Midri: Resto Shaman application

[Midri]

Character Name: Midri

Realm: Lightbringer

Race, Class & Spec: Draenei, shaman, resto with ele offspec

Armory Link: http://us.battle.net...er/Midri/simple

Professions:

Jewelcrafting and mining. I actually picked them because when I was a new to WoW, I thought it would be really great idea to take advantage of the +5 jewelcrafting Draenei racial, and mining for the mats seemed the most reasonable second profession. I've kept jewelcrafting for the jewelcrafter-only gems.

I toyed with the idea of dropping mining for blacksmithing many times, to get the extra sockets, but having run afoul of shamans' strangely low health pools in the past, I kept mining for the health buff. (Nefarian's Electrocute used to one-shot me, though back then I was an alternate and relatively undergeared; similarly, I could never solo-soak the Twilight Barrages on Warmaster, even after the Dragon Soul nerf was big enough that almost everyone else in the raid could.)

Age: 22

Male/Female: Female

Location: New York City

If accepted, when is the earliest you can start raiding with us?

Next week, assuming the server transfer and faction change go off alright. I had made plans to visit my parents for the 4th of July and my mom's birthday, so I won't be at my gaming computer for the second half of this week.

Availability (Tues to Thur 9pm EST to 12 am)

These times are fine with me. Your forum post mentioned that you have concerns about students and schedules; I'm a computer science PhD student, and in grad school, no one seems to care when you do anything, as long as it gets done, so my schedule is pretty much whatever I want it to be. Plus, I pretty much live in front of a computer all the time.

Previous guilds & why you left:

I was a Wrath baby! I started raiding seriously in ICC, and my guild then was Champions of Light, a 25-man guild on Shadowmoon. Towards the end of the expansion, a lot of the raiders lost motivation, and there was difficulty fielding a 25-man team. Then, shortly after Cataclysm dropped, the raid leader quit WoW due to real life problems, and the 25-team imploded. One of the officers started a 10-man team with a group of his friends in the guild, and the rest of us either hung around as alternates (which I did for a while), or left for greener pastures (which I did eventually).

My current guild is Sanctuary, a 10-man guild on Lightbringer, which has stopped raiding for the rest of Cataclysm and will not be raiding in Mists due to burnout among the officers. Since the middle of Firelands, we have been struggling with roster/balance problems: at least four healers have quit WoW because of real life conflicts, and at one point we had two ranged and five melee. There was a lot of stress and frustration on the part of the leadership, and they actually promoted made me healing lead midway through Dragon Soul to try to rally the healing team, which was suffering from the high turnover. While everyone stuck it out to finish the Cataclysm content, a lot of raiders and all the officers wanted a break from WoW, so the guild is done with raiding.

Tell us a little about your class and spec. specifically, how do you gear? How do you gem? What is your rotation/priority on a given fight?

(I'm not sure what level of detail is appropriate, so if this isn't what's expected, please let me know!)

For resto, I have two stat priorities. The one currently on my armory page is the default spec/reforge that I use for instances/lfr/farm content. The spec is pretty standard; I'm going for flexibility rather than massive throughput or survivability. I reforge to the 2005 haste breakpoint, where you gain an extra Riptide tick, and the rest goes into mastery. I don't reforge out of spirit if I can help it, as my healing team has been pretty dependent on Mana Tide.

During progression, I drop to the 916 haste breakpoint and reforge the difference into mastery for bigger heals when people are low (which is almost always on progression fights). The exception is for fights where I'm the primary dispeller (Sinestra, Spine); then I keep the haste, since most of my healing comes from whatever hots I squeeze in between dispels. I also use some specialized specs for fights with unusual mechanics. On Spine, for example, I drop Ancestral Swiftness (15% movement speed increase and instant Ghost Wolf) and spec into Cleansing Waters (reduced mana cost on dispels, and dispels also do a little healing on a six second icd) and Focused Insight (a small throughput increase for Healing Rain, which does the bulk of my healing, and a significant mana-saver).

I rarely change my glyphs. I use all throughput glyphs, with Stoneskin Totem as a personal mitigation cd, and Healing Stream Totem for the resistance buff.

As for rotation/priority I use Riptide on cd to keep Tidal Waves up and to keep the health buff on the tank(s), and I'll put down Healing Rain on groups of four or more people if I'm expecting aoe damage. Nothing really changes if I have a specific healing assignment, except that if push comes to shove, I'll let die a dps if I'm assigned to the tanks (the opposite is generally not true unless we've come up against an enrage, in which case I'll frantically spam heal our mage and pray). The only time I've used Healing Surge on purpose is on Al'akir, during Rohash's Storm Shield.

