General:
Your Name, Age, Gender and Location:
Connor, 28, Male, London
Tell us a little bit about yourself (non-WoW related Interests, Hobbies etc)
COVID has pretty much locked us all down, So lately it has been a lot more WoW recently, but from that aside I enjoy flying as I have my pilot's licence, this includes visiting different cities and countries with my girlfriend.
Character Information:
Armory Link:
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/chara ... ill/wimble
Battletag:
Wimble#2942
Describe your choice of talents and why you've chosen them:
Quite easy for BrM - No real variation here and it's been the same all tier,
15 - Eye of the tiger. Easy go to for nearly all content. There has to be ALOT of consistent AoE to go for Chi burst which usually is your go to M+ talent.
Eye of the tiger just passively gives some small self sustain and a small DPS output component.
30 - 90% of the time, Chi torpedo. It just provides the best source of on demand, instant bursts of quick fire movement that you can use to traverse ground extremely quickly. This enhances our already insane amount of mobility.
Tiger's lust - incredibly useful in some wonderful ways. Again, on demand bursts of movement speed, small CD, can be used on friendlies (Shad'har morsel's). The fact it removes roots/movement impairments (G'huun orb runs + Wrathion stacks) make it extremely powerful. The fact this doesn't take a roll charge away entirely is quite OP (not complaining)
45 - Always light brewing. Black ox Brew , is, well, the perfect cliche for this talent is "high risk high reward". With it being active, I personally just do not see it being anywhere near as rewarding as light brewing. When both talents are played perfectly, BoB will out-do LB in brew generation, also it can serve as a slight DPS increase with you fitting more Tiger Palm's + Keg smashes into the BoB window, however any downtime in fights or a tiny mistake, the gap really broaden's between these two talents. I have always picked light brewing.
60 - Situational. usually always Ring of Peace. Great for solo survivability and also raid wide (small g'huunies on, well, G'huun). Having your raid stood inside bouncing off all attackers, awesome. usually a default pick
Summon statue - Or as he's known in the brM community - Dave.
Dave is great, we love Dave. Whether it's picking up adds smacking your disc on Carapace/Nzoth, Or kiting adds entirely away from the fight like SpellBlade Aluriel so you can ignore adds and kill the boss... Wicked! The problem most BrM's face is that they simply do not have a focus macro for Dave, so your loving healers can heal him, you can too, but they simply miss the Mass AoE taunt you can do off him.
With Legsweep being already baseline, I've rarely touched this.
75 - Bob and weave. Nearly always. A BrM's forte is being able to stagger damage and anything that enhances that is just a huge bonus. Plus its entirely passive. In order for Dampen harm to be taken, there needs to be a component in a fight where you take a large smack. By this time I usually have a tank trinket to deal with this so I can keep using Bob and Weave (psychic shell)
90 - RJW. Good damage. Good AoE. Great on threat. Click every 6 seconds. Done.
Invoke Nizzy - Angry Dave. Not taken, or rarely. But with the changes into Beta (which I have been playing) I think this will become extremely useful, Especially him being nice enough to share some of your stagger.
100 - High Tolerance, as mentioned in my stats review, I always play HT as it just passively gives Haste %. Black out combo can be played, It does give a small benefit of a marginal damage increase, but I find it under whelming.
How do you prioritize your stats and why?
Brewmaster monk has had it quite lucky in BfA. The top theorycrafter's in peak of serenity always tell newer players that it doesn't really matter what stats you have as they are all useful, whilst this may be somewhat true, I still have taken my own testing/research into what exactly each stat gives me and made my own choices from there.
As a monk, usually, higher Item level wins. This is due to Agility being such a major factor into your attack power, dodge chance, stagger effectiveness (which they've just nerfed the modifier on beta from 3.7 down to 3.37, around a 3% nerf) and even self healing.
Crit - Obviously the biggest selling point of crit here for a monk is your celestial fortune. I know you already know this, but for formality's sake, "Your crit strike gives you an increase chance for any healing on you to heal you for an additional 65%, which also applies to absorbs" - Now, crit is definitely NOT a bad stat for brewmaster's. Obviously, it offers an offensive benefit and tank damage should by no mean's put into disregard during progress, but more on that later. On the defensive side, It goes without saying that obviously healing done on to you will have a chance to be increased, I tried stacking a lot of crit during Uldir progression and imo it worked, It gave me great damage output and healer's didn't have too many complaint's, However, I find it makes BrM's "too spikey" as you are relying on those crit heals to come through and heal you for the required amount. That's ALL it offers defensively, a REACTIVE heal that is RNG. This doesn't really play into the crux niche that BrM's have. Their strength is in their passive Proactive mitigation (stagger).
I tend not to prioritise Crit *too much* into my gearing. If it comes passively on gear that has another more important stat, Sure, great, but it's not something I actively now search out for.
Haste - Most BrM's will always tell you to stay away from haste as much as possible. For the most part this is true due to the fact we have our talent "high tolerance" which not only passively makes your stagger 5% more effective, but also gives you up to 15% haste depending on the current state of stagger. If you're tanking a mythic boss, chances are, you're going to have that passive 15% for a high % of the fight. Obviously, haste also increases attack speed, energy regen and CD reduction on brew's etc, but if you're playing BrM correctly, then this should never be an issue.
