Fulgshift

Yay! Nyisha promptly covered all of the key subjects, but welcome to the club! I hope you'll enjoy FFXIV, as I've been having a blast since it was released. Don't hesitate to ask any questions you may have!

Nice to see you around, Hip! Glad to hear about your shoulder, especially.

Should work for me.

I've got a lot of free time during the evenings this week. Peach never showed on Saturday either. Not sure what's up.

Haha. I AM a Caps fan, unfortunately. Lived in DC for a few years and went to many games. Needless to say, it was a miserable night to watch them!

I'm on Mumble now and will be until 4 PM or so. I'll be gone for the evening, so let me know!

Sorry for the wait. Unreal day in the office and then I drove to Columbus and saw a hockey game. I can do tomorrow early afternoon. How does 1 PM sound?

Congrats, Grieve!

Did you mean to leave the FC? Perhaps your account was compromised?

Welcome! Negido has handled all the relevant questions.

We realized last night that I've been playing WoW or other games with Kelta for over 5 years now. He was one of the first members of <Pandemic>, even before I joined, and stuck with it until the very, very end. Very loyal guy. And as long as he can keep his self-deprecation to a minimum (you can do it, Kelta!), he's a good guy to have around.

Howdy Gul! Let us hope we get some juicy information from the Live Letter this week and are in Open Beta soon! What class do you plan on playing at launch? What race (this is VERY important)? Did you get a chance to play in Closed Beta at all?

Yay!

This was my biggest take-away from the initial application and the length reply to all of our questions. The constant use of "retard," "rape" and similar language is extraordinarily off-putting. I can also appreciate an individual who talks up their game-play and describes their past gaming history in the best terms...but I'm just getting this overwhelming sense of dread when reading what you're saying. Help me (and others in the guild feeling similarly) out here. Being competent in raids is one thing. Given our progression, I believe it's a given that we're all more or less competent and we have some absolutely stellar players. But, equally important, we need to be able to want to raid with you as an individual.

Considering I think I have killed all 6 bosses nearly every week and only have 4 Runestones, consider yourself lucky! Good luck with your app!

As I said in my initial post...these are not personal criticisms. I'm sorry that you took them as such. In addition, you're still not grasping the concept of re-applying an eclipsed dot at the start of the eclipse. It's not about the number of times you are casting the DoT, it's about having maximum DPS. To do that, you apply an eclipsed dot immediately upon hitting an eclipse. Not 6-8 seconds into it. We're not looking for a "world class balance druid for the 10/13 guild" (although, I sense the bitterness) since I am clearly not world class. But someone with thick enough skin to handle critiques of their logs and answer fairly direct questions would be preferable. Good luck!

Now, I'm sorry. There are several inaccuracies in here. First, let's talk about SF/MF "savings." You're not getting the most out of your eclipsed dots. But waiting until the end of the Eclipse, you are losing significant damage by not overwriting your non-eclipsed dot with an eclipsed one. Significant, significant damage. This is why it's not "the same" as you phrase it. They're substantially different things, with your way losing significant DPS. If the first thing you do when you hit an eclipse is hit the eclipsed dot (unless there are CA'ed dots up), it would be a big DPS boost for you. Second, SOTF is just flat out bad. You're viewing Wrath use in a complete vacuum. It is a statistical improbability that you will not get a single Starsurge proc when going from one Eclipse to another. Except, that is, if you are letting your dots fall off (which you do). Those Starsurge procs mean that you are not saving as much as you think with SOTF. In addition, you are making it so that your CA usage is completely "naked" -- or you have absolutely no other damage amplifiers going on with it. This is why Incarnation is excellent, PARTICULARLY when there are multiple targets to hit with your CA (think: Horridon, Tortos, Primordius, Iron Qon, Twins). Treants have also been proven to be a significant DPS increase over Incarnation in a single target fight. In other words, SOTF is the worst of all possible options. With the amount of haste you have coupled with the fact that you have the legendary meta...SOTF is simply overkill. You should be making it to Eclipses much faster than you are. Third, I'd love to hear the wrong assumptions that the sims use. Alternatively, I'd love to see a single high-end parse running SOTF or a boomkin who regularly runs SOTF in progression content. There is no debate on that particular topic, because SOTF simply does not give you enough, particularly since you're not maximizing your DoT uptime to begin with.

