 2 of these, if not 3, to actually beat the timer.  These have four possible drops (and I think it’s smart enough not to give you the same one twice):

o   Stratholme Gate Key: Shortens substantially the length of time to win the “Culling of Strathholme” portal scenario.  Saves about 5-7 minutes.

o   Brimstone Beacon: Eliminates all of the preliminary waves of the “Mount Hyjal” portal scenario, letting you jump right to the final boss.  Saves about 3-5 minutes.  I seem to get this one the most.

o   Cenarion Circle Documents: auto-wins the “Battle for Andorhal” portal scenario.   This saves 5 or more minutes depending on how fast you are at killing.  This is a great one to get.

o   Tyrande's Moonstone: I have never gotten this to drop, but it supposedly shortens the time it takes to finish the Well of Eternity portal scenario.  

·         Bronze Drake: This is sort of like the Keepsake box, but for the outer shrine objectives. When you accept the drake reward, it automatically wins you one of the four shrines.  I have found that the Azure shrine is the hardest one for me to win, and the Ruby shrine is the easiest (and the Obsidian Shrine is also easy one you’ve won it once), so if those two shrines are still up, I sometimes wait to kill the bosses and then use the bronze dragon, but in general, always take these when offered unless the Keepsake Box is available. And then just click these as soon as you get them.

·         Reputation Buffs.  Until you get the Timelord achievement from maxing out your Chromie reputation, I would take these over anything except for the two short-cut drops above.  Once you’ve hit Timelord, though, these become worthless.  There are two basic kinds, some that provide +x reputation and some that multiply all reputation gains by some percentage (these are called “Favor of the Bronze”). These stack, so that the more of the latter kind you get, the more you get from the former.  

·         Battle Buffs. Prior to maxing out reputation, I would tend to take reputation over these, but as you get closer to Timelord status (and for sure once you hit it) these become keys to winning the scenarios. They provide boosts to damage, survivability, and speed. These include

o   Fangs of the Bronze (more DPS)

o   Hide of the Bronze (better survivability)

o   Wings of the Bronze (faster movement speed)

·         Stolen Time. These add +10, +20, or +30 seconds to your 15 minute time and they stack indefinitely.  I’ve gotten close to getting 10 minutes of bonus time from these.  When you are first learning the scenarios, they aren’t that useful because the point is just to win one scenario per try, but one you are ready to try to win the whole thing, these are good.  I would say that the DPS and survivability buffs (Fans and Hide of Dragon) still outrank this, but I’d take these over Wings of the Bronze.

·         Time-Lost Wallet: Usually 35-40 gold pieces, but sometime a very rare pet drop.  Until you win the whole thing, any of the above drops are superiod,  but once you win, I’d say to take this as your first choice, since the point of farming this is for more chances at the pets, and this is where you get the pets.

·         Timewarped Badges.  These are just +10 badges, like mini rewards from a timewalking dungeon.  Useful if you want stuff but lower priority that any of the above as long as you are trying to win.

·         Gold. Gold is good but 30-40gp per drop won’t be better than anything above (except reputation boosts once they become useless) unless you just don’t care for any of the rewards.  But if you are here farming for gold, you’ve missed the point! This is a consolation prize, not a goal

 Ok, so now what do you do?

 Once you’ve killed the first Magnataur and chosen the buff reward, I would head to the Ruby Dragonshire because I think it’s the easiest of the four to win.  There will be a Magnataur named Dregmar Runebeard walking around 53, 48, and he is easy to kill for some more Sands of Time.  Kill him, get the buffs and then head inside. To win this the first time through you need to solve the mystery of the shrine.  I won’t spoil that for you here, but if you get stuck, go here for a run through:  http://www.wowhead.com/the-deaths-of-chromie-scenario-guide#ruby

 While here, check for treasure chests.  There is usually one available, at one of these two spots:  45.2, 47.3 or 48.8, 49.5.

 As I said, this is the easiest of the four outside bosses to beat, so until you can win this one, it’s going to be hard to do others.  Once you do win in, then you can swing by here, kill Dregmar Runebeard and the Ruby Boss for their Sands of Time buffs, and then work on the next shrine.

