[RG1] Xanzara, level 100, Feral Druid
Posted: 02 May 2015, 00:26
Who is your character?
My current main is Xanzara, currently main spec Feral Druid, but I also play the other specs at a decent level. My primary off-spec is guardian but I've been restoing a bit in alt raids to gain gear for the two caster specs as well.
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/t ... a/advanced
Who are you?
I'm Marcus, (or Xanzara, or Xanthra or simply Xan - I respond to all of them
) I currently live in Sweden and currently studying for a Master of Science in Engineering. Other than living the "sweet" student life I like video gaming (well WoW of cource), especially competitive computer gaming (Currently a focus on League and CS:GO), and taking beer or two with friends.
To which Raid Group are you Applying?
RG1
Experience
Currently I'm 6/7M in Highmaul and 2/10M in Blackrock Foundry on my druid as feral with some minor guardianing as offspec whenever it was needed. Progression has more or less stopped very early in BRF due to lack of numbers in my current guild.
I raided as an Elemental/Resto shaman in MoP (and previously in Cata as well) and all the following progression was done on her.
When SoO was current(so before 6.0 patches made it trivial); I got to Blackfuse in 25 heroic (before the numbers dwindled like now) and killed up to and including Garrosh in 10 heroic.
I can't remember exact progression in the previous MoP tiers, but it included no full tier-clears, but I think I got heroic kills from slightly more than half of the bosses in them (including cutting edge from Mogushan).
Raid Role
As a feral my primary asset is really my high single-target damage, cleaving and mobility is not too shabby either but my AoE leave things to be desired, as such my role is usually to heavily focus on boss damage on fights which combines different kind of dps jobs (As an example I may not do much damage to packbeasts on Darmac, but I can usually be at the top in single-target damage).
Preparation (other than consumables of cource) and keeping myself update goes hand in hand, I tend to follow the top ferals (and theorycrafters if that would not coincide) and see what they do on various bosses and read up on their findings. The primary source of feral knowledge is undoubtably the community of fluiddruid.net and I tend to hang there a lot (even if I might not be the most active contributor). I also use simcraft to test various spec choices and decisions in my spare time.
In general for learning classes and specs I tend to use resources such as the fresh summonstone.com (which has some excellent guides), mmo-champions forum (which is less great, but often has some amount of quality information as long as you can sort away the less interesting) and a few blogs and sites I've subscribed too. In the past I've used icy-veins, wowhead (the blogs and guides, the database is of course excellent still) and elitist jerks but I think their quality has either degraded or become of very varying quality so much less so now.
As for judging my own performance, Warcraftlogs is an invaluable tool in many ways. The most obvious is that you can see percentiles and rankings (which provide a good indication as long as they are read sensibly, specific tasks on a fight, and strategy has a big impact on dps numbers of course and padding is of course a thing as well.) but also being able to check things such as dot uptimes, proc usages, resource waste and even zoom down and see a specific sequence of ability use at any point is absolutely amazing (which is excellent for checking my opener). I tend to run a few queries after most raids and see where I can improve. I also record most raids and go back and look on them (during progression mostly) to provide a compliment to the logs. The video playback helps mostly with seeing issues were your UI might not be helping you.
Your Spec
Ferals rotation is all about managing resources. I try to maintain high uptime on my dots and buffs (Rip, Rake, Savage Roar, Moonfire), while effectively using my energy to build combo points and use finishers. I'll try to avoid writing a paper about how to play feral but in short the rotation goes something like this:
Use as many powered up finishers (We have a few snapshot mechanics still) as possible while maintaining dot uptimes as high as possible while never wasting any resources. Feral is not as hard as it once was, but it still has intricacies to it (such as blood talons which makes healing touches empower two abilities, which snapshots with dots) which add to the enjoyment of the spec for me.
Stat priorities are a bit fluid but for single-target goes something like Crit > Multistrike >> Versatility >= Mastery >= Haste and on cleave and AoE: Mastery >>> Crit > Multistrike >= Versatility > Haste
I tend to go for (like a lot of ferals do) a somewhat balanced approach of Crit > Mastery = Multistrike > Versatility > Haste as the single-target sacrifice is fairly small for a rather big AoE increase (admittedly my current gear has a fairly low mastery number still compare to crit and ms - I'll attribute that to RNG). If I had access to multiple weapons (and other enchantable off-pieces) I'd likely enchant and gem them for mastery and swap for aoe fights, but I've chosen to prioritize the balanced build over two specific ones for the sake of efficient usage of items for the raid as a whole.