Hi Mon: Well, I had a big long thing typed up...and then I managed to hit the back button on my mouse on accident while reviewing it for typos. That's super. This one will probably be much more brief than the last. Since you've already mentioned how we examine logs, I'll say this: do not take any of the following as personal criticism. It is merely a critique of a few of your logs to see if you'd be a good fit, on that end, in our guild. None of us play perfectly all the time, and we're certainly not looking for perfection. We just want to see the ability to perform very well in raids. I look for five things: DoT uptimes (as close to 95% as possible), offensive CD use, defensive CD use, utility ability use, and overall survivability. I select pretty random logs so as to get a better picture of an applicant. 5/16 H Megaera: Overall DPS = 135k. This is very low. DoT uptimes = 79.8%/79.2%. This is also pretty low (mine were around 85% on this fight last week), but it's a little bit of a wonky fight for dots, so I'll give it a pass. However, it looks like you are dotting the Venomous Head a ton throughout the entire fight. Why are you doing this? This is a pretty huge DPS loss to yourself personally (spending 2 GCDs to cast two spells on an almost completely un-debuffed target) and a DPS loss for your overall raid (less DPS on the focus head target = longer time that each head is active). Your CD usage is also very strange. It appears as though you ran Soul of the Forest here, since I cannot see any use of Incarnation or Treants. What was the basis for that decision? I can't see how it would be beneficial (ever) over either Incarn/Treants. You also used your second potion at a VERY random time, when you had no CA active, no trinkets procced, no Lust burned, or any other CD of any description. Your defensive CD / utility ability use looks solid, though. Was this just a bad fight for you on this night? 5/22 H Horridon: Overall DPS = 281k. This is fine, except that you're getting to cheat a bit since you're the one running the log. Thus, your DPS to your Direhorn Spirit gets included in the log while no one else's DPS does. Subtracting out that damage gives us 266k DPS. Still respectable. DoT uptimes = 97.6%/90.8%. Huh? I've been seeing this a few times recently...what causes this vast discrepancy between your Sunfire and Moonfire uptimes? It just seems a bit random to me. Once again...no Incarnation or Treants? Did you also run Soul of the Forest here? Looks like you lined up your potion with CA/Lust this time. Lots more Barkskin/Healthstone/HT use, so that's good. Even a Tranq for good fun. 5/24 H Iron Qon: A fun fight to examine. Overall DPS = 141k. Very, very meh. DoT uptimes = 85.6%/84.1%. Not very good at all. Looks like you ran NV here. Again, that seems like a really random talent choice for a fight. NV is really only usable on a fight that is very short in length or has a big DPS increase as a mechanic. Iron Qon is an extremely long fight (11 minutes for ya'll) and has no sort of DPS amplifier. Your CD use was generally fine, as you lined up CA/Incarn/NV several times, except for the last time. It looks like you delayed your sixth NV so much that it was not up for your fourth Incarn/CA combo and then you just didn't use NV outside of it. Defensive CD use looks...fine? Probably a little low given the length of the fight. I like that you used Astral Communion during the shields on that phase (it's a good trick and not one many people do). Survivability when learning a new heroic: Looking over Iron Qon wipes. You were middle/top-ish of your raid group on the new nights you spent learning this fight. That's pretty good to see. I won't evaluate every death individually, since that seems like a waste. Watching your video, though, I can see some pretty bad habits. First, your DoT timers are really strange (looks like you have two add-ons conflicting with each other and they give you two different timers on the same DoT....how strange!). Second, as I feared with my earlier question, I'm not sure you're handling eclipses correctly, which could lead to why your DoT times are low on average. For instance, at about 1:25, you're transitioning from Solar->Lunar. When you hit Lunar, you have 9 seconds on a NG'ed Moonfire, 10 seconds on a NG'ed/Eclipsed Sunfire. Upon reaching Lunar, you do not re-cast Moonfire now that it would be eclipsed until very late, and only then very randomly. You then let Sunfire completely fall off for 5 seconds (1:36 - 1:41). Everything is fine until your next Lunar eclipse, where you repeat the error (you do not cast an eclipsed Moonfire to over-write your non-eclipsed Moonfire on the target), then Sunfire once again falls completely off for a few seconds as you get to Solar. It also looks like you used Soul of the Forest here. This only compounds your errors. You're using a talent that supposedly helps you get to eclipses faster, yet still allowing DoTs to fall off in-between these shortened in-between eclipse times. Interested to hear your feedback. Really interested in hearing why you like to use Soul of the Forest as a talent over Incarnation or even Treants (since they are now buffed in 5.3). Thanks.

I won't be able to formulate a more coherent post until tonight, but I had to respond about DoT up times specifically. On a fight like Jin, there is next to nothing going on and certainly not enough mechanics to justify your attitude about getting to an eclipse at the detriment of dot up times. Those sorts of DoT up times are simply not good. For instance, you should be getting between eclipses quickly enough to only have to cast both DoTs once, or by recasting the eclipsed dot towards the end of your NG timer to ensure it is active until the next eclipse. I'd be interested to hear you dive into this specific topic more. Let us say you're on a single target fight and you're going from a lunar eclipse to a solar eclipse. Moonfire has 6 seconds left, sunfire has 10 seconds left. Both are NGed DoTs, while obviously only moonfire is eclipsed. You hit solar eclipse. What do you do?