Mistweaver Application

[Caillenne]

Hi!

I've spoken a little with Ashin in game over battletag about your guild and I felt that it is time for me to write out an application.

I play a solid healing monk currently and have been in the bleeding edge of content as a healer for quite a few years now. Before maining my monk I mained an Hpal for four years and was very competitive on her. I'd like to give you a quick history of my raiding and game accomplishments over the course of my wow career.

I started playing a week after Wrath was launched on my paladin. I hit 55, and instantly made a death knight and finished leveling to 80 where I raided the opening tier of raids. Basically, I was getting carried, I had no clue what I was doing. When Ulduar launched, it was my first time experiencing progression raiding, and I absolutely loved it. During Ulduar I was the main tank for my guild. I played a Dual Wielding Frost DK.....like a boss. Boy do I miss those days, also reaching 100% ArmPen with Grim toll!!! My account ended up getting hacked as authenticators started becoming popular and I finished my Hpal while I waited on Blizzard to restore my DK. It was at this point that I fell in love with healing.

The most notable achievement I accomplished during wrath would have been Herald of the Titans. I also managed to get a Tribute to Insanity on 10 man, but that wasn't until ICC, I also downed H LK, but was also late into the patch. I also downed H Halion on 10, and had many sub 5% wipes on 25 man, but never got a kill on 25man.

In Cataclysm, I was in a US top 90 ten man guild called CONVERGE on Maelstrom who just recently fell apart. During my stay with them I managed to get 3 Prenerf Kills on Heroic Nefarian (was absolutely ridiculous when compared to the nerf version) and a Prenerf kill on Heroic Al'akir. I had a (literally) 0.1% wipe on H Ascendant Council, then left the following week due to guild drama that I didn't wish to be a part of. From there I joined Tyranny who was on Drak'tharon at the time (now Shattered Hand I believe). Unfortuantely, the GM there overrecruited on healers, and HPals. I was one of three Hpals, and the least geared (though the best performing) and there was a healing team consisting of 11 raiders at the time. Needless to say many people saw lots of bench. By the time we were working on H Rag, I had a total of 16 H Shannox kills, and 1 H Ryholith kill, with plenty of progression experience on all of the other bosses, however no kills. Due to the amount of bench I was seeing I left for Static on Executus (they've since transferred to Arthas). I actually really enjoyed my stay there, though it was very short due to an emergency in real life that left me without a home for 5 months. I was (obviously) unable to raid during that time! When I came back I joined a casual guild and stayed for awhile, then left for Wasted Potential on Executus to see more content at the last bit of DS. During early December of last year I left the guild due to progression frustrations (or the lack of I should say) for Big Crits, on Sen'jin (my current guild).

I'm condensing this next bit of information into spoiler tags, to save room on this page for those that are more interested in the "must have" information

Current Guild

(History, complaints, accomplishments, why I'm leaving)

So lets talk about Big Crits. I came in during H Lei Shi progression, helped down her, the H Vizier, H Amber Shaper, H Empress, and the rest of Heroic ToES. Originally, I really enjoyed my stay here. I had a lot of fun, I was able to hop in mumble and hang out with anybody at any given time during the day because people were always on! Unfortunately a lot of people left, and the structure of the guild has change drastically since I joined. My problems started during H Sha progression. Our GM (also a mistweaver) went Brewmaster for this fight. He's a terrible tank, and really needs to stick to healing which he has admitted. Early in our attempts I noted that he was holding us back on the kill, but no changes were made until the very last night. Most guilds around our level at the time were killing H Sha in roughly 80-90 attempts, it took us 250. I was in for roughly 245 attempts. When the call was made to change out GM to heals from tank and have our dps warrior tank for us, I was hit by a DDOS by an officer (an HPal) when we made it to P2. When I came back after the attack he refused to bring me back in and harassed me asking how the bench was. They ended up getting the kill 5 attempts later. This just so happened to be the last day before the patch hit as well, so unfortunately I missed out on my prenerf Feat of Strenght, and as you could imagine was a very rough time for me.

