Hello Mythic Raiders!

As we move into heroic full time, we want to make sure everyone is putting their best foot forward! As such, we’re asking you to send Tiraffe and/or Quetzie a self-evaluation of your performance thus far in the tier. Consider what your strengths are, and where you are struggling. We ask that you tell us 3 things that you can improve on, and how you intend to do so (please be more specific than “die less” or “higher DPS”). These evals don’t have to be long – a few sentences is fine.

Evaluation Expectations

If you’re struggling to know where you can improve, plug some logs into Wipefest or Wowanalyzer. If you know what you need to improve, but aren’t sure how to fix it, let us know – but be specific. “I have really low casts of Wrath compared to other balance druids, what am I doing wrong?” would be an example of a specific problem. Please do not blindly ask us how you can improve (you’ve had plenty of opportunity to do so until now). This is a time for you to prove that you know your faults, even if you’re not sure how to fix them.

After we’ve received your evals, we’ll converse with you about how we can help on your actionables. There might not always be something we can do on our end, but we hope to try. It might be as easy as finding (or creating) weakauras or changing addon settings, or as involved as watching you practice your rotation on a dummy and giving feedback.

We may also volunteer other, potentially more crucial, places that we think you can improve. This might be something like a talent choice, spec choice, gear or stat priority, trinket usage, etc.

We hope that this exercise will get you thinking more regularly and critically about your performance, both your strengths and your weaknesses. When we move into mythic, we’ll use these conversations to guide our feedback for you at that time. Those of you who were with us when we moved into Mythic Nyalotha remember the one-sheet reviews – expect something similar that will incorporate your self-evaluations this time around.

We expect these evaluations to be sent to us by midnight on Sunday, January 10th. This gives you several weeks of normal and heroic logs to look over.

Helpful Tools

Where to find your logs: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/aerie-peak/YOURNAME
Wowanalyzer  (Even if your spec is “not supported” by Wowanalyzer, it will still have many useful insights. Don’t ignore it. See below)
Wipefest
Warcraftlogs (heroic rankings)
Improving your DPS: Revisited

A Note About Gear

Gear is not performance. These self-evaluations need to be made entirely separate from the gear on your person. If you feel that gear is holding you back, it isn’t and should not be your main concern. That said, if you aren’t taking a visible initiative to get yourself into keys or use pvp to fill in gaps in your gear, you need to do so. No one should be relying solely on raid gear for Mythic progression. Spending more time in keys will also make them less difficult when the only worthwhile gear comes out of 14/15’s, even if it’s just for the Great Vault.

Example

Here is an example self-evaluation from Quetzie. It’s more in-depth than yours needs to be:

  • I don’t know whether I should be prioritizing 3 stacks of Eclipse empowerments, or 3 stacks of Starlord. I often wind up with 2 Starlord stacks halfway through an Eclipse because of movement. I will check in with people who know my class well, as well as practice on a dummy, to see what has greater DPS output.
  • I tend to stand too far away from people in Sun King, which makes life harder on our healers and harder to cleave. What I should do is use Soulshape to get into “melee” range after channeling on a pillar, instead of moving slightly off the channeled pillar and  remaining planted there. Since I can cast while moving, I should take advantage of that!
  • I usually rarely cast Heart of the Wild (except for sun king). Huntsman and Darkvein both have really high damage output moments – it would be a good idea for me to cast HotW at the start of the 3rd dog phase, and follow it up by blanketing the raid in Rejuvs and WG. I can do the same thing on Darkvein after she gets to about 1/4 HP (which is when we start losing it). I can probably also cast it during P1 of Denathrius – the first add wave in the second “pie slice” seems really high damage and some blanket rejuvs before adds spawn would help there.