Haste - I usually ignore on gear. It's been nice to have as it increases TD procs (i tried Mind flays at the start as it simmed higher but was too unreliable, but mostly I went into Versa amp when not using TD)
Mastery - Arguably the most important and interesting one here. For a brewmaster, we gain Elusive Brawler. Stacking buff that increases your chance to dodge, until you do. Dodged damage = 0 damage. Big plus. Mastery also increases your attack power for higher damage output and gift of the ox (healing sphere's) healing.
This is something I actively search for in my gear, It bring's a very high level of offensive and defensive outputs for the aforementioned reasons.
Versatility - Obvious easy % damage + healing + damage reduction. Not a great deal to mention here.
For most of BFA I have followed the Mast/Vers priority.
Where do you acquire knowledge about your Class?
I strongly believe the Race to World First has completely revolutionised the way we see new content and get access to the top % of player's info.
Right away from the get go you get a visual and sometimes audible experience of exactly how these players are going around the set encounters. The trick is to try and find a way that you can make this work for the content that you are experiencing with the composition you have.
This is the same with warcraft logs. At the beginning of new content, I also try to find any guilds in the top 50 or so who are live logging or atleast public logging. The difference to the stream is, sometimes it's a better PoV from an entire raids perspective of positioning and how they dealt with mechanics. Did they soak? how many soaked? How many went left and right? Did they send more melee one side? How many stacks are the tanks swapping on? etc.
Streaming in general has helped massively. I've found raiders I enjoy to watch. Max from limit, Andybrew from pieces, Naowh/Meeres of Echo. They're all tanks I know and respect. You can always see what they're doing, sometimes they explain why. Then you can take that information and test it yourself, make sure it's something you're happy with/feasible for you.
Class discords - Some are really good in fairness. Peak of Serenity for BrM is one of them. Having a large player base that's very active, with mods + theorycrafter's who also are very active. The BDK one (archerus) is quite good also. The same level of detail to Peak I would say. A lot better than the Fel Hammer (DH) which might aswell just be deleted IMO.
SimC - Simming is always so vital. Tank DPS can be a major factor into how boss fights play out. Even during Nyalotha, Complexity Limit's tanks were doing far superior damage than Method's and this was really quite evident. During early N'zoth progression, 1-2% off N'zoth during burn phases made or broke a pull. I am by no means a log whore and who doesn't love padding every once in a while. But at the same time you have to respect and value the contribution a tank can make to overall DPS.
Paste a your UI via [img]LINK[/img] IN COMBAT
(Ensure that all Key Bindings are visible)
https://imgur.com/a/KOjDNtu
What state is the state of your Heart of Azeroth?
Rank 93
Link to your raid logs using using [url]LINK[/url].:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/ ... artition=3
Raiding History:
Having looked at the next few questions, I feel I would rather condense this answer into a longer post. I hope this is acceptable and you understand my reasoning.
I joined my first mythic raiding guild on Defias Brotherhood "<The Misty Moon Massive> (WR2/400 tier depending) this guild went through some changes/splits/merges with a guild called <Unlucky> Here I achieved CE's on Helya + Gul'dan
After all the merges/splits/tantrums (not a good introduction into mythic for me) joined a guild <Novella> (1.1kish) on Draenor. This was a small step back, they were around 900/1.1kish at the time, We progressed ALL of ToS and then officers decided to not do KJ and wait for the next tier, which, in all honesty I didn't agree with. I was due for moving out/sorting IRL so I decided to take a small break until BfA.
At the start of BfA I raided in a guild called <Epoch> WR400 on Argent Dawn, helping out a friend who required a tank for some progression as they're MT had to take small break for some RL stuff I believe. . We achieved G'huun WR422ish and then their tank returned and I was surplus to requirement's. Which was fine, I played Super Sub I guess.
I tried to find a guild after G'huun but I got stuck in the down time between finding a guild and the tier already being so close to started (almost a similar scenario I find myself in now). I applied to a few guilds but I found mostly that they already had a stable roster moving into BoD. It was still fairly early xpac so I did expect that.
I have a RL group of friends that casually always clear all HC content, so that's where I just defaulted to, to keep myself somewhat active in the game regardless of what I'm currently doing IRL.
I decided to make a return into mythic raiding with an IRL friend who was also returning to raiding. We found a guild called <Qualify> (WR1k at the time) on Ravencrest. We both wanted something 2 day on alliance (he wanted to arena with his brother) so we applied here. Shortly after we became Officers/Raid leaders here, we both were unaware of when we applied that the guild had failed to kill Azshara and this caused a semi split amongst the team with a lot of core member's leaving. We were not deterred and took on the challenge of rebuilding the guild. After a slow start, we finally managed to get N'zoth at 691WR on a 2 day 6hr schedule. After not having even a full 20 man roster I feel positive about the overall experience. Being an officer or a raid leader is not something I have ever done before. But I used the experience I do have, with me being a vocal player anyway, I feel that I did a good job overall.