Why did he DDOS me? Basically, because he didn't like me. He's basically an over all douche bag, with a crap personality; however I feel as though the huge amount of frustration that H Sha brought on the guild as a whole had a lot of people at each others throats and that was why things escalated to the point where they did. He, and the other officers have since then stopped playing the game entirely. They were in for a week or two of Throne and then left. H Sha killed off a lot of the raiders we had, more than half the raid ended up leaving shortly after. The people that are left, and the people that came in afterwards don't mesh well with me. There's a lot of personality clashes, favoritism, and just over all crap that goes on now and I'm quite fed up with it.

New Guild

(What I'm looking for)

So I'm here because I'm looking for a new guild. (Obviously). I found SoH through wowprogress.com and mmochamp (was browsing between tabs and found SoH on both pages at the same time interestingly enough!). I noticed that your guilds raid times are pretty close to mine (raiding 1 hour less per day, 3 hours less per week). So this fits in well with my schedule, and I noticed that you guys are also a little ahead of my guild. I was actually kind of impressed to see how fast you downed H Iron Qon, though in all fairness had my guild listened to anything I said about the fight we wouldn't have spent 3 raid nights on him. /facepalm. So the progression is there and the raid times are perfect for me. I'm looking for a friendly environment, a place I don't have to worry about hostilities against me (as I do in my current guild). I understand bosses such as H Rag, H Sha, and so on are going to cause a large amount of frustrations, and I understand bursts of rage can happen during this, however in an overall picture I don't want this. I'm an understanding person and pretty forgiving but like I said, I'd like to come home and ENJOY raiding.

Other Interests

(mostly in game stuff!)

Challenge Modes!! I achieved Server First on my monk very early in the expansion, as well as achieving a World4th/US1st time in Jade Serpent, though since then people have improved the time drastically due to better trinkets/weapons/etc I'd like to finish golds on my Ele sham and then later my warrior (once I gear that toon up!) And possibly my mage and DK when I get them to 90 and adequately geared too!!

.

RBGs!! I managed to achieve a rating of 2099 on my Hpal during "LOLCOCCLEAVE" Season. My goal was 2100, however we had a DC and lost a lot of points, and we were never able to get back up to that :[ I haven't put any focus into PvP just yet this expac however I know this is something that I'd like to be able to get back to on my monk, and to get her the mount as well.

Alt Raids!!! I play a very competitive Ele sham, and during DS a very competitive Mage as well. Right now my Mage is only 87, but my ele sham is wrecking faces on a separate server. The guild I run with is only up to Iron Qon, and I'm not very happy with the progression there either. I was hoping for a 1-2 heroic monday night type guild to run with, but finding that is very difficult. Either way, I love my ele sham, and I love raiding on her.

About Me

(Me rambling)

I was born April 3, 1990 in Oakland California. Me being a military brat, I've been all over the country, I lived in Clarksville TN for 6 years due to 9/11. My dad being SF and us being stationed at a high deployment base, was gone for most of those years, during that time my brother was born and he spent the first years of his life not knowing who his father was. Imagine being deployed in a hostile environment, and then coming home to take care of a new born child. As any soldier who's been through that would tell you, it was very difficult on the family! So as you can imagine, the military is a very big deal to me. I'm currently not enlisted, nor do I wish to enlist however, I have a very high amount of respect for our men and women in uniform, being a part of a military family I understand how difficult life can be for a soldier at times, though not fully since I'm not in their shoes. My dad retired a few years ago and I'm now living in NC (unfortunately, I hate it here). I've been to college a few times, though due to family emergencies I've had to drop out, which sucks hard. I currently hold a full time job and work mon-friday and almost always have my weekends off. When money starts becoming more available, and when I can work out the time for both work and school, I'd like to be able to go back (hopefully next semester) to college to pursue a degree in Physics! As well as being at the bleeding edge of progression in WoW, I would like to be at the bleeding edge of discovery, with putting my focus in space. I've always been very interested in studying black holes, ever since I was a child in the 90's when knowledge of them were very limited and mostly wrong. lol. It's something I'd like to study further, as well as other areas. I'm the kind of person that finds fascination in most things, and I'd really like to be able to do everything! But, since I'm only human and limited by time, I have to pick and choose :/