There are not really that many interesting glyphs and talents,
T1: I swap between my movement talents depending on encounter needs, but my default choice is Displacer Beast (blink + short sprint)
T2: I am almost always Yseras for constant healing, I've toyed with Ward on fights where there are predictable big damage (it would be excellent for Crackling, but we haven't had a mechanic like that in a while) but there are not much use for it this tier
T3: This tier is next to useless in raids, Typhoon is my default choice - I've heard that mass-entanglement might be useful on the boat on mythic maidens, so that's a very situational row
T4: Well, Incarnation is head and shoulders above the other in almost any thinkable raid situation - I've tried the other two in proving grounds but that's about it
T5: Another highly situational row - Ursol's Vortex is probably the most useful (together with Typhoon it makes a psudo-gorefiend's grasp) but I don't really swap this around much in PvE, the only case is in challenge modes where I used incapacitating roar as an additional area interrupt which worked fairly well.
T6: Off-role utility, not very interesting and mostly I go with dream of cenarius to add a decent stream of constant rejuv healing on tanks (and healing touches on raid members if they happen to be low when I am using a healing touch proc) - Heart of the wild is a decent healing throughput cd if you want to give up DPS, but the 6 minute cooldown makes it a bad trade-off on most encounters, it is unfortunately not making me a good tank either - on fights with constant high raid damage nature vigil is a good choice, it syncs with cooldowns to provide similar overall throughput to dream (it is bad without cooldowns supporting it thou). It was very useful on butcher and it is also good if I'm alone for prolonged periods (such as soloing a balcony on Blackhand).
T7: is slightly more interesting, the option is 85% of cases is Blood talons as it is the best single-target talent and also good for very high target aoe (well, not good - but much better than the options) while Lunar Inspiration is useful for near constant few target-cleave such as maidens and hanzgar, or twin ogron from Highmaul.
Glyphs: Two near mandatory ones; glyph of savage roar which is a straight dps increase as it allow me to avoid having to spend a lot of combo points on savage roar (at start, or whenever I use incarnation) a lot of the power of incarnation does indeed come from this glyph. The other near mandatory one is actually a choice between glyph of cat form (+20% healing taken) and glyph of ninth life (flat 10% damage reduction), I do not swap this super much currently (as 20% healing is better in theory as long as you avoid one shots) but I can definitely see merits of both in harder content.
Other glyphs are very meh, stampeding roar (40yd range) is probably my go-to. I'm seldom primary combat resser as resto and balance do it instantly, so rebirth glyph (res with 100% hp) is situational and the other really interesting glyph is situational survival instincts (For shorter duration and recharge time on my shield wall) or Ferocious bite (some minor healing), and I guess rake is also a situational choice for some convenience when multi-dotting during incarnation but it is such a minor consideration that it is seldom interesting in PvE.
Off-specs and Alternative characters
Very comfortable with all the druid specs, my guardian gear is about as good as my feral gear and I am very comfortable playing it. I'm also a decent resto, and I've played enough boomkin (dungeons and lfr and such) that I know that I could become good at it very quickly. Both of those specs need a few pieces thou (trinkets and cloak primarily) to become strong mythic specs.
One of my strengths as a player has always been that I'm good at picking up specs and classes fast and play them at a good level and as such I tend to spend a lot of time on PTR and Beta's testing different specs to see what I think and like about the playstyle. I do have a bunch of level hundreds (with heirlooms levelling is almost too fast
) such as my former main (elemental/resto shaman) and a warlock (my former 'primary' alt I guess, played around in heroic siege of orgrimmar) that I more or less could raid mythics with, but I haven't really focused on gearing any of them as I've mostly been concerned with getting all my four druid specs geared (playing resto in heroic alt raids for example)
I'm not adverse to playing alts if they are needed, even thou I prefer playing my main these days (feral is one of the funniest specs I found during the beta) of course all of that is hypothetical as I don't have any good alt to show you right now and I can't expect you to trust my word on being a fast learner.