I use Gift of the Naaru, Nature's Swiftness, and Spirit Link Totem as emergency buttons, and I should probably explain the latter, since it's almost always part of a pre-set cd rotation. I figure that if using Spirit Link out of turn will prevent a wipe, I might as well do it. If I don't, we're not going to get to the point in the fight where I was supposed to use it anyway, and it's usually possible to use other healers' cds early, or to use a tank's or dps's cd. Some examples of times when I've done this are on Zon'ozz, if we need to do extra bounces for whatever reason, or on Madness, if a tank cd hasn't come up in time for an Impale. Also, as of tier 13, Spiritwalker's Grace is also a resto throughput cd and is amazing for spamming Greater Healing Wave for spread aoe heals. I'm also a big fan of using totems proactively (super excited about the Mists totem changes!), such as dropping the Earth Elemental Totem to gather up loose Corrupted Bloods near the end of Spine.

Please post a screen shot of your UI.

http://i49.tinypic.com/qrc1lc.jpg

Raiding Add-Ons.

Visible in the screenshot are Vuhdo raid frames, Weak Auras for tracking certain (de)buffs and cooldowns, Omen, Recount for logging, and Tidyplates enemy name plates (I only turn on friendly name plates for certain encounters, like Al'akir, to make it easier to see where people are). Not pictured are DBM and Parrot floating combat text. I also use ReforgeLite to do reforging calculations so that I'm closer to breakpoints than if I just eyeballed it myself.

Please include any WWS or WMO logs you might have.

http://www.worldoflo...1wvxwnnvl1sbkz/

Hopefully you will be able to see it before it gets purged! As I mentioned, our guild has stopped raiding, so the report is from June.

Name an Encounter where you excel and give reasons as to why your class would excel more then other classes on that specific encounter, or why you personally do better than other players on that fight, this can also include fights from WOTLK. Please include more than one example.

Spine is a big one as far as class mechanics go. Spirit Link Totem eats right through Searing Plasma. Resto shaman have cheap dispels (though for political reasons, our druid is usually the main dispeller on that fight; this is the case in the log above) and a lot of fire-and-forget heals - Earth Shield, Healing Rain, and Riptide - that we can use in between dispels. We also have the win-win of getting mana and helping kill the Tendons via Telluric Currents. Madness and Majordomo are also pretty good for shaman, since we can pretty much go nuts healing and then regen our entire mana pools with Telluric Currents. On Madness, there is also the benefit of being able to use Flame Shock to trigger Focused Insight. Flame Shock is great for proccing Spellweave, so I had a lot of fun keeping it up on the Mutated Corruptions and watching all the Spellweaves go off.

An encounter where I think I've done a particularly good job is Morchok: I had the 66th ranked parse on the third week of Dragon Soul. (He had been buggy the second week and didn't do enough damage per Stomp.) I was still helped by the circumstances of the encounter, since I healed my side alone and didn't have to share the damage with anyone, but I'm pretty proud of my performance given how much moving I had to do. I burned through every cd I had, and I had to use Telluric Currents heavily during the black phases to recover from all the Greater Healing Wave spam. Other things I'm proud of are tank-healing Yor'sahj (we used two healers, neither of whom were pallys) and, back in Wrath, solo-healing phase 3 of the Lich King encounter (I did this twice on 10-man because the other healers always managed to die during phase 2; there must be some kindness in the rng god's heart because I didn't get Frostmourne'd either time).

Every player has room for improvements, even the best players, give us an area where you personally can improve, and possible steps you have taken to improve in this area. Also, can we expect you to improve on a week to week basis on every encounter we do?

Throughout Dragon Soul, I have been working on improving my Healing Rain uptime. I'm pretty good about it when I'm using Focused Insight with it, but otherwise I'm often late in refreshing it. I also find that I'm not as comfortable with my aoe healing rotation as I would like. I'm keeping Healing Rain down, three Riptides up, and then filling the rest of the time with Chain Heals, consuming expiring Riptides whenever I can, but I'd like to get better at the timing of the three abilities.

My Chain Heal also overheals a lot more than I would like, especially compared to the overhealing on my (Greater) Healing Wave. The cluster scanner on Vuhdo is a big help for making sure Chain Heals bounce (I cry a little every time I see a Chain Heal that doesn't bounce), but that only goes so far. Right now I aim Chain Heals at the lowest-health person in the cluster, but that doesn't account for, say, the second-lowest person being far away from other low-health people. Then the Chain Heal bounces from him to some relatively high-health people and overheals on them.

I expect the transition to 25-man raiding will come with some bumps as well. I've been raiding 10-mans for the majority of my raiding "career," so I've developed some 10-man habits. For example, I'm pretty stingy with the Chain Heals and Healing Rains because it's so easy to waste them in 10-man - too much space for too few people.

