It’s the most wonderful time of the tier!

…or something like that, anyway.

Those of you who have been around for a while know the drill. For those who are new, we ask for our mythic raiders to do a little bit of homework as we move into mythic.

Please 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. Reflect on whether there’s anything you can do as a person to improve as well.

• 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 – several sentences is fine.
• Send us a screenshot of your in combat UI. This will help us determine if your UI is negatively impacting performance – maybe by blocking parts of the screen, or failing to highlight important buffs / debuffs impacting your rotation. If you can take a screenshot while you have a mechanic (such as Earthbreaker Missiles on Halondrus) even better.
• Please do not mention gear. Everyone has 4 set by now – trinkets and weapons are good, but are not going to widely swing your performance issues compared to playing better.

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.
  • Consider chatting with other people of your class/spec/role to see what they’re doing before coming to us with/for feedback.

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 and 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.

We expect these evaluations to be sent to us by midnight on Sunday, April 24th. This gives you several weeks of logs to look over.

Helpful Tools

NEW: Llorgs – make sure you look at Heroic for current comparisons, and Mythic for looking ahead!
NEW: Subcreation – grabs top info from Warcraft Logs about builds (talents, covenants, etc!)
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, but BE CAREFUL for outdated specs)
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.

Remember that you can save 278 pieces to use in your creation catalyst, and you can upgrade M+ and PvP gear and catalyze them. You can also buy mythic BoEs for this purpose, if you have the dough for it.

Example

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

• I don’t know how long it is between Pulsar procs as an average. This means that I might be holding Convoke too long (losing DPS) or sitting on a Pulsar proc too long while waiting for Pulsar (again losing DPS). I should sit in front of a dummy and press buttons on cooldown to see what the average length of time is for a Pulsar proc to come back around.
• On fights where I am not likely to be taking high damage / where quick movement is a priority, I should swap to Wild Charge instead of Renewal; Lihuvium is a good example of this. I can practice usage on a lower-stakes fight like normal Rygelon.
• I run Night Fae / Convoke as a comfort pick, because Venthyr timings can swing wildly in a raid group, and we don’t generally need the AoE coverage. I should spend time in WCL and on Llorgs to figure out which fights Venthyr might be more beneficial on for our comp and damage profile.

For a more thorough example, check out this example self-evaluation we handed out with 9.1. Even the raid leads give and get feedback!