Communication
Yes, yes and yes. Very comfortable with talking during encounters, maybe a bit too eager occasionally. I am good at reading forums and usually cycle through a long list of forums and blogs multiple times daily for updates.
Combat Logs
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/c ... 55/latest/ - show the entire story, with average percentiles and individual logs. If you want me to cherry pick some logs I could do that of course.
Your UI
http://static.xanthra.eu/currentui.png
My current UI as of Monday in LFR. Based mostly on Skullflowers Elvui mod, with BigWigs and WeakAuras as well as Exsorsus Raid Tools. I do change my UI around fairly often, but I tend to prefer a style with as much view over the raid as possible while still having access to all the information I want near my view. (and no I'm not a clicker , I just have my binds hidden at that screenshot - I'm actually a fairly excessive key binder and I've even moved my movement keys to esdf to get more binds 
)
Guild History
I've played the game for very long and honestly, my early days are a bit blurry and not awfully relevant any-more. I started very early in Vanilla, in fact earlier than the EU server release. Following that I played through vanilla as a undead priest and really flew between guilds at the time looking for these elusive things know as raids, I was still floating around mostly through early burning crusade and eventually found a raiding team (multiple guilds) and stuck with them throughout Wrath (it wasn't a guild per say before later in Wrath, but really it was a guild custom chat channel and all) and the team successfully went harder and harder at the content, and was 5days*4hour at the end of Wrath. Real-life started to catch-up to me at this time (as when I was younger time and real-life commitments were not a massive issue to raiding in the middle of the night :p).
I started an account to play casually at EU (better ping and times, the US prime time does not map well to Europe) and choose The Venture Co as I had some real life buddies there, and figured I was going to try my hand at RP and joined a very casual "raiding"-guild with a silly name that I can't recall at the moment. Regardless I was thinking about going casual and maybe do some normal raids at start of Cataclysm and took a short break as well, but ultimately after going down the Warhammer Online route decided that WoW was the game for me after all and came back. At this time I joined the only 25-man guild that was still active at the time (TVC went from fairly high pop to low during the first tier in Cataclysm with most top guilds moving or disbanding) which is also my current guild, <Sanctuary of Dreams>, the choice proved wise and I stuck around throughout Firelands, Dragon Soul and into Mists of Pandaria. I was fairly burned out at the time so I went on a break for a few months in ToT, came back before the start of SoO and have played constantly with them since. SoD eventually ended up being the ONLY raiding guild on TVC at the end of SoO. It's rather surprising that we managed to hold an active rooster as we did on a server as dead as that, but we did.
We continued on our level from SoO and entered Highmaul full of hope, but numbers have continuously dropped down and since 10 man raiding isn't a thing anymore going from raiding mythics 9 hours a week to zero or maybe 1 if a lot of social members show up is too big of a hurdle for me to stick around.
What we can learn from this story is probably that I am not the one to quit a guild in the first place, when I find a home I tend to stick to it or maybe that I write very long posts on forums occasionally, I guess both are true
Raid availability
I should be able to make all of them regularly, I can flexibly control my schedule so it should be fine with some odd occasional thing. In my current guild I've missed one raid (due to the flu) since the start of this expansion.
References
Unfortunately not many, I've been looking for a guild with good mythic raiding while not having an overburdening schedule and that seem to have a nice attitude, drama is something I like to avoid as far as possible, and I can tell you that there aren't many around. I found TRC on WoWProgress and I think I might have found a very good match.
About you
I think I have written most of me into the other categories already; but yes I'm a video gamer at heart, plays a lot of different games and follow esports, other interests include programming, electronics and robotics (which is also what my master of science is about) history and politics, fantasy in general and sci-fi in general. I have a punny and occasionally dry sense of humour and is not easily offended. I consider myself good at quickly picking up and playing games, and love trying things both in game/s and in real life. Oh right I also like playing board games, and play a bit of magic: the gathering whenever I get opportunity and also have a Warhammer army painted and ready even if I don't use it much anymore. (There is only so many hours a day, unfortunately, and studies/work soak up most of them
)
Miscellaneous
I don't think there is anything else right now, but I might have forgotten something
My current main is Xanzara, currently main spec Feral Druid, but I also play the other specs at a decent level. My primary off-spec is guardian but I've been restoing a bit in alt raids to gain gear for the two caster specs as well.