I also play guitar, and I'm in a local metal/djent band. I have a very long background in music. As most kids have, I started in music on a recorder in elementary school. I went on to middle school and played french horn, then on to high school where I played in both concert and the marching band on the horn. Around the end of my freshman year, start of sophomore I started teaching myself guitar. It all started one day when I was in band warming up. Our Bari-Sax player (a really freakin awesome guy) was playing Ozzy Osbourne's Crazy Train on his sax. Me, having never heard ozzy/randy rhodes, thought it was amazing. So I went home and started composing what I could remember on my phone, my dad happened to walk by and heard what I was playing and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was composing a song I had heard in band earlier that day. He was impressed with how well my memory of it was and how good of an ear I have that he had his team medic, who was also a very close friend of the family pass me down my first guitar, which was a Les Paul Jr.

If anybody here is interested in gear, I'm using a POD HD400, with an Alto 12" PA system. I play on an Ibanez Ax 7221 (7 string) and we (my band) play in Drop G# I also own a BC rich Warlock, and a DBZ Venom (both 6 strings).

Other Notes

(Availability outside of raid)

I work a full time job, typically I work Monday through Friday 9am-5pm but I'm gone from 7am-6pm est (rush hour traffic sucks). Sundays are normally rehearsal nights with my band, and saturdays I run my alt and usually our shows are saturday nights. As you can tell my schedule during the weekend is quite sporadic, and can be full or empty depending on the weekend. I never really know until a week in advanced, so relying on me to show up on the weekend is pretty much out of the question, though if I'm online and I'm not busy then I'm definitely more than happy to jump in and have fun!!!

Now that I've left that very lengthy introduction I'll leave you with the basic "every guild asks for" information as well as some final thoughts.

http://us.battle.net...llenne/advanced

http://raidbots.com/...9;jin/caillenne

http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/50525/

Computer Specs:

GTX 550ti

Processor: Piece of shit

Motherboard: Also a piece of shit

I actually just ordered: http://www.newegg.co...t=Combo.1306461

and it will be here within 3 business days or less. I'm looking forward to it since it's going to be a massive upgrade for me. I'm currently using an AMD Athalon 5000-Dual Core, I don't recall what my motherboard is but if it tells you anything about it's age, it's maximum RAM capacity is 8GB of DDR2. I'll be upgrading to 32GB of DDR3 pretty soon Assuming it's not DOA.

I'd like to take this application process a bit slow, and get to know each other before making the decision to transfer over. I've dealt with a lot of unnecessary drama since H Sha progression and I want to make sure that I'm not going to find myself in the same boat again when I switch guilds. I am paying in real life currency, which is far more limited than gold is in WoW, I'd like to be cautious about it. Without sounding overly arrogant, I am a very solid healer and I'm capable of obtaining a raiding position in most guilds that fit my schedule. I've given you plenty of information about myself and I'm more than happy to provide more, and I know for certain that I would be an excellent addition to any raid roster; however, I would like to know that you are a great fit for me. Again, I hope you understand where I'm coming from, and I don't mean to sound arrogant by saying that.

[Ashin]

Definitely a lot of personality in your app, and I like the way you used the spoiler tags!

I have to be honest, the DDOS thing just sounds bizarre to me. I don't really understand how your guildmate could even do that to you. Isn't it more likely that you just had some connection issue? Why do you think he hated you so much?

What about Monk caught your interest, such that you dropped your Hpal? What do you think are the unique strengths of the mistweaver as compared to other healers? What are the weaknesses?