In Closing...

Sorry if I was too long-winded in the application! My dad likes to say that I learned to talk early and haven't stopped since...

I have to admit, I waffled around for a while before I gathered up the courage to app - and spent each day terrified that by the time I did decide to app, you'd have already found someone way better than me! I tend to get really attached to my guilds, and it takes me forever to leave one. For that reason, when I'm looking for a new guild, I like to lurk around the forums for a bit to get a feel for what it's like. I'm very happy with what I saw here: everyone is extraordinarily friendly and willing to engage with applicants.

I'll be checking this thread, but let me know if you want to talk in some other medium!

And just to confirm; signing the Code of Conduct isn't necessary at this stage of applying, correct?

[Stegosaurus]

I can't say much about your actual spec as I'm not too versed in Resto Shamans these days. I definitely can say that you're plenty experienced and this is a quality app.

Welcome to the boards! And you're correct, Code of Conduct is a bit later on in the process.

I do have a few questions that make no difference whatsoever in this process:

Favorite dinosasur?

Favorite color?

Do you play TF2?

I'm all out of questions.

[Ashin]

Hello!

Thank you for a very thorough application. I'm very interested and I'm going to dive right into some tough questions.

First, as I review your logs I notice that I don't see terribly many GHW's - is this a reflection of being at a point in the progression where there isn't deep enough damage going around to justify the cast time? The last time I've really looked closely at rsham logs was during T12 progression and I remember GHW accounting for the bulk of throughput back then. Along these lines, I was wondering why I don't see more use of Unleash Elements. This might actually relate to the GHW question, but it's hard to argue with +20% healing on a 15 second cooldown. So I was wondering if you could elaborate.

Second with respect to your closing comments, I just want to mention that it is no crime being shy. However, in our guild and in our raid team I cultivate an atmosphere where we can discuss performance and feedback very openly. I think we're very civilized about it, but it could be perceived as somewhat confrontational to someone who is overly shy. Does this raise any concerns, or do you feel comfortable in that sort of open, goal-focused environment?

Lastly I want to throw you a curveball and point out that we are a PvP server. I recognize that you are coming from a PvE realm, and that Mists is going to put renewed emphasis on world PvP. Have you thought about whether this will be enjoyable for you? Would you have fun with activities like random or rated BG's during off nights? I mention that in particular because I don't see many HK's in the armory, especially for how much time you've put into the character.

Again thanks for the application - it is great to see that you have a lot of experience with this expansion. I'm also bumping your access to Guest which should facilitate your lurking.

I look forward to hearing your replies.

(Also, you're not from Texas, which is amazing given our recent string of applications!)

[Morkgrim]

Welcome to the forums!

[Hip]

Thanks for dropping in and completing a solid app. Well done.

Curious what race you would choose if you flipped your character to the horde?

Also, do you have any affiliation with Texas?

Welcome to the boards!

[Inedit]

Welcome!

Curious about your 2 HM Madness kills -- were there many attempts and those were the only two successful ones? Or, did you kill it twice in a row and then the raiding stopped?

Also, if you were invited out on a dinner date to a gas station restaurant in Texas, would you go?

[Huntyre]

Welcome

[Gippal]

(1) As we've made the jump from 10-man to 25-man, some of our raiders have experienced some noticeable lag issues with some of the more graphics-intensive fights. Given you've largely been in a 10-man setting, do you foresee any issues with this?

(2) Any plans on dropping Mining for a second, more useful profession?

(3) Can you speak in binary?

[Cryus]

I noticed the gas station restaurant thing mentioned. There is actually a 5 star restaurant in a gas station in my area. I haven't been but my sister has. She said is is really nice. And the more texans the merrier

[Midri]

Wow, you people get up early! Thanks for all the welcomes.

Favorite dinosasur?

I watched The Land Before Time a lot as a kid, so I have a deep and abiding love for brontosaurus/apatosaurus, or whatever they're calling it these days.

Favorite color?

Olive green.

Do you play TF2?

The only FPS I ever really played was America's Army, and I stopped after getting killed by friendly fire a few too many times. I was always a medic, and for some reason, people would ask for the medic, only to shoot me as I approached. "Hey, I'm towards you from the east. Oh I see you; do you see me? Why am I dead? Again? Are you guys doing this on purpose??"

Regarding GHW and UE use

http://www.worldoflo...egsfc8vzlmm9mg/ This is the first half of the DS lockout from the week after the other lot, and it has more GHW. Sort of.