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/t ... a/advanced
Who are you?
I'm Marcus, (or Xanzara, or Xanthra or simply Xan - I respond to all of them
) I currently live in Sweden and currently studying for a Master of Science in Engineering. Other than living the "sweet" student life I like video gaming (well WoW of cource), especially competitive computer gaming (Currently a focus on League and CS:GO), and taking beer or two with friends.To which Raid Group are you Applying?
RG1
Experience
Currently I'm 6/7M in Highmaul and 2/10M in Blackrock Foundry on my druid as feral with some minor guardianing as offspec whenever it was needed. Progression has more or less stopped very early in BRF due to lack of numbers in my current guild.
I raided as an Elemental/Resto shaman in MoP (and previously in Cata as well) and all the following progression was done on her.
When SoO was current(so before 6.0 patches made it trivial); I got to Blackfuse in 25 heroic (before the numbers dwindled like now) and killed up to and including Garrosh in 10 heroic.
I can't remember exact progression in the previous MoP tiers, but it included no full tier-clears, but I think I got heroic kills from slightly more than half of the bosses in them (including cutting edge from Mogushan).
Raid Role
As a feral my primary asset is really my high single-target damage, cleaving and mobility is not too shabby either but my AoE leave things to be desired, as such my role is usually to heavily focus on boss damage on fights which combines different kind of dps jobs (As an example I may not do much damage to packbeasts on Darmac, but I can usually be at the top in single-target damage).
Preparation (other than consumables of cource) and keeping myself update goes hand in hand, I tend to follow the top ferals (and theorycrafters if that would not coincide) and see what they do on various bosses and read up on their findings. The primary source of feral knowledge is undoubtably the community of fluiddruid.net and I tend to hang there a lot (even if I might not be the most active contributor). I also use simcraft to test various spec choices and decisions in my spare time.
In general for learning classes and specs I tend to use resources such as the fresh summonstone.com (which has some excellent guides), mmo-champions forum (which is less great, but often has some amount of quality information as long as you can sort away the less interesting) and a few blogs and sites I've subscribed too. In the past I've used icy-veins, wowhead (the blogs and guides, the database is of course excellent still) and elitist jerks but I think their quality has either degraded or become of very varying quality so much less so now.
As for judging my own performance, Warcraftlogs is an invaluable tool in many ways. The most obvious is that you can see percentiles and rankings (which provide a good indication as long as they are read sensibly, specific tasks on a fight, and strategy has a big impact on dps numbers of course and padding is of course a thing as well.) but also being able to check things such as dot uptimes, proc usages, resource waste and even zoom down and see a specific sequence of ability use at any point is absolutely amazing (which is excellent for checking my opener). I tend to run a few queries after most raids and see where I can improve. I also record most raids and go back and look on them (during progression mostly) to provide a compliment to the logs. The video playback helps mostly with seeing issues were your UI might not be helping you.
Your Spec
Ferals rotation is all about managing resources. I try to maintain high uptime on my dots and buffs (Rip, Rake, Savage Roar, Moonfire), while effectively using my energy to build combo points and use finishers. I'll try to avoid writing a paper about how to play feral but in short the rotation goes something like this:
Use as many powered up finishers (We have a few snapshot mechanics still) as possible while maintaining dot uptimes as high as possible while never wasting any resources. Feral is not as hard as it once was, but it still has intricacies to it (such as blood talons which makes healing touches empower two abilities, which snapshots with dots) which add to the enjoyment of the spec for me.
Stat priorities are a bit fluid but for single-target goes something like Crit > Multistrike >> Versatility >= Mastery >= Haste and on cleave and AoE: Mastery >>> Crit > Multistrike >= Versatility > Haste
I tend to go for (like a lot of ferals do) a somewhat balanced approach of Crit > Mastery = Multistrike > Versatility > Haste as the single-target sacrifice is fairly small for a rather big AoE increase (admittedly my current gear has a fairly low mastery number still compare to crit and ms - I'll attribute that to RNG). If I had access to multiple weapons (and other enchantable off-pieces) I'd likely enchant and gem them for mastery and swap for aoe fights, but I've chosen to prioritize the balanced build over two specific ones for the sake of efficient usage of items for the raid as a whole.