What do you feel are your best and worst qualities as a raider?

[Caillenne]

I know the whole DDOS deal sounds strange. Big Crits does have a history of it's raiders DDOSing each other though. The reason I think it was an attack was because the "lag" was nothing like anything I've ever had, and nothing like a usual spike, I've also never had that issue unless he was in the raid with me :/

I was playing in the beta, I got in very early and I kept up with the monk for most of it. I fell in love with the play style. Very early in the beta, originally the way to play the monk was to keep Renewing Mists active by keeping Thunder Focus Tea on CD, it was possible to blanket the entire raid this way, but they ended up changing it. The class went through a ton of changes in the beta (as probably expected for a new class) it just kept me fascinated the entire time, much more than the DK did!

Mistweavers have a few different ways they can be played. During T14 the optimal way to play for 25 mans was through fistweaving. Fistweaving (jab/black out kick/uplift) was very strong and provide a huge amount of AE. During hte 5.3 PTR they made some changes that I was really looking forward to, such as Muscle Memory which made it to live (after jab hits a target, the next blackout kick or tiger palm damage will be increased by 150% (was 200% on ptr) and will also restore 4% mana. Unfortunately, at the very last second before launch, they nerfed eminence healing and cut it in half, which crippled Fistweaving.

It's still possible to fistweave, and you should definitely fistweave on fights where there's a damage buff that gives at least 50% (H Horridon after second gate, H Windlord, etc)

The other way is a more traditional style of healing, with soothing mists channel. Soothing Mists takes the role of the low expense, low heal (Holy Light, Healing Wave, Heal, etc). But it also gets a nice healing increase when Enveloping Mists is present on the target, which Env Mists also does a huge amount of healing by itself. So, between these two spells and our big expense big heal, Surging Mists, Mistweavers can push out a lot of single target healing when necessary. But their biggest strength comes from their AE healing. Fistweaving has a positional requirement. For anybody to be eligible to receive healing done from the monk, they must be within 40 yards of the monk, and/or 20 yards from the statue. The biggest source of AE healing however, comes from Uplift spam and ReM. ReM will jump 40 yards (when glyphed, and it should be glyphed!) between targets that are injured, and this can cover a huge range. There is no limit on the range as long as there's a target within 40 yards (in other words, if you had raiders lined up 40 yards apart, it would jump to all of them, covering 200 yards, 40 yards per charge), from there uplift has no range on it. It will heal anybody with Renewing Mists on them. Other healers all have some sort of limitation on their AE healing, mostly positional requirements (Chain Heal, Healing Rain, Holy Radiance, Daybreak, Efflo, etc).

There are a few complaints I have about the class though. I've noticed when 2 healing monks are paired together, ReM tends to travel to the same targets (makes sense since it's the same AI working), and it'll cause those targets to get lots of heals, while others not so much. It also means that the monks are stealing more healing from each other and one may be doing more overhealing than the other. It's not bad to have 2 healing monks, but it can be annoying at times. Probably my biggest complaint however, is the lack of preventative damage. With the exception of Life Cocoon (which in my guild rarely gets called for by tanks), monks have zero sources of preventative damage, and we rely on post damage healing.

Best traits about me as a raider, I'm committed! I'm also very passionate about raiding, and I love progressing. I'm an understanding person, and I have quite a bit of patience and I'm forgiving. I understand fight mechanics, I learn quickly, and I'm not afraid to ask questions when I can't figure something out on my own. I tend to take the initiative and try to keep up with my classes changes without having to be told. However, due to me being at work constantly I may be slow at this at times! To give a quick example, my GM (our other mistweaver) told me that I needed to be gemming straight crit gems in yellow socks and int/crit for red. I went with it for awhile, but something felt odd about it. I wanted to be gemming straight int in red sockets, with int/crit in yellow. Turns out, at our gear levels we should be in haste gems!!!! >.> But only at our gear levels. Reason being, we're easily able to obtain our second haste breakpoint on ReM, which is at 6150, and we're able to get a bit past that as well. With haste gems we're able to get to our third breakpoint at 9150, which is quite a big deal. Once we've reached a little higher iLevel, and grab gear with more base haste on it, we should be able to stop gemming haste and go back to straight int while maintaining that third breakpoint. I actually found this out last night after looking up a few other monks. I knew something strange was going on with our GM's ReM was doing a huge amount more healing than mine.

