Tinymanz

Anytime Ashin! It was fun.

Also, yes, I am well aware of my poor survival statistics on the Durumu fight. There are a couple of factors that were at play in regards to that fight. The first, and most important would be unfamiliarity with the fight; as you said, I came in on the fly without any real experience with the mechanics of the fight and operating on minimal instruction regarding all the potential random aspects that could target/effect any given character. Granted that may impact performance for the first few attempts and isolated incidents following ones, not across the board like is shown there and I apologize for that. That said, I seldom raid on mondays, in fact I generally don't. Reason being, internet sharing with my roommate. Normally his work schedule and my raid times don't conflict like that, I raid try to raid Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday evenings while he's at work.

Last night I was running latency rates between 500ms/450 home/world and up to 900ms/675 home/world for a few pulls, including the kill attempt. Though I dislike presenting internet lag as an excuse, it is, in large part, responsible for my deaths since the fight has so many mechanics that are latency sensitive. Most of my deaths (aside from being blasted off the platform) were to issues during the maze phase of the fight, where we're running around the boss avoiding his death beam where the slightest bit of inopportune lag can cause death. There were a number of times where on my screen I was ahead of the beam then several seconds later ended up dead. I can very much assure you that had we been doing this fight on one of the standard raid days this would not have been a problem at all.

As you can see here: http://www.worldoflo...s=67977��across 20 tortos (another fight with high movement and random mechanics) attempts my survivability is well within acceptable limits. I would ask that you regard the Durumu logs as an exception, not the rule. As I said before, had this been one of the standard nights you would not be asking me to address life expectancy as an issue.

And here I was thinking I had discovered an amazing exploit.

Damn. Feja you're an amazing killjoy.

Now to go to work ><

That sounds like a plan indeed! Let me know when works best for you and Inedit, my schedule is always very loose on the weekends.

I have no idea.

Here ya go twelve...not much but better than nothing. Lei Shi and Sha of Fear LFR.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-x7vzglophx79moyf/dashboard/?enc=bosses

...linking this log seems so wrong. Anyway, as you can see I am not the most finessed spriest in the world. Though playing shadow mainspec is something I'd be both more than willing to do and something of a nice change, I need more practice in a raid setting before I could feel competent playing this spec on a progression boss. My gear is both too incoherent and overall too low to bring to a progression boss. Once I get some items to sort out my gear, play shadow more often and in general get myself into a better spot for the spec I'd happily switch to MS shadow. Until then I would only feel comfortable playing Holy in a progression encounter.

Annnnnd 20wipes later, Tortos is down: http://www.worldoflo...bswdq9wgznmly4/ and a 57th place as holy priest for me...4set is a wonderful thing.

I don't know when or if I'll ever be able to provide damage logs from current content. I did ask if I could DPS tonight but was told I had to heal >.>

I played shadow at the start of the expansion, but recently, because of the changes made to chastise chakra for holy, when I've had to go dps for whatever reason I've been dpsing as holy in my shadow set. It does decent damage and still has the full range of Holy healing CD's available, which makes it quite versatile and ideal for the situation where you need a healer to go dps without losing a CD.

That said, my performance as shadow isn't horrible, my gear is comparable to that of my holy set and my damage has never been regarded as "bad". Would I be able to roll shadow and parallel the performance of a dedicated shadow priest? No, not even close. I haven't played it enough to have the spec finessed nearly to the same degree as I know how to play holy, but that's a simple lack-of-familiarity issue. The only concrete number I have for my shadow dps was from last night on Elite Protectors 10man normal: I did 93k. I'm sorry I don't have anything more concrete to give you, but the chances I've had of late to actually play shadow are few and far between--outside of just doing my dailies. I keep up to date on what talents to run and the general rotation/CD usage but my execution is sloppy. I could easily improve it, I'd just need (and will do so if asked) to play it more.

Because it's worth noting: Killed 3/12 ToT tonight, logs are here: http://www.worldoflogs.com/guilds/182291/

For whatever reason they they didn't register the kills for horridon and council but some of the attempts are there.

Hey Ashin,

Firstly I'd like to apologize for how unclear my posts have been and with this message I hope to clear that up.

These days, and for much of my career as a priest, I've played holy. I love the spec and I'm very, very good at it. I was applying as shadow before because that's what you needed and because I loved how close a community South of Heaven seems to be. I would kill for a chance to be part of you guys; the guild is everything that I look for in one: I would take your offer of a social invite in an instant if I could do so and still have a consistent raid group to raid with. Knowing that's unlikely to happen, I've decided to go for broke and apply directly to the raid team now that you have an opening for what I actually do: heal as a holy priest.

I know that in applying to you guys as I am now it looks like something of a joke. 493 ilvl, no 4set, only a month's worth of 25man logs and only 2 heroic kills...not what anyone who leads a top 100 25man would look twice at but even though I understand that I still want to apply to the raid team. That, however, is not at all something that I'm happy with; I've never been so under-progressed in my life and that's even including the time at the start of Cata when I was rebuilding after losing my original account.