There are not really that many interesting glyphs and talents,
T1: I swap between my movement talents depending on encounter needs, but my default choice is Displacer Beast (blink + short sprint)
T2: I am almost always Yseras for constant healing, I've toyed with Ward on fights where there are predictable big damage (it would be excellent for Crackling, but we haven't had a mechanic like that in a while) but there are not much use for it this tier
T3: This tier is next to useless in raids, Typhoon is my default choice - I've heard that mass-entanglement might be useful on the boat on mythic maidens, so that's a very situational row
T4: Well, Incarnation is head and shoulders above the other in almost any thinkable raid situation - I've tried the other two in proving grounds but that's about it
T5: Another highly situational row - Ursol's Vortex is probably the most useful (together with Typhoon it makes a psudo-gorefiend's grasp) but I don't really swap this around much in PvE, the only case is in challenge modes where I used incapacitating roar as an additional area interrupt which worked fairly well.
T6: Off-role utility, not very interesting and mostly I go with dream of cenarius to add a decent stream of constant rejuv healing on tanks (and healing touches on raid members if they happen to be low when I am using a healing touch proc) - Heart of the wild is a decent healing throughput cd if you want to give up DPS, but the 6 minute cooldown makes it a bad trade-off on most encounters, it is unfortunately not making me a good tank either - on fights with constant high raid damage nature vigil is a good choice, it syncs with cooldowns to provide similar overall throughput to dream (it is bad without cooldowns supporting it thou). It was very useful on butcher and it is also good if I'm alone for prolonged periods (such as soloing a balcony on Blackhand).
T7: is slightly more interesting, the option is 85% of cases is Blood talons as it is the best single-target talent and also good for very high target aoe (well, not good - but much better than the options) while Lunar Inspiration is useful for near constant few target-cleave such as maidens and hanzgar, or twin ogron from Highmaul.
Glyphs: Two near mandatory ones; glyph of savage roar which is a straight dps increase as it allow me to avoid having to spend a lot of combo points on savage roar (at start, or whenever I use incarnation) a lot of the power of incarnation does indeed come from this glyph. The other near mandatory one is actually a choice between glyph of cat form (+20% healing taken) and glyph of ninth life (flat 10% damage reduction), I do not swap this super much currently (as 20% healing is better in theory as long as you avoid one shots) but I can definitely see merits of both in harder content.
Other glyphs are very meh, stampeding roar (40yd range) is probably my go-to. I'm seldom primary combat resser as resto and balance do it instantly, so rebirth glyph (res with 100% hp) is situational and the other really interesting glyph is situational survival instincts (For shorter duration and recharge time on my shield wall) or Ferocious bite (some minor healing), and I guess rake is also a situational choice for some convenience when multi-dotting during incarnation but it is such a minor consideration that it is seldom interesting in PvE.
Off-specs and Alternative characters
Very comfortable with all the druid specs, my guardian gear is about as good as my feral gear and I am very comfortable playing it. I'm also a decent resto, and I've played enough boomkin (dungeons and lfr and such) that I know that I could become good at it very quickly. Both of those specs need a few pieces thou (trinkets and cloak primarily) to become strong mythic specs.
One of my strengths as a player has always been that I'm good at picking up specs and classes fast and play them at a good level and as such I tend to spend a lot of time on PTR and Beta's testing different specs to see what I think and like about the playstyle. I do have a bunch of level hundreds (with heirlooms levelling is almost too fast
) such as my former main (elemental/resto shaman) and a warlock (my former 'primary' alt I guess, played around in heroic siege of orgrimmar) that I more or less could raid mythics with, but I haven't really focused on gearing any of them as I've mostly been concerned with getting all my four druid specs geared (playing resto in heroic alt raids for example)I'm not adverse to playing alts if they are needed, even thou I prefer playing my main these days (feral is one of the funniest specs I found during the beta) of course all of that is hypothetical as I don't have any good alt to show you right now and I can't expect you to trust my word on being a fast learner.