So my worst traits I can probably honestly only say is that I'm a bit slow on keeping up to date, and this is really just because I'm busy during the week with work, and I'd like to relax on my days off instead of do homework!! lol.

[Caillenne]

Also, I just realized I didn't provide an SS of my UI

This is it as of last night, I have Weak Auras tracking pretty much everything. My CD bar on the left is a dynamic group that grows upward. The big clearcasting icon dead center of my screen tracks my legendary meta procs, so that I can go nuts when it procs. I also have boss tracking auras that aren't shown, such as H Tortos debuff for the shield. I have one for when I'm full and one for when I'm not.

And here's during progression in combat. I've since added a few more things to track, and made it look a bit neater. I've also turned off the healing numbers for now to free up resources, though I may turn it back on when I get my mobo/processor. I like to see them fly all over the place cuz it makes me feel like I'm kicking ass.

[Fulgshift]

You're going to make many of our raiders swoon over your WAs.

I've recently been playing a MW on an alt and you spoke about this in your application and response...but what method of Monk healing do you personally prefer? Would you like to get back to the Tier 14 style or do you like the current model? Would you like to see Fistweaving involved more? Sorry to hear about your current guild drama. I can assure you that since joining <South of Heaven> five months ago, it has been a fantastic experience and you'll never see our guild members acting as your current/former guildies did. Love your history of progression!

What's the most recent movie you saw in theaters? Thoughts on it?

Any TV shows that keep your interest on a weekly basis?

Let's get one YouTube video of your taste in music.

Good luck on your application!

[Caillenne]

Lol it's simply not possible to link only one, especially since metal is such a diverse genre with many great sub genres (Melodic Death Metal, Folk Metal, Progressive Metal, Djent, etc).

Tbh, I'd like to see the T14 fistweaving model come back stronger. It made the class feel very unique, I think they could make some changes to it so that we're able to use Env Mists more (previously, it was something that needed to be hard casted which meant auto attacks stopped, which also means that heals stop).

I don't remember the last movie I saw in theaters. It's been many years. I wanted to see the Hobbit, Captain America, The Avengers, GI Joe 2, Django, and a few others, but I also refuse to go to the movies by myself, and nobody ever really wants to go around here :/

I don't watch much TV either, mostly I'll watch the news when I'm making my lunch for work in the morning, and a bit when I come home, just because I want to keep up to date with whats going on in the world, and in our country (I also understand how the media is biased and I'm aware of it while watching).

I'll just leave a list of bands here for you. Here's a video of my most recent obsession

Arch Enemy (huge impact on my musicianship, also my first tattoo was of doomsday machine on my right arm)

Scar Symmetry (also a pretty big impact and inspiration)

Children of Bodom

Turisas

Periphery (Big influence, especially in the djent area)

The HAARP Machine

All Shall Perish

Born of Osiris

Eluveitie

If you recognize these names, then you can see that I'm all over the place as far as sub genre's go! lol

[Raer]

I like your taste in music!

[Etol]

I like your taste in music!

What he said, that vid you linked is AWESOME!

[Evgeny]

Nice UI. Love the WA work. Is it all custom? would you try and snag a raid SS? (LFR maybe, or just turn the test frames on in Elv?

[Sheytan]

I remember watching the Big Crits 2-parter for H Sha! Wow, I had no idea things like DDoS were going on. I still remember him being a very fail tank and giving up on that, which led to the kill. It's sad that you were pulled off right before the kill and missed it after all those wipes!