 For the second shrine, I’d recommend the Obsidian Shrine.  Kill the Magnataur named Icefist who can be found along the road at 43.5, 31.5 or so.  Then work throught he mystery of this shrine.  This is the longest one to GET to the boss, but the boss itself is pretty easy.  Again, no spoilers as to the mystery, but you can go hear if you get stuck: http://www.wowhead.com/the-deaths-of-chromie-scenario-guide#obsidian

 This is the only shrione where finding the treasure chests is not worth it – they are down a path you can otherwise skip, so don;’t worry about treasure chests here.

 Once you have this one down, this is a very easy way to get more Sands – swoop in, kill the Magnataur and the Boss (who will be outside the cave once you’ve won this once, makes for a quick kill).

 Then third hardest is the Emerald Shrine.  Kill its Mangantaur (Iceshatter) who can be found close to 62, 69.  Then you have to solve the mystery.  Spoilers can be found here: http://www.wowhead.com/the-deaths-of-chromie-scenario-guide#emerald  This one is pretty fast for re-killing but I found the boss to be somewhat annoying b/c he can put you to sleep for 5 seconds.  

 While here, check for treasure chests.  There is usually one available, at one of these two spots:  62.7, 73.5 (in a pool) or 65.7, 73.5.

 For the last one (the Azure shrone), hopefully you’ve gotten a Bronze Dragon and killed it, but at some point you’ll have to deal with it.  

 Kill the Magnataur on the way in: Bloodfeast – he tends to be around 58, 64.

 The only reason I hate it is because you end up fighting on a little platform in the air and he makes the circle increasingly small.  For those of you less clumsy than I am, this may not be an issue but I fall off a lot or get stuck in the purple damage areas, etc.  The spoilers for this can be found here:  http://www.wowhead.com/the-deaths-of-chromie-scenario-guide#azure

 And also, check for treasure chests.  There is usually one available, at one of these two spots:  54.5, 65 (on a platform) or 56.5, 68.9 (on the ground).

 As you open these up, you unlock (permanently) access to the four portal scenarios, so that by the time you finish the first 4, it tells you that you need 8 to win.  This depressed me at first, because I thought it was getting harder the better I did, but it’s always the case you need 8 to win.  The quest you took that asks you to win 4 is still there, and the first time you get all 4 of the shrines in one 15 minute run (with boosts from the Sands of Time) you will get credit for the quest.  But you don’t WIN until you get all 8.

 Once you’ve gotten these outer 4, you should work, one at a time, at the four inner ones.  In terms of which to work through first to learn how, I guess I’d recommend this order

 ·         Mount Hyjal: The Hyjal one is very straightforward – you walk in and fight waves of monsters until you kill the uber boss.  (Info on that is here: http://www.wowhead.com/the-deaths-of-chromie-scenario-guide#mount-hyjal but I doubt you’ll need a spoiler for this).

·         The Culling of Stratholme.  This one is not hard, just long.  There are some running-around quests needed to get the key to go fight the bad guys, then you work through to fight the bad guy.  My STRONG recommendation (esp. after you do this one once the slow way) is to walk in, buy all the items, and then do the quests that start at [[guy name/location]].  Trust me – this will save like 2 minutes of running around on errands.  That means you will go to

o   Frag Suabi at 41.6, 71 and buyt he two items he sells

o   George Goodman at 61.6, 35.6 and buy TWO of the Jerky he sells and 1 of the other green item he sells.

o   Robert Pierce at 58.1, 45.6 and buy his rifle

o   Olivia Zenith at 63, 42.6 and buy her bandage

o   Sophie Aaron at 64, 55.2 and buy her flower.

o   Once you finish these quests, the key you get open the door in the town hall, NOT one of the gates.  Other hint can be found here: http://www.wowhead.com/the-deaths-of-chromie-scenario-guide#culling-of-stratholme

·         Battle for Andoral.  This one is the most mysterious of the bunch, and so if you get frustrated, read the spoilers here (http://www.wowhead.com/the-deaths-of-chromie-scenario-guide#andorhal).  I enjoyed solving it, but once I did I was glad that this short-cut drop to automatically win this one is a pretty common drop.