Communication
Yes, yes and yes. Very comfortable with talking during encounters, maybe a bit too eager occasionally. I am good at reading forums and usually cycle through a long list of forums and blogs multiple times daily for updates.
Combat Logs
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/c ... 55/latest/ - show the entire story, with average percentiles and individual logs. If you want me to cherry pick some logs I could do that of course.
Your UI
http://static.xanthra.eu/currentui.png
My current UI as of Monday in LFR. Based mostly on Skullflowers Elvui mod, with BigWigs and WeakAuras as well as Exsorsus Raid Tools. I do change my UI around fairly often, but I tend to prefer a style with as much view over the raid as possible while still having access to all the information I want near my view. (and no I'm not a clicker
, I just have my binds hidden at that screenshot - I'm actually a fairly excessive key binder and I've even moved my movement keys to esdf to get more binds )Guild History
I've played the game for very long and honestly, my early days are a bit blurry and not awfully relevant any-more. I started very early in Vanilla, in fact earlier than the EU server release. Following that I played through vanilla as a undead priest and really flew between guilds at the time looking for these elusive things know as raids, I was still floating around mostly through early burning crusade and eventually found a raiding team (multiple guilds) and stuck with them throughout Wrath (it wasn't a guild per say before later in Wrath, but really it was a guild custom chat channel and all) and the team successfully went harder and harder at the content, and was 5days*4hour at the end of Wrath. Real-life started to catch-up to me at this time (as when I was younger time and real-life commitments were not a massive issue to raiding in the middle of the night :p).
I started an account to play casually at EU (better ping and times, the US prime time does not map well to Europe) and choose The Venture Co as I had some real life buddies there, and figured I was going to try my hand at RP and joined a very casual "raiding"-guild with a silly name that I can't recall at the moment. Regardless I was thinking about going casual and maybe do some normal raids at start of Cataclysm and took a short break as well, but ultimately after going down the Warhammer Online route decided that WoW was the game for me after all and came back. At this time I joined the only 25-man guild that was still active at the time (TVC went from fairly high pop to low during the first tier in Cataclysm with most top guilds moving or disbanding) which is also my current guild, <Sanctuary of Dreams>, the choice proved wise and I stuck around throughout Firelands, Dragon Soul and into Mists of Pandaria. I was fairly burned out at the time so I went on a break for a few months in ToT, came back before the start of SoO and have played constantly with them since. SoD eventually ended up being the ONLY raiding guild on TVC at the end of SoO. It's rather surprising that we managed to hold an active rooster as we did on a server as dead as that, but we did.
We continued on our level from SoO and entered Highmaul full of hope, but numbers have continuously dropped down and since 10 man raiding isn't a thing anymore going from raiding mythics 9 hours a week to zero or maybe 1 if a lot of social members show up is too big of a hurdle for me to stick around.
What we can learn from this story is probably that I am not the one to quit a guild in the first place, when I find a home I tend to stick to it or maybe that I write very long posts on forums occasionally, I guess both are true
Raid availability
I should be able to make all of them regularly, I can flexibly control my schedule so it should be fine with some odd occasional thing. In my current guild I've missed one raid (due to the flu) since the start of this expansion.
References
Unfortunately not many, I've been looking for a guild with good mythic raiding while not having an overburdening schedule and that seem to have a nice attitude, drama is something I like to avoid as far as possible, and I can tell you that there aren't many around. I found TRC on WoWProgress and I think I might have found a very good match.
About you
I think I have written most of me into the other categories already; but yes I'm a video gamer at heart, plays a lot of different games and follow esports, other interests include programming, electronics and robotics (which is also what my master of science is about) history and politics, fantasy in general and sci-fi in general. I have a punny and occasionally dry sense of humour and is not easily offended. I consider myself good at quickly picking up and playing games, and love trying things both in game/s and in real life. Oh right I also like playing board games, and play a bit of magic: the gathering whenever I get opportunity and also have a Warhammer army painted and ready even if I don't use it much anymore. (There is only so many hours a day, unfortunately, and studies/work soak up most of them
)Miscellaneous
I don't think there is anything else right now, but I might have forgotten something