If you’re a normal or heroic raider that wants to improve your performance, feel free to reach out to Tiraffe and Quetzie anyway, even though this homework is directed at the Mythic team.

Mythic Eval Expectations

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. You can send this as either a Discord message or a document, as space requires.

• 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 each 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 Rock Blast or Awakened Earth on Terros, or Meteor Axes on Primal Council) even better.
• We know that many people are experiencing FPS drops, lagging, etc. This is also not something that should be listed amongst your 3 points to improve, but if you know it’s an issue, feel free to mention it separately and we can try to work with you to resolve some of these issues.

Some thoughts on Gear

It’s very easy to blame gear – ilvl, trinkets, weapons, etc – as a pain point in performance. However, this is (mostly) a cop-out at the mythic level. While it’s true that some specific pieces of gear can make a huge difference in damage or healing, the majority of performance improvements come from mastering your rotation and positional awareness. A good piece of gear could bring your purple parse up to orange, but it won’t be why you’re grey parsing on all bosses.

That being said, stat priority and allocation could be a pain point for some classes; you can acknowledge that you need to target specific crafted gear or dungeons, but this should not replace any of the 3 points of improvement we requested above.

Crafted gear is also a huge resource this tier. You can wear an unlimited number of crafted pieces (caveat: only 2 embellished pieces) with your BiS stats, and you should be taking advantage of that. 405 gear with the right stats might be much better for you than higher ilvl gear with poor stat allocation. Specific combinations of stats (looking at you, haste/mastery rings) can be especially difficult to come by, so supplement with crafts!

Acquiring Primal Focus and Concentrated Primal Focus most easily comes from dungeons than from raids. You need 10 of either to be able to created a crafted piece. Right now, everyone should have 5 or 6 sparks at their disposal, and you should therefore have 5 or so pieces of crafted gear. If you don’t, you should start running more +11s / pug heroic raid (for primal focus) or +16s (for concentrated primal focus). It might be difficult to get into 16s, but if you find you’re struggling to get into keys or struggling to time them, remember to attend the wednesday mythic keystone event – and practice your AoE rotation.

Resources to Help Shape your Evals

• Llorgs – shows when major cooldowns are used by your class
• Subcreation (heroic) (mythic) – grabs top info from Warcraft Logs about builds (talents, gems, embellished gear, etc)
• Wowanalyzer  (Even if your spec is “not supported” by Wowanalyzer, it will still have many useful insights. Don’t ignore it, but BE CAREFUL for outdated specs)
  • 
• Wipefest
• Warcraftlogs (heroic rankings) (mythic rankings)
  • Where to find your logs: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/aerie-peak/YOURNAME
• Improving your DPS: Revisited
• Class Discord list on wowhead

Evaluation Expectations

If you’re struggling to know where you can improve, plug some logs into Wipefest or Wowanalyzer, or chat with people in your class Discord.

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 (yes, we may recommend spec swapping), 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 Friday, February 24th. This gives you plenty of logs to look over from both end-tier heroic and beginning-tier mythic bosses.

Example

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

• Terros has so much going on that I find it difficult to make sure I’m using my cooldowns effectively. I’ve had a trend of wasting New Moon charges, or letting Stellar Flare fall off. While I want to save Full Moons for pulsar procs as much as possible, it shouldn’t come at the expense of wasting charges. I should come up with an audio proc that lets me know when I have moon charges close to capping, since the fight is too visually hectic to look at that cooldown.
• On AoE fights I tend to hold Fury of Elune too long. We have so much burst damage that I don’t need to worry about saving it for when adds are up – padding my numbers isn’t going to help kill the boss, and the damage it does is negligible compared to using it on cooldown or effectively for AP gain.
• I need to remember when I should be using starfire VS wrath. It’s hard to break the habit of always casting wrath now, even when I should be casting it in AoE situations. Formerly you would only cast it at 5+ targets; I need to learn the new breakpoint and force myself to change it as a result.
• I need to remember to proc Pulsar with Starfall rather than Starsurge, since starfall will gain buffs from boat/CA and do more damage than a starsurge would, even in single target.
• TIL: Mushroom’s DoT stacks with itself, so there’s no advantage to staggering them instead of using them over time. Therefore I can pop 3 charges at once for a burst of damage and AP, or save them for movement as needed.
• Dropping from 3k crit to around 1k crit and boosting up my haste did amazing things for my rotation and ability to keep uptime on Rattle the Stars, but I will have to make sure that I didn’t overdo it. I am very likely lacking in vers!

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!

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!

Short sweet, and to the point.

Sanctum of Domination:

Hazelnutty Sanctum of Domination Raid Boss Guides
Mythic Trap Sanctum of Domination Raid Boss Guides (starting at the Tarragrue)
Sanctum of Pineapples mechanic minigame
Wowhead Sanctum of Domination Guides – Wowhead

Tazavesh Megadungeon:

Hazelnutty Tazavesh Guide
Mythic Trap Tazavesh Guide
Wowhead Tazavesh Guide

Mythic+ Guides:

Tormented Affix Preview
Class Specialization Mythic+ Guides – check your spec page for tips on what anima powers to take with the new affix