Cráb People

Foreword

Hello everyone, this is my application to Cráb People. I tried to keep it as short and as informative as I could but not rushing anything. I think I've covered everything that's important for an application; however if I managed to miss something, please do let me know. :)

--Amid

About...
... me

The person behind the character

I'm Jesse Brands, 17 years old and living in Groningen, which is a pretty "big" city in the north of the Netherlands. I'm an IT student of the second year and my studies are going fine. I'm a native English speaker and writer, although living in the Netherlands did little good to my pronunciation. As such, I often make silly mistakes which are entirely to blame to the Dutch language. I actually like to swear once in a while although this application would show little of it.

Hobbies

My hobbies include playing guitar, piano, drawing, programming and scripting (PHP, Bash, C++, Java), web design and Linux. I also like tinkering with my computer and often replace hardware which is mostly what I spend my salary on, what's left is put in new games and my World of Warcraft subscription. I draw both digitally and traditionally, favoring the latter by a big leap.

Regarding Linux, there was a time I looked at Linux as the be all and end all but these days I learned to look a bit more objectively at it. For those who are interested, my favorite distribution is Fedora 11 which is running on my laptop, my PC (which is a gaming rig) runs Windows 7. I picked my hardware with care and went for a good synergy, although my video card needs replacement and is the bottleneck of my system right now.

I love music, I play guitar, piano and I would really like to learn to play drums as well. My music taste ranges from Led Zeppelin to various trance artists to death metal. Classic rock is the genre I always return too in the end though.

Gaming

Gaming is something I've always done and probably will be doing for a long, long time. I love it, especially how before gaming, fantasy was on paper and in your mind. Now with computers, people are capable of creating their fantasies into actual game worlds, that other people can experience. It's fascinating.

Contact

It's important to be able to reach a cross realm applicant. You're likely to find me on any of the following characters first and foremost:
Amidith and Nindia on Argent Dawn-EU
Another option you're almost always bound to succeed with is MSN:
jesse@drakebyte.net
Which also serves as email adress.

... about my IRL gear

Computer
AMD Phenom-II 945 @ 3200 MHz
4GB of DDR3 RAM @ 1333MHz
Asus Crosshair III Formula motherboard
XFX nVidia GeForce 9800GTX+
Asus Xonar Soundcard
Water Cooled
1000W PSU

Computer Accessory
Logitech G15 Keyboard
Logitech Wireless Mouse (never had issues, but it's due for replacement)
Philips 220EW 21.6" Flat Screen
A proper headset with working microphone for raiding
A decent, good quality 2.1 sound set for music and average playing

Benchmarking
I run at max settings, 1680x1050 for average playing. There's little special to say about this; it runs my favored UI and I use it when I'm not focusing on frapsing. A stress test was done running about in Dalaran for 10 minutes on these settings, averaging on 53~ FPS.

For Frapsing, I use the same UI but slightly altered to fit a 1280x768 resolution; although playing at a lower resolution is a little annoying it's nothing I can't cope with. This delivers the best image quality.

UI
My PC crashed after some new hardware (I changed from Intel to AMD, so my Windows installation went all fucky), I did a clean install of WoW to accompany this, having to redo my UI. It's my old UI except more refined, a screenshot is here:


Noteworthy Add-Ons:
Skada Damage Meters, Grid, Pitbull, ForteXcorcist (CD tracker and stuff), Quartz, Big Wigs Boss Mods, Elkano's Buff Bars, Bartender4, Various Media Packs for the looks.

... Amidith
Amidith has come a long way since I initially made her 253 days ago as of writing on TBC launch. Back then known as Elynth it was my first serious character into the PvE world, having played a Gnome Mage before that on Defias Brotherhood I never could be too bothered with PvE; when my mage reached 70 and I touched Karazhan, I knew I wanted more; but DPS wasn't my thing -- too boring.

I've always loved Blood Elven lore so I decided to go with a priest, quickly finding myself in a new PvE guild just done with Karazhan I began healing. I quickly became a lot better at it, reading up theory craft and often doing my own. Wanting to know more, become better and maximize my character's performance.

Sadly in TBC I always had to miss out on some stuff, I often slagged a little behind the general PvE Progress due to guild choice. When WotLK was almost released, I decided to become hardcore and joined Ave on Magtheridon-EU. I'm leaning to guild history now though and that's something I wish to discuss later.

In WotLK; I reached the achievement I'm most proud of, I set the world record health per second (for a week or so) on Sapphiron 25 with 10.5k. Now, Amidith is in a pretty casual state, now I left my guild and she's waiting to be unleashed again on some proper raiding.

An armory link may be found here:
http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet ... &n=Amidith

... playing style
This is mostly regarding as to how I play my priest. This includes playing style decisions, talent choices, stat choices and so forth. I'm a little controversial against some points the general theory craft suggests, however this way works best for me; I've tried pretty much everything and I often fumble around with gems - money is not an issue - to see what works best. I found my current set up is the most ideal.

Stat Choices

For me, two stats in specific reign supreme. Those being haste and intellect; I feel that reducing the GCD and casting time is very beneficial, I strive for about 20-25% haste, I got 21.04% at the moment so I'm very pleased. As with intellect, this is a little bit of a double-sided edge, I think it's the best regen, but not the end all and be all. I do not forsake spirit at all, in fact, I happily use a few spirit gems. The quality of spirit is the benefits to spell power, regen and the way it scales with intellect. The more intellect, the more beneficial spirit will be.

