Raiding

Weekend Warriors (Heroic):

EST:
Saturday 5 – 8 (4:30 – 4:50 invites)
Sunday 1 – 4 (12:30 – 12:50 invites)

PST:
Saturday 2 – 5 (1:30 – 1:50 invites)
Sunday 10 – 1 (9:30 – 9:50 invites)

Mythic:

EST:
Thursday & Friday 7 – 10 (6:30 – 6:50 invites)

PST:
Thursday & Friday 4 – 7 (3:30 – 3:50 invites)

 

All raiding events will be posted on the in-game calendar as PST / Server time; all events on the websites will be EST.

Quetzie

10.0 Mythic Self-Evals

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

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!

Quetzie

Dragonflight Launch Mythic Raider Meeting Replacement Notes

Hello Mythic raiders!

In lieu of our traditionally longer-form meeting for most pre-patch events, we’ve decided (because of holidays + launch + dungeons this week) to write up the usual minutes as a post for you to read at your leisure. That being said, we expect you to read this – so don’t come to us with a bunch of questions already in the posting.

That being said, THERE WILL STILL BE A SHORT MEETING AT 7PM ON THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1. Please plan to attend this even if you’re not available for dungeons.

Heroic raid meeting is on Saturday, 5pm eastern.

Agenda:

Introduction
Expectations
Rule Updates
Weekend Heroic Raiding
Dragonflight Info (some spoilers)
M+ / Dungeon Information
Q&A / Missing info

Continue reading →

Quetzie

Customizing the new UI - Tips, Tweaks, and Addons

Updated 11/16 – added XP bar, Micromenu, and Minimap resizer; added console command to clear action bars
Updated 11/1 – added Exiles Reach console command for edit mode, added SL micromenu addon, changed addon to hide Micromenu

It’s known to many that I have always used the basic stock WoW UI – no bartender, no ElvUI, no Dominos. I did use an addon called ButtonForge that allowed me to create extra, simple actionbars without revamping my whole UI – but now that Blizzard has given us up to 8 action bars, I can get rid of it and go completely clean.

Of course, the new UI still has bugs, and many of those are being hotfixed every day. For example, the stance bar kept centering and changing its size in the first few days; that should now be fixed. There’s a few UI options that can’t be moved by default. The “snap” option in Edit Mode isn’t intuitive. Here’s hoping some of those change over time!

We’ll start by diving into default options in the new UI, move into third-party enhancements for the new UI, and then dive into some lesser-known changes that can be made to it. I’ll also cover where old options have moved to in the new menus.

This post will act as a “living document” for a little while, and I’ll post edits and the dates I’ve added them to keep things tidy.

Sections:

  • Blizzard’s Official Notes on the New UI
  • Addons and Weakauras to Enhance the New UI
  • Addons to Enhance or Fix other Prepatch Changes
  • Enhancement and Changes for other UI Elements
  • Tips and Tricks for the New UI
  • “Thanks, I hate it, Take me Back”
  • Example UIs
  • Closing

Continue reading →