Hello Mythic Raiders!

Once again, the raid leads are asking you to be critical of your performance. Those who were around in Nathria remember this; for those who are new, don’t sweat.

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 on your UI or keybinds.

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 further guide our feedback for you at that time.

We expect these evaluations to be sent to us by midnight on Sunday, August 8th. This gives you several weeks of 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; click through the dropdown menus for your spec and covenant)
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 need to look up how long I should be holding Convoke for to line up with a Pulsar window, or how long to hold a Pulsar window to line up with Convoke. There are some fights where my windows fall out of alignment because of downtime (like Painsmith). I may actually benefit from using a different legendary on Painsmith because of the amount of forced downtime. I should also look into Nerzhul timing with my moonmoon talent – is it more worth it to save for adds / pulsar or should I be using it without saving it? Basically I need to figure out the timing on save VS spend for overcapping on a variety of abilities.
  • I changed my keybinds recently, but I should adjust them further. Soulshape should be on a higher priority keybind location so that it takes less fiddling to line it up properly; this way I won’t die to as many dodgeable mechanics (lookin’ at you, Eye).
  • If I’m going to be using the Shadowed Orb of Torment, I need to make sure that I’m safe before channeling. I have either died or taken excess damage a lot because of planting myself to prioritize damage, but dead DPS do no DPS.