Aside from that, I try and keep my spell power on a healthy level, but I'm not too interested in putting it very high, I believe too much spell power won't do too much good. Neither do I value crit very high, which is weird seeing I use spirit, which would work very well with holy concentration. Typically I find I get enough Surge of Light/Holy Concentration procs as is.

My build is 14/57/00 traditional FH/POH opposed to the every so popular 14/57/00 COH/R renew rolling build. I don't think gimping your toolkit in benefit of instant casts like COH/R and PoM is a good idea. The versatility of a the Holy Priest and it's large toolkit is what makes it a good healer and a must have in any raid. No matter what happens, a holy priest can adept in one way or another. Therefore, ruining your casted spells is in my opinion not a good idea.

I do not stack spirit as I said, I think having more than 30K raid buffed intellect is down right a waste of other potentially good stats, in favor of just one. Regen is great, but over 30.000 is silly. I easily reach 30K mana raid buffed myself at the moment and I really feel no need for more. I have no mana issues at all.

I do have COH/R for intensive raid healing fights like Twins and hard mode IC, they are great there because all you will be doing is raid healing either way. I often keep it as my off spec when exploring new content, where all the healing is needed. When this is not the case, I often resort to my shadow spec in off spec for giggles and dailies.

Consumables

For flasks my preferred choice is Flask of Distilled Wisdom; since I don't actively focus on intellect gemming, the boost from this flask is very nice; aside from that, I think the mp5 flask is plain trash and I don't really need more spell power. I keep a healthy amount of mana pots and potions of speed in my pocket for when they are needed.

Cool downs and spells

I am a firm believer of proper CD rotating, I think it's the first step to not going out of mana, I barely ever have mana issues thanks to perfecting my CD rotations, giving me the use of each cool down at least twice and some three times. I barely ever need my mana potions thanks to this and I often find myself using a haste potion to get that extra punch out when necessary!

My preferred heals are flash heal for most healing, while having PoM and CoH on CD at all times. Instead of flash heal, I often roll renews for raid healing when it's needed; having serendipity almost always on 3 stacks to quickly patch up a group with POH or to save a member with a quick Greater Heal.

... raiding experience

Pre-TBC:
Nothing sadly. Except lolo bat boss in ZG!

TBC
Everything up and including Felmyst.

Wrath of the Lich King
Due to several reasons, I lost interest in WoW during Ulduar, and missed out on pretty much the entire instance. More about this later.

Naxx: Clear on 10 and 25.
Sarth: Clear on 10 and 25 with 3 drakes.
Malygos: Clear on 10 and 25.
Ulduar: 12/14 on 10, 9/14 on 25 (On different characters, therefore the achievements may not entirely match; My mage has 25-man experience, my paladin did 12/14 on 10 and Amidith did a mix)
Ulduar Hard Modes on 10:
Extensive experience on Firefighter. ( I could do this blind folded)
I love the Smell of Saronite in the Morning.
I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare.
Ulduar Hard Modes on 25:
NULL
ToTC cleared on both 10 and 25.
ToTC10HC only experience on first boss. Fail DPS was fail.
ToTC25HC, no experience.
Onyxia: Only just got my PC back, so I didn't get the chance to do it yet.

About my...
... previous guilds

Pre-AVE
Nothing much to say here, I've been in a few guilds. This is pretty long ago now and I barely can remember the guilds I've been in.

Ave on Magtheridon
This guild was recommended to me by a good friend of mine. I applied and I accepted, leveling to 80 with them and getting a few top 200 kills. Things were nice but I quickly found out AVE simply wasn't cut out of the right wood for me. There was little social interaction and the guild seemed to cripple slowly. I left with my friend to a different realm after a while to start...

Victory or Death on Chambers of Aspects
I wanted to try something I never did before together with my best WoW friend Lauraniel, we started a guild named Victory or Death. I didn't expect much from it; but what followed was a month of warm memories, joy and sharing great moments together with some of the most awesome people I've ever played World of Warcraft with.

We quickly became the best guild on the realm due to united effort of many very skilled players. During Sartharion 25+3, things quickly fell apart though. It wasn't the challenge that broke us apart or made anyone slack. No, it was an officer deciding it was time to ruin things. He left the guild together with a bunch of his friends. Friends he had us recruit and replace good members with. The guild quickly became crippled as we lost our main tank in the process.

The same night, after an emergency discussion with the officers which came to no agreement I decided to do my thing as a guild master and consider my options alone. I knew the guild could not continue when being cut in two. So I pulled the plug, in hopes people would become one guild again. This happened, fortunately.

I took a break after that for pretty much the entire duration of Patch 3.1, until close to 3.2; I joined Ancient Failacies.. err Prophecies, sorry.

Ancient Prophecies
After my break, I decided to transfer to a realm I never been on, start fresh and all that. I stood without a guild for a month or so until I decided I really wanted to raid again. Via-via I found Ancient Prophecies, a small, just newly started guild. I decided to hop in the wagon and help them out. Sadly this was a massive mistake.

Ancient Prophecies (AP from here on) was led by a rather bad Guild Master, the typical one with the good intentions and a good heart but no idea how to handle things. The officers were basically just real-life friends of him and had no idea what their role was about. I was a good healer and I my trial period was rather quickly done, without too much issues; after I got promoted to raider I decided to do some easy maintenance to my PC, upgrade my hardware a little.

Sadly, my CPU wasn't OK and I had to send it RMA and wait a good three weeks to get it replaced. I used my laptop to let people know I wouldn't be around for a good