·         The Well of Eternity.  I dislike this one.  There’s no real mystery – you just have to get across a field of annoying mobs, get to a portal and be out of combat long enough to click through, and then you follow the path to the next portal, killing a boss along the way.  I have NEVER gotten the short cut drop for this, so I have grown tired of this one but there’s nothing particularly tricky about it. More details here: http://www.wowhead.com/the-deaths-of-chromie-scenario-guide#the-well-of-eternity

 Finally, now that you have won all 8 of these in separate runs, it’s time to combine them and work for a 8-in-one-try victory.  I recommend:

 Get the quest at the start.  Kill Bonesunder (the Magnataur at the base of Wyrmrest Temple – near 57,52).  Then go in and do the Emerald shrine, killing the magnataur and the boss, and grabbing the treasure chest items).  Click on all Sands of Times unless you get a Bronze Dragon; if you get one of these, kill the Emerald Boss first and then click on it because it will be more likely to get rid of the Azure shrine boss, which is the hardest.

 Then fly to Emerald shrine, kill its Magnataur, boss, and get the treasure chest.  Keep clicking the Sands of Time.  Do the same for the Obsidian Shrine, except don’t bother with the treasure chest there.  If you still have not auto-killed the Azure shrine boss, then, if you have finished the starting uqest, go back to wyrmrest and claim the reward – hopefully this will autokill the Azure boss.  

 If not, then fly to the Azure shrine, kill the magnataur, get the treasure, and if those don’t kill the boss, then deal with him.

 Hopefully at this point, you’ve gotten at least 2 keepsake boxes (the portal scenario shortcuts) and have 8-10 minutes left, plus, ideally, you have a ton of buffs built up from Sands of Time.  If not, you probably won’t win, but keep trying.  For this, the 4th level of research, which doubles the Sands drop rate, was a real game-changer for me – double the drops makes the goal of having 10 minutes and 2 keepsakes really feasible.  

 Then, do whichever two (or more) scenarios you have the shortcuts for, and hope that another keepsake box drops before you finish those.  If so, you’ll be in good shape.  Then tackle whichever ones are left.

 This took me about 40 tries.  But I had fun getting better at it and I was happy with the rewards I got.  I hope you enjoy it too!

 Addendum on Chromie Buffs.

 Here is the path you’ll want to follow, at least based on my experience:

 Tier 1: Pick Time Stop

You get Damage and healing increased by 5%.

Also

Chromie can freeze an enemy and all enemies within 5 yards of them for 3 sec which comes in handy as an interrupt for the bad guys nasty attacks (if you get lucky and Chromie times it right)

 Tier 2: (This depends on your class)

Bonus: Health increased by 5%.

 If you are a healer, then pick Accelerated Aggression, otherwise, pick Rapid Recovery

 ·         Accelerated Aggression - Chromie becomes a tank, increasing threat by 200% and healing received by 60%.

o   Chromie also gains a damage bonus that scales with her current health, increasing her damage by up to 100%, but she loses 2% of her maximum health every second when above 50% health.

o   This damage bonus is increased to up to 500% if you are a healer.

·         Rapid Recovery Passive - Chromie becomes a healer.  You get the following healing abilities:

o   Foresight - Chromie reduces the damage you take from the next 3 attacks made against you by 90%.

o   Regeneration - Allies within 10 yards restore 1% of their maximum health every 3 sec.

o   Rewind Time - Restores an ally's health to its highest point in the last 8 seconds.

 Tier 3 (1 Day Research – no reputation level required)

Movement and mounted speed increased by 5%.

 Dragon's Determination- Chromie's damage taken is reduced by 20%.

(note the other option is a reputation accelerator, but if Chromie dies, the scenario ends automatically, so giving her some staying power was much better for me)

  Tier 4 (1 Day Research, also requires your reputation to be at “Chrono-Friend”)

Damage and healing increased by 10%.

Blessing of the Bronze Dragonflight, this makes it more likely you will get a “Bronze Drake” when you open the Sands of Time. These are the drakes that automatically win one of the four shrines (the 4 easier bosses) for you.  As you are working towards getting 8 down in 15 minutes, these are very handy.

(the other option, where Chromie shows you treasure chests on the minimap is unnecessary b/c they spawn in only a few, consistent spots).

 Tier 5 (1 Day Research, also requires your reputation to be at “Bronze Ally”)

Bonus: Health increased by 10%.

 There is no choice here, you have to take Fortuitous, which doubles the chance of getting a Sands of Time, and for guaranteed drops it doubles the quantity you get.  (So, for example, the quests within the scenario that give you 3 Sands now give 6).  This was the tier level that gave me enough to get 8 down in 15 minutes b/c the Sands of Time provided so many shortcut drops and duration extenders.  Plus, once you are done and start farming the scenario for pets, more Sands of Time equals more chances for loot)

 Tier 6 (2 Days of Research, also requires your reputation to be at “Epoch-Mender”

Movement and mounted speed increased by 10%.