The reason for leaving this guild is that it's disbanding. Sadly. The IRL friend I joined here with is rejoining his old guild (An extremely hardcore guild). The other officer was planning to step down himself, with 1 or 2 other guildies also wanting to stop playing WoW. Rebuilding an entire guild is not something I can do myself, I know I have limited experience with running a guild and quite frankly it's just too much of a monumental task to achieve solo.
I recently joined the guild "Feint - Tarren Mill" - I had a successful trial period of 3 weeks which I feel went well. This tier has been good in the fact that a lot of guilds could use some different strats on many fights, Like Ilgynoth dispel/no dispel and nzoth routes and path's etc. I feel I quickly adapted and played well. However I then received this message.
https://imgur.com/a/Dy5Egm9
I really am not one to disparage anyone, But this quite frankly shocked me the more I read it and focussed on certain points of the message.
More Information:
Can you meet our raid schedule of Wed/Thur/Mon 21:00 to 00:00 server time with at least 90% attendance?
Yes absolutely.
We also raid on Sunday at the start of a new raiding tier. Are you aware of this?
I am
Are you able to Listen and Speak on Teamspeak?
I am
What qualities do you bring to a Raid?
Cliche's, Let's get those out of the way. I am a committed, dedicated, hard working player. This has been especially brought out in me by being the officer of a guild. Seeing how thing's run from the other side of the fence has unlocked and awoken my passion and desire for the game. Watching VoD's, streams, sifting through logs and making google docs.
I am vocal, I am not a mute. I will not just sit by and not ask for DR's, or to move positioning, or to question if I am not sure on a strat or mechanic. I get involved, I talk to people and make myself known in a discord. I don't ever want people to feel I'm ever unreasonable or unapproachable.
I will always help guildies in any way I can, whether it be running M+ or gearing alts.
As a tank player, my ability to micro-manage my own character and performance have been unlocked. The decision's I make when it comes to gear, talents and play style are entirely different in comparison to when I've played healers/Dps. I believe progressing new content as a tank can be challenging and there are extremely important decisions to be made when choosing your build, talents and stats, this all impacts how a boss fight will play out as tanks can be a huge influence on how progressing a certain boss goes.
For example, during progression with my guild on N'zoth, as stupid of a point as this may be..
I wanted to sim each corruption and see how it stacked up against the top simming "Mind flay", I found that waiting for procs on a target that my well be out of range or immune at any second is an abhorrent way of playing the game and not always the strongest set up for the fight. Thus, I found that stacking Twilight Devastation to be the best, during N'zoth progress, being able to deal immense damage to Pyscophages was invaluable within the mind gate's, Opposed to my co-tank who was in Mind gate 2, they appeared to have trouble clearing those (I don't know how honestly...)
The great thing about running TD in those scenarios is that the ST is almost comparable to Mind flay BUT it scales (obviously) so immensely well on Multi target. The difference for us between the Mind Flay use and the TD use was astronomical.
The take-away from all this, would be that I thoroughly explore all of my options and that of those around me in order to make the best available decision I can, even if it appears to not always be "the recommended one". I know I haven't played at a WR that you have, my highest being around 400, but I believe that my stability, consistency and personal work ethic to improve will compliment the team's efforts into progressing into Shadowlands.
How comfortable are you playing your offspecs?
My other specs concern other roles. I am more than a competent Healer, but make a far more efficient DPS as far as roles go. I would be happy, for the need of the particular encounter, to swap to either of these roles if needed.
How do you feel about progression raiding?
Progression is the best part. I understand people do enjoy farm and cheesing some logs. But for me, as the tank role, progression is really where the fun is. I enjoy the nitty gritty details, learning the positioning, am I making this easy for the melee? Am I cucking the ranged here? Can I not use a healer CD here and save it for the next mechanic?
I love the inter-communication within the raid team, even under high pressure and stress. Everyone pulling together to achieve a common goal.
Progression is absolutely the best part.
Where did you hear about Curse of Years and do you know anyone in the guild?
I unfortunately do not know anyone here, But I saw you're recruitment status on WoWprogress.
What encouraged you to apply to Curse of Years?
I know your recruitment status does not indicate you are in need of a tank. Tank's can be the most crucial part of a raid team at times and this means they have to be a formidable team. A lot of guilds on recruit internally for tanking positions for this exact reason.
But this guild has a good history of stable progression at a very good pace whilst making huge stride forwards in terms of world ranks and efficiency. This is something I would love to be a part of.
This really is not the best time to be searching for a guild, but having been left in the lurch not once, but twice. I thought I would at least try here as you never know a guild's situation.
Do you play outside of raid?
I do, In the past due to some time constraints with a previous job, I haven't been able to play as much as I would have liked. However I now work my own hours of my own choosing which has really increased my freedom within the game.
Is there anything else you'd like to add to your application?
As mentioned, I know this is an awful time to be applying for a guild and a tank spot so I would just like to take this time to thank you for reading my app! Regardless of how this goes, GL to everyone in CoY for SL.
Tell us a joke:
Why didn't the warrior cross the road?
No path available.