In Firelands GHW was big because there weren't many opportunities to use our aoe abilities, both because people tended to be too spread out, and because not a lot of fights had that much aoe damage. So you have Shannox, which is damage on three people at a time, Beth with only a few people upstairs and only the tank/fixated target and bomber spider dentonator downstairs, Alysrazor with just the tanks, Baleroc with the tank and the crystal soaker, and so on. In contrast, Dragon Soul is very aoe-friendly for shaman (some people think that Blizzard did this on purpose after the complaints about Firelands being unfriendly, especially in 10 man). For the fights in the log, we have Warmaster, where there is almost always a nice melee Chain Heal cluster of people who got hit by an add charging. Spine and Madness are heavy on aoe-damage and limited space. In the log above, GHW is a much bigger portion of my healing done on fights like Yor'sahj, where you often don't want to aoe heal for fear of blowing up the raid, and Hagara, where people are spread out and moving around most of the time.

The other big thing is that, on Spine and Madness, we were using our haste-geared pally, whose heals were noticeably weaker than the other, crit-geared pally we had at the time. This was amazing when they were both in a fight because we could enjoy the benefits of both a powerful tank healer and a powerful stacked aoe healer, but when only one of them was in a fight, I usually took the role of the other. So besides DS mechanics more often favoring aoe rather than big single-target bombs, there was also that my role spot-healing, and our raid-healing druid, bless her, needed the help a lot more than our tank-healing pally did.

As for UE, I would use it to set up a big heal on a tank - Baleroc during the Decimation Blade - or if I really wanted to squeeze out as much healing as possible on a pre-hotted target - UE+Riptide on the tank right before the purple phase on Yor'sahj (which I realize I don't do in the log above; when the log was taken, we outgeared the encounter, and the pally's Beacon heals more or less did everything for me). UE isn't something I use much when I'm aoe healing because, to my knowledge, it doesn't do anything for Healing Rain. I chould probably work on slotting it in before a Chain Heal. But generally, I think of UE as a set-up ability to use during a low-damage lull when you're expecting someone to take a big hit. I probably should have used it more for this purpose to deal with Impales on Madness.

Regarding performance feedback

I'm fine with it. The officers in Sanctuary didn't hold back when they thought I was underperforming in raid or doing a poor leadership job with my healing team. Plus, as the burnout really started taking a toll on the officers, I kind of took over raid leading a lot of the time. I reprimanded people left and right for doing silly things or failing to do important things, and I'd be a pretty big jerk if I couldn't take criticism myself. It's always been my personal policy to admit fault if I even suspect I was the cause of a wipe; that way we can figure out what to do about it and get on with killing things.

Regarding PvP servers

My first server, Shadowmoon, was PvP, too, so world PvP doesn't bother me, though I've never sought it out. I also play Aion, an MMO by the company that makes Guild Wars, and that's all about the world PvP. Most of my experience with WoW PvP was from one short and concentrated burst of 3v3 arenas during 4.2. My team made Challenger, but then again, resto shaman were so amazingly good for PvP this expansion that it was probably due less to me than to favorable mechanics. But I do enjoy PvP, and I'd love to it with guildies.

Curious what race you would choose if you flipped your character to the horde?

If Mists had already dropped, I'd be a panda in a heartbeat! But probably a troll, ostensibly because the haste racial is great for both resto and ele, but really because I like their casting animations the best... I'm a little shallow like that.

Also, do you have any affiliation with Texas?

My roommate freshman year was from Houston; affiliation by proxy?

Curious about your 2 HM Madness kills -- were there many attempts and those were the only two successful ones? Or, did you kill it twice in a row and then the raiding stopped?

Both? There were a lot of attempts, and we changed strats a couple times, but we only intended to kill it once. At that point, a lot of people were counting down the days until they could stop playing. We killed it the second time to get achievements for everyone who had sat out for balance on the first kill, and then after that we switched to working on Ragnaros, which we had left over from Firelands. I was on vacation in Ecuador when they killed him, and I felt would have really bad asking everyone to stay an extra week for me, so I've been pretty okay with not being a Firelady.

Also, if you were invited out on a dinner date to a gas station restaurant in Texas, would you go?

I have never been to a gas station restaurant (I don't think there are any around here; at least, I've never seen one), so why not!

Regarding 25-mans and hardware

I've had lag playing with the graphical settings turned up in lfr, but I'm pretty sure that's because I was a noob gamer when I was working on the specs for my computer and only put in 3Gb of ram. With Aion, which is graphically more intensive than wow, I had actually noticed my poor computer paging in my faction capital! I've since upgraded to 16Gb, which makes Aion run smoothly, so while I haven't tested it out in lfr, I don't think lag will be a problem.

Any plans on dropping Mining for a second, more useful profession?

I briefly addressed this in my application. I've thought about replacing it with blacksmithing for a while, but due to some "omg I need more health" moments and a non-trivial amount of laziness, I haven't done it yet. I'd certainly be willing to.

Can you speak in binary?

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