 Choose Keepsake Continuum, which gives you a higher chance to earn Keepsake Boxes from Sands of Time.  These are the most important drops because they significantly shorten the time needed to do the 4 harder “portal” bosses.  In one case, it does the whole thing for you, in the others it cuts the time substantially.  

 (the other choice, Infinite Velocity, provides portals from Wyrmrest to the dragonshrines and is a minor benefit, nothing like the value of a Keepsake Box.

  Tier 7 (5 Days of Research, also requires your reputation to be at “Timelord”)

Damage, healing, health, movement, and mounted speed all increased by 50%.

 There is no choice, you have to choose Dragon Crash which lets Chromie get a bad-ass dragon attack.

Outside my lane again, but only a little

If you have no idea who I am (i.e, if you are almost everyone on earth), a quick bio: I’m an economist who works in litigation, studying antitrust issues.  I know a lot about a very narrow slice of economics and that slice involves how markets set prices (for goods, services, labor, etc), how collusion among firms alters that.  I know a little more about certain markets b/c I study them a lot, esp. high tech products and sports/entertainment issues (ticket prices, labor prices, etc).  I am not a macro economist, so I do not study government policy, etc.  I have a sports econ-related blog here: http://sportsgeekonomics.tumblr.com/

This is a post about gov’t statistics on unemployment, so while I probably understand economics better than the average person, I am not trained in this sub-field.  This is more about politics anyway...

Ok, so for 8 years GOP people told us that Obama was goosing up the unemployment figures.  I remember Jack Welch saying he was certain that the BLS faked their numbers, etc.  Trump famously said the unemployment might be as high as 42% rather than 4.9% under Obama.  Well, the same methodology and the same bureaucrats just produced a 4.7% number.  So, Jack Welch, was it politically goosed this time?  How do you know?  Mighty convenient eh?  Who changed within the set of people who do the calcs?  What changed in terms of the formula or the methodology?  If it’s the same bureaucrats and the same method and the same formula, how can it be fake in 2016 but real in 2017?  Did unemployment go from 42% to 4.7%?  really?  that would be YUUUUUUGE and awesome, but I’d suspect we’d have noticed millions of people suddenly working after being out of workforce.  Traffic would be much worse.  Lines for lunch would be staggering, etc.

Here’s what I think

End of rant.  Be well!

A quick thought on “personal responsibility” and healthcare

Paul Ryan today said something silly about how Obamacare doesn’t work b/c we ask the people who are healthy to subsidize the people who are sick, as if that is not the core of any* system of insurance -- we all pay in and the people who end up collecting on the insurance (ex post) get more than they paid in, and the people who end up not collecting (b/c they didn't get sick, their house didn't burn down, etc.) paid in more (ex ante) than they got out (ex post).

And since almost everyone is at least a little risk averse, we actually all benefit (ex ante) by raising the average cost (b/c insurers get a slice) but lowering the high-end outlier impact.

Then some dude on the internet said something to me about omg, mandates suck and I was thinking about the current law mandating that hospitals treat patients whether they have insurance or not, and realized that the whole GOP line about healthcare is not a right and it’s really about choice and personal responsibility, skip your iPhone if you care about healthcare, blah, blah, and realized that the “I don;t want insurance” crowd who oppose the mandate are in fact, a bunch of freeloading “takers” mooching off of the public.

1) Guy chooses not to buy insurance.  Saves himself money

2) Guy gets into car accident, hospital patches him up anyway.

3) Guy declares bankruptcy.

Voila, there’s your “mandates limit freedom” man sucking off the nanny state teet.

I think we could keep everything else in Obamacare the way it is, and the say if you’re going to end the individual mandate, you should simply declare that anyone who doesn’t voluntarily choose to buy insurance or to pay the fine is cool on their taxes, but is banned from anything but cash-up-front emergency room/doctor services.  You cool with that, freedom fries folks?