I love to raid, and to raid well; I'm a team player, I like to move through content in a very clear and organized way and that would have happened this tier had the guild I was originally supposed to be main healing for (Vs The Universe) not decided they'd rather have had a mistweaver over a holy priest at the last second. That decision put me in a very difficult position. All the solid guilds had full rosters and were starting to hit content hard. I had to take what I could find and make the best of it. Losing two and a half months to an unfortunate situation at my job didn't help matters either. In the last month and a bit I have tried my best to do everything I can to bring my toon back up to the level that I like to be at. I achieved some measure of that too...rank 18th on heroic feng 25man (as holy,such that healer ranks matter) and several other > 50 rank parses.

I chose now to reapply to SoH because the release of 5.2 leveled the playing field somewhat, I think. New raid, blank progression slate. With all the means to get gear that are in the game now I don't think it would take very long for me to catch up to the level that the rest of the 25man is at. Because of that, I figured now would be the best time to apply as any guild I'm likely to be in will move significantly slower than South of Heaven thus widening both the progression and gear disparity even more. Do I think as I stand now that I could be a solid member of your team, yes I do; gear or no gear. I completely understand what you mean by saying "to be fair as much to me as to the rest of the team" but even still I can't stand the prospect of guild hopping anymore. As you can see, I'm caught between knowing what is expected of people raiding at your level, liking the community of South of Heaven and liking to raid consistently. It's made this all very awkward and confusing and I'm sorry about that.

Hello Ashin! After running into you in Halfhill, I figured I may as well give this a second shot now that things have calmed down work wise. I didn't really know what to do, so like I mentioned to you, I posted up my most recent logs as well as a link to my armory. If there's anything more specific you need from me in terms of new information not mentioned in the original application post (and I still stand by what I said there, give or take a few changes to how healing as holy works).

It'll be fine, 6 yards was nice, but let's be fair, it DID all but remove the positioning factor of the spell. 4 yards will be more realistic. Bets on how long it takes before a holy priest starts demanding that the raid stack in a single file line?

Now I love Divine Star! And it's getting buffed slightly in 5.2! And hello again

Lol I was wondering what you'd say about that since I use it a lot now...really helped in that Feng kill if you look at the logs. Divine Star is OP as all hell.

Also Hi!

Annnnnd amazing ancient thread bump of awesome. I'm back in the game now...have been doing 25's with Oozeling since that's all I could find when I came back. Alas. Anyway, for what it's worth, new logs:

Heroic Feng 25

Elite Protectors, 25 Normal

25 Normal, Bladelord

25 Normal, Sha of Fear

All as holy. Because holy is OP. Note: I do not have 4set >.>

New Armory:

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

NB: I swap talents out frequently, so depending on when you click this it might have a different set in that's not exactly correct for a 25man raid healer. I do apologize if that's the case.

Same Old Tiny!

Ask me things!

Sounds good ^^

UNGH.

I didn't see this post.

./fail. I'd been working on my druid as discussed and picked up an extra shift at work since I thought you were full for this week.

I keep Decursive around because it yells at me when someone gets an important cleansable debuff....i have the grid hidden on my current UI.

Edit: I have everything bound through Clique so getting dispels isn't tricky.

Part of the decursive grid thing. you can click on one of the squares and it dispels everything that's on that target.

Lol...divine star is trash. Cascade is a bloody beast, especially in 25man. I know i didn't talk too much about specifics or anything. If you have questions please ask and I will answer.

Jesus...this got really, really long. I"m sorry ><

Hey guys! I always hate writing these things...feels like writing a coverletter, however, after speaking to Ashin today I realized that I've put this off enough and it's time to get down to business. Forgive me if this is long, but there's a lot to say.

Guild and Community

My name is Nathan, I'm a 27 year-old chef from Canada and (somewhat obviously) I play a priest on Stormreaver. Throughout Cataclysm I spent my time guild hopping, always trying to find the right mix of community and progression -- the two things that matter most to me when it comes to this game. Prior to applying to South of Heaven, I joined Vs the Universe alliance side late in the cataclysm expansion and prior to that I had been raiding 25man heroics with a reasonably competent guild on another server. That guild managed to get Heroic Warmaster killed at 10% but shortly after that and before we could start work on spine the guild fell apart for numerous reasons. Eventually, I joined my roommate at the time on stormreaver and bounced around small guilds until being taken in by vs the universe as a main healer for their core group and finally managed to get my heroic madness kill...sadly well after I had wanted to and too far into the progressive nerfs to be considered much of an accomplishment at all.