*Bob Clement of South Carolina points out to me that there are forms of insurance that only share ex ante risk, so that each person is paying his/her actuarial cost (plus some level of profit).   if all Paul Ryan was saying was that because, ex ante, we know that some people will be paying more than their actuarial amount to ensure other are covered, I should amend the words “any system of insurance” to say “any system of social insurance”

This is all the more true since the young and healthy will almost all eventually become older and less healthy, so it really may be more of a smoothing of payment than a subsidy, once we get past the first clump of old people”

As I w tli bt  pos, i o hikhat I si w ls, ut 

musings on rights

LetsGoCavs!@LetsCavs@MarkEnnis @andyhre Seems pretty tautologicalLast night I saw on twitter someone (Charlie Kirk) posted something about how Bernie Sanders couldn’t be right about healthcare being a right because all rights come from God.

This struck me as blasphemous to my understanding of conceptions of God in Christian theology [Warning: I am not Christian, my knowledge of such is through reading/education, and not an upbringing in a Christian faith].  I posted this and a few cool folks engaged me without acrimony.  In essence, the summary of that argument was well expressed by Mark Ennis, who said:

To which he added (in response to my questioning what it meant to have a right to assert against God) that 

It stuck me that that didn’t solve the original Kirk’s tweet’s problem, which posited that rights, by virtue of coming from God, cannot come from government, but in Mark’s formulation, since everything comes initially from God though mediated through human action, that Bernie’s statement wouldn’t have been contradictable by pointing to God.  yes, in mark’s reformulation, all rights come from God, but government create them too, as instruments of that God.

In essence, my problem with the idea that only God can grant rights is that usually you have a valid grievance against a rights-grantor for not living up to the obligation.  If the right to free speech comes from God, is God in the wrong when he doesn’t protect my right from being abridged.  it seemed, well, blasphemous.  LetsGoCavs! (@LetsCavs) which I hope is a pseudonym, seemed to mirror what i was saying when he added

Ian Gunn (@IanPGunn) said I was being imprcise

This didn’t ring true with me, for various reason, the first of which is that i don’t think standard theology posits that God cannot take away free will, but chooses not to.  In which case, under the conception of a right I was groping towards, free will is a gift.

Thomas Baker (@Drtab3), who is a law professor and so probably what we would have called an “expert” prior to the Era of Trump, made an offhand comment about legal right (with the impliation of being contrasted w/natural rights 

That set me on the right track, though i was too tired to think it through then.  This morning I googled and got the following from Wikipedia, which i think captures what i was trying to say:

For Bernie Sanders to be talking about healthcare as a right of every American, i think he has to be speaking in the framework of legal rights. For one thing, like me, Bernie is a pretty secular Jew.  But for another, it was in a political context and clearly the question of whether healthcare is, or is not, a right, is a political/legal question.  We would all agree Free Speech is a right but that’s not universally true -- In Turkey it’s illegal to criticize the President.

If THOSE kinds of legal rights come from God, and are inalienable, then I would repeat my statement about blasphemy.  Saying God’s laws are country-specific and can change with the whim of a dictator is a weird thing to believe if you also believe int he omnipotence of God.  The right of entry into a country as a green-card holder seems a classic example of something man-made and to blame God for it strikes me as contrary to what I understand to be normal conceptions of the diety.

With that said, I understand completely the conception of universal or natural right and we could argue over whether one needs to mention God or not, but if you believe in an omnipotent, benevolent God, clearly those rights are consistent with that belief.  I didn’t mean to assert that belief that natural rights come from God was blasphemous.  But I think to assert that when the right to drink as a 19 year old was taken away in Massachusetts, that was God’s taking away people’s rights seems blasphemous to me, other than in the attenuated way mark described it, as all human actions coming ultimately from God.  And that attenuated understanding is fine, but it’s not what the original tweeter meant, which was that humans play no role in trhe creation of legal rights.  I think that’s not what most Christian theologies believe, but I am happy to learn if I’m wrong.

None of this was meant to imply any insult on any faith (or lack there of).  I just wanted to explain why i said what I said.

Silly Game Stuff

When you fight Ashlei, her second pet does not attack and will fall asleep (and get swapped out) on the third attack.  So if you have an Infinite Whelpling, use tail sweep to beat down the first pet (Pixie Bell) and do 2 attacks on the Plush Elek (doodle).  On attack 3, use Early advantage and that will end up hitting Ashlei’s Talbuk (Tally) twice.  then tail swipe until the Whelpling dies.  Bring in Pet Bombling to finish off Talbuk and commit suicide using Explode.  That leaves you with your carry pet and just the plush elek and you just slowly whittle it down.  You get very high XP on a level 1 pet, and then again when you do it the next day with a level 10-15 or so.

Better still, if you can buy a pet treat for a 50% Xp boost, or a lesser pet treat (for 25%) it really zooms up.

Ashlei is located at 50,30 in Shadowmoon Valley (Draenor version)

How to Succeed without having to Secede.

As a consistently blue voter in a consistently blue state, with family and friends generally all of the same stripe, I’ve been hearing (mostly non-serious) talk of the west coast states moving to secede from the union, similar to how the Confederate States seceded between the election and inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.

My view is that this was an act of treason then and, short of a national vote to split apart, would be treason now.  i think this when red states threaten it, and I think it when my own California seems to at least have a few people thinking about it.

But the good news is i think our federal system provides a way for California specifically, and the Pacific Time Zone more generally, to move forward within the United States without giving up our values, through the vehicle of state taxation.  As I understand it, every dollar of state income tax you pay lowers your federal taxable income by a similar amount.  So I would suggest that California (and Oregon, Washington, and Nevada as well, if they want) pass a tax law that says that for every dollar of tax cuts the federal government enacts, the State will increase it’s taxes by a similar amount.  

If I am doing the math right, this will actually lower Californians overall tax burden, as this example shows:

With the windfall, California (or the whole Pacific Time Zone) can enact progressive social legislation.  If “Obamacare” is abandoned, we can pass it at the state level.  As a state, California is bigger than Canada, so we’re a large enough market to have single payer insurance if we want.  Adding the rest of the Pacific Time zone would only make the system more powerful.  We can do this for any social program we want to adopt, and can show how much stronger our western economy becomes relative to the rest of the country as brain power and workers move to where taxes are a little lower and services much higher.

Since California is a net payer into the federal government (i.e., as a state we pay more in taxes than we get in benefits), we will be able to pay for a more robust social network AND lower our total tax bill, and let the red states finance their own schemes without a subsidy from the blue coast.

Thoughts?  email me or post a comment.

Was O’Bannon about antitrust or right of publicity

 This is an issue I hear from time to time.  Clearly O’Bannon was about licensing of names, images, and likeness (NILs in the jargon of the case).  But much of the news coverage glossed over the fact that the actual cause of action in the case was the Sherman Act, that is, the antitrust laws, and the violation was not fundamentally based in whether O’Bannon actually had a right of publicity or not.  

Here’s what the court actually found:  “ the Court concludes that the NCAA’s challenged rules unreasonably restrain trade in violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act.”  You can comb the decision for anything saying whether or not any athlete’s right of publicity was violated, and you will not find it.  You’ll even find some acknowledgement that in some states such a right might not exist.  But because this case was an antitrust case, the question was whether the agreement not to allow those payments (even if there was no right to them) was a violation of a different right, the right to a market free of price fixing.

I think this quotation from the O’Bannon decision says it well, and it;’s important to note that all of this portion of the ruling was upheld at the Ninth Circuit on appeal (I’ll quote the Ninth Circuit below).  Judge Wilken explained that the case was not really about whether there is a right of publicity or not, but whether the NCAA rules represent a form of price fixing:

She followed this up with a good summary of the case’s " Summary of Liability Determinations” (pages 94-95 of the Wilken ruling):

The Ninth Circuit actually, in some ways, strengthened this conclusion, when they stated that even if there were no right of publicity at all, the NCAA could still be liable under antitrust rules b/c the opportunity to seek compensation is different from a right of publicity:

As for the contention that the Ninth Circuit limited Judge Wilken’s ruling, that is true, but that was only as to Remedy, not as to the finding of Liability.  With respect to Liability, the Ninth Circuit said:

To a lay person, that quote may not scream out “Judge W was right on liability” but if you are familiar with (or even if you practice) the law, you’ll see that all the reversed was remedy and that you can’t have any remedy if you don’t have liability.  So when they say “ We otherwise affirm” in the quote below, what they are saying is the Liability Finding stands:

People can argue otherwise, but I think it’s pretty clear.  Clear enough that even a simple economist (albeit one who has worked in the law for over 18 years) can understand that the decision in O’Bannon was based on whether or not the NCAA rules violated the antitrust laws or not.