That said, I return to my original mention of Community. None of the guilds I had been in prior to writing this (Firelands and T11 are another topic) had had much of that community sense or, indeed a sense of discipline among the raiders who, it seemed, never quite realized that for a working adult raiding at such a high level was a significant time commitment. When I began my search for guilds come MoP I spent ages researching, reading what they had to say about themselves and talking to guild leaders; I do not want to repeat my Cata experience...I want a stable community that I can invest my time and effort into tackling the challenges of an expansion, knowing that it's not just going to up and end one day when people stop logging in. When I found South of Heaven I started to get excited; the fundamental principals that SoH was built around and have kept the guild together on so many fronts for so long, resonated strongly with me. The understanding that we all have jobs, that we all have families, that we all have obligations outside the game so that the time we spend playing is valuable--the clearly outlined expectations of performance dedication and discipline so that raiding can be done at a high level but the element of fun which is so key to this isn't lost. A guild is a community and a large part of that, for me, is getting to know people--to be able to talk to them, joke, have a good time but still be able to sit down and work at maintaining that same high level of gameplay that we've enjoy all at the same time.

If that makes utterly no sense...well, there's a reason I'm a chef and not writer

Gameplay

I love healing, I love the challenges and different style of play it requires from that of a pure DPS or tank class. For me, Priest was a natural choice. They have always been a fundamental class in World of Warcraft and are, in many ways an unparalleled healing class. Priests have a versatility beyond that of simply healing or DPS, to me they seem to showcase the best of all the healing classes. From absorbs to a continuous HoT mechanic introduced with holy priest mastery (Echo of Light) they are almost always viable to bring to any encounter. In the last expansion with the introduction of mastery and the changes made to critical heals, priest versatility and healing output or damage reduction have made people rethink how healing should be done. It's no longer a simple game of keeping the squares at 100%; it's become a game of prioritizing where and how to spend your mana (the management of which has always been the trickiest thing about playing the class) and how to use the different mechanics granted to the class to their greatest effect.

Some people say, not without justification mind, that priests are a little bit TOO versitile; able to many things but none too well. While this is not without justification, I feel that that statement is largely due to a poor understanding of the design intent behind the class and an unfortunate focus on 10man raiding. The priest holy spec was designed as a raid healing spec on a very large scale. With powerful AoE healing ability as their primary claim to fame, they are not without the ability to single target heal very well making them useful even for phases when there is little raid damage or when your primary tank healer runs into some flavor of crisis (though not to the same degree as a shaman or paladin). Disc, I feel, is slightly more nebulous in intent. While the spec could swing either way, to tank healing or to raid healing, I think that's an oversimplification of what they're meant to do.

Discpline, more and more it seems, is designed to act as a damage buffer--to provide an instant where no damage is taken by a given target. This, in turn provide their co-healer with a chance for the raw healing of HoTs or long cast time direct heals to take effect without losing a certain amount of effectiveness to ongoing damage during the cast or HoT duration. Shown in that light, priests become a class that brings stability to the raid, be it through continuous out put of group-wide AoE healing, multi-target or single target smart healing (CoH and Atonement) or through the continuous buffer of a constant HoT or mass absorb (Echo of Light or Divine Aegis) all while being able to switch track and cover the duties of the secondary healing class during a dynamic raid encounter. Yes, the class has its faults and some are more pronounced at the moment that others but I strongly believe that the benefits of the class will always outweigh their faults when played skillfully.

I understand that this is perhaps more esoteric than what you were looking for...I can talk numbers up the wazoo, but for healing above all, I think an understanding of what the design intent behind the class/spec is just as critical as knowing why it's better to go with 80 stats to chest over 200 spirit based on the average time of encounters.

As for shadow...I started playing shadow with the greatest intensity at the start of this expansion and I'm a little unsure about what you'd expect to hear from me in this regard. I know there might be an issue that I haven't stacked pure haste until 7584 (goblins FTW) however, after doing some research I came to the conclusion that it benefited me more to gem for int rather than pure haste. The added spellpower and crit is a DPS increase over stacking pure haste (I gained ~2300 spellpower and a sizable amount of crit) until my gear alone can support haste rating to my break-point.

Additionally, I've been aiming for crit over mastery as my secondary stat because I've found it helps with my dps on single-target fights. Eventually I hope to be able to run two sets of DPS gear if I am required to be a full time DPS: one stacking mastery the other stacking crit so I can tag them out for fights with tons and tons of adds where mastery pulls ahead of crit or single target where the weight is in favor of crit.

Shadow Logs:

http://www.worldoflo.../?s=8101&e=8436

--Somewhat outdated spiritbinder log from oct 16th (I don't have that many so I'm grasping at straws).

http://www.worldoflo...e/?s=798&e=1362

--Recent Will of the Emperor Kill with vs the universe. (NOTE: my connection was giving me trouble for the previous part of that raid logged on Tuesday, I would ask you to disregard the truly abysmal performance on the first 4.)

Holy Logs:

http://www.worldoflo...rong> </strong>

From Oct 16th

UI:

http://i47.tinypic.com/23jr5f9.jpg

It's old, but I had it on hand...Really hasn't changed at all TBH. For shadow, I use weakauras for Dot and internal CD timer tracking.

Armory:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/stormreaver/Tinymanz/advanced

Finally...outside the game, I'm a bit of a workaholic...but I manage to find time to play both badminton and in a recreational dodgeball league here in Toronto. THAT, I must say, is something I think EVERYONE needs to look into...it's really quite fun. Dodgeball was never a child's game. I SWEAR!