As a final note, it has been noted that because the NCAA lost under Sherman Act, Section 1 (banning collusion) and not Sherman Act Section 2 (banning abuse of monopoly) that the NCAA was not found to be a monopoly.  That’s not entirely true.  Part of any rule of reason case (too complex for this post --  I’ll add a link here to explain) requires the plaintiff to show the Defendant has market and/or monopoly power.  Judge Wilken found that O’Bannon did so, describing how

Since the only schools in this market are in the NCAA, the Judge described the claims in O’Bannon as “Plaintiffs’ monopoly theory” (Wilken Decision, page 66) and agreeing with this theory: 

To say the Court did not find the NCAA was a monopolist in a market is, I think, simply to misread the case.  I’d be happy to hear arguments to the contrary, but I think they should be grounded in the actual case docket.  Which you can find here if you have a pacer account: https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/iqquerymenu.pl?218079

When P=T+F, dP/dT =dP/dF

Ok, this is a very specific example that I will build into a blog post or an article, beacuse I think it is important, but I want o just jot down th ideas here first.

Recently, a lot of people have become hyper-focused on the supposed connection between rising spending on athletics and rising student fees.  My friend Dave Ridpath just (5 mins ago!) said to me that fees are rising faster than tuition and that worse still, there is too little transparency in what those fees are for.

The point of this post is that the first half of that statement (fees rising faster than tuition) is a red herring.  The second half is actually both true and false -- it’s true that there should be more transparency and false that the problem is that that lowering the use of student fees would improve this..  I’ll tackle both in turn.

My thesis is that except in a state like Virginia, where there is a law that makes it illegal to use tuition money on college sports, money is 100% fungible within a university.  That is, it matters 0% whether the accounting statements says that sports were paid for with student fees or tuition money or donations or with money found in the cracks in the cushions of the couch in the athletic director’s mom’s basement.  It’s just money.  

As an example, consider a hypothetical school with N students that currently charges $x/student in student fees (for a total across all students of $F) $y/student in tuition (for a total across all student of $T).  the total bill the student pays each year is $z/student, where z=x+y, and this sums to a total amount of money brought in from charging students to attend the school (that is N * z) of $P. 

That is F=Nx, T=Ny, P = Nz and P=(F+T)=(Nx+Ny)=Nz.  In all cases in this hypothetical, tuition and fees are both mandatory.

Also to keep this simple, assume the school only has football (no other sports) and the central adminstration of the school pays the athletic department $F in total in exchange for it providing football services to the campus.*  

In one scenario, the school:

1) Charges $x/student (total of $F) in fees.  Labels the tudent fees a “football subsidy.”  

2) Publicly announces that no tuition is spends on football and that all costs are paid for by the football team itself, or by a targeted student fee.  Moreover, that targeted fee provides any student who wishes to attend a football game with a discount, in that student tickets are notably less expensive than general admission tickets.

3) Pay athletics $F, which is an amount equal to $x/student.  It also writes down $F in a box on on an accounting statement that says “Student Fees”

In another scenario, the school:

1a) Lower student fees by $x/student.  That is, it zeros out $F.

1b) Raises tuition by $x/student.  That is, the old $T, which used to be $y per student, is now $(x+y) per student.

2) Publicly announces that the school has decided to stop the practice of using student fees to fund athletics, and instead will fund athletics out of the school’s general fund.  Student will still receive discounted season tickets if they wish to purchase them.  In a separate announcement, the school announces that to offset the loss of student fees, tuition will rise by an unspecified amount (which of course if just F).

3) Pay athletics $Y. Instead of putting $F in a box on on an accounting statement that says “Student Fees,”  it puts $F in a box called “Direct Institutional Support.”

Between these two scenarios, the only things that differ are:

(a) Rhetoric: The way the price of attending Hypothetical U is marketed to the public has changed.

(b) Accounting: The label assigned on the financial statements have changed both in both cases the central office has indicated it paid athletics $Z to provide athletics services.

(c) Transparency: The transparency to students and their families has actually gone DOWN.  Before, the students knew that the school was paying $F to athletics to get football services and the result was an increase in each students price of $x.  Now, once the change happens, the student has no idea that the central administration is paying for football services at all.  If it it’s a public school, perhaps the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of that state will allow a reporter to find out what the line item labelled “Direct institutional support” says, but to students and parents trying to compare schools’ prices, there is nothing on any financial aid disclosure or website that says -- look, we’re going to allocated $x of what you pay us to buy some football services.

In the old scenario, that last statement happened, or at least a non-simplified version of it.  Every student/parent gets a form saying that student fees will be $x and most schools even break that down among various sub-allocations, either on the form to parents or on a website.  As an example, consider a school close to Dave’s, Miami of Ohio, which publishes this explanation of Fees (http://miamioh.edu/onestop/your-money/tuition-fees/explanation-of-fees/index.html and also breaks some of those fees down in terms of dollars (http://miamioh.edu/onestop/your-money/tuition-fees/oxford-undergraduate-fall-spring-tuition-fees/index.html).  In contrast, the “Tuition and General Fees” line is just a big $13,000 blob with zero transparency as to what goes where or what the Tuition element is even used for.

(As an aside, the first school I picked in Ohio was actually Dayton, and you can see that Dayton is a real-world example of the second hypothetical, where they have decided to zero out fees and call it all tuition: https://www.udayton.edu/apply/undergraduate/cost/index.php?utm_campaign=transparency.  And, despite now providing zero transparency as to how much students are paying for athletics, Dayton has labelled this change a “Transparency Campaign.”)

Let’s throw in a third scenario.  Here the school:

1) Charges $x/student in fees but labels the student fees a “campus concert and gardening fee.” 

2) Publicly announces that no fees are spent on on football and that all costs are paid for by the football team itself, or by other university funds.  Moreover, despite charging no football fee any student who wishes to attend a football game will still receive a discount, in that student tickets are notably less expensive than general admission tickets.

3) Pays athletics $F.  Marks a box called “Direct Institutional Support”

Nothing is different now to a customer of the university, other than perhaps the marketing used to draw them in (”look how much we spend on concerts and gardening!!!”) and the reduction of transparency as to how much is spent on football.

Here’s the bottom line.  if you are a student or a parent of a student and you are paying the school $z per year, it does not matter what they call it, or how they account for it if it doesn’t change the bundle of goods and services you get in exchange.  It may feel better to some if a school calls it a Football fee.  it may feel better if the school says it charges no fees.  The name of the charge is a marketing and/or accounting thing, not a reflection of economic reality.

If we as a society are concerned about P, the total price we’re charging students, focusing on F or T, in isolation is silly and is going to generate goofy marketing like the Dayton example above.  It is a classic example of failing to understand the fungibility of money.

Now -- and this is a topic for another day -- there is the question of whether a school should or should not pay for athletic services as part of its campus offering, and there is a still separate question of whether we have bad managerial systems in place on campus to manage how those athletic departments run themselves.  Perhaps a budget allocation process that assumes schools generate NO money on their own is ill-suited for an athletics department that turns a profit.  I’ve proposed an alternative accounting measure to address these managerial problems and certain perverse incentives: https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/college-sports-program-accounting-scam.  But to the extent bad management is driving up the price that athletics charges for its services, focusing on the label of how the school charges students is like trying to cure a heart problem by focusing on a tingling in the toes that results. At most, it is a symptom.

* As a side note, I am intentionally not using the word subsidy.  I think it’s much easier to think about the central administration of a school paying its various departments for services.  The school doesn’t subsidize the economics department, it pays the economics department to provide econ services (research, teaching, handsome bloggers) and it pays the athletic department to provide athletic services.  As it happens, sometimes an academic department is self-funding and provides the services w/o a direct payment -- a physics department with a large grant from the Department of Defense or a Sports Management Department with a large graduate school that takes in more in tuition than it spends on professors.  The same is sometimes true in athletics -- a larger donor base or very lucrative television contracts.  But when that’s not the case, if the University wants certain services provided, it acquires them by paying for it.  As it happens, with most academic departments, the payment required to get those services is close to 100% of the costs.  With athletics, it’s also often 100% of the costs, but NOT in Division I.  In Division I, and especially the FBS tier of Division I, most schools cover most of their own costs and the payment they demand for their services is consequently much lower.

Reality vs Luck (Oliver, that is)

Here is Oliver Luck’s view of the world:

Here is reality, courtesy of a Georgetown University study.  Yes, the same Georgetown you know from watching March Madness:

Moreover, many of these working students are EMPLOYEES OF THEIR UNIVERSITY (emphasis mine):

So, Oliver, when will the NCAA come out against its members using " work study for a low-wage workforce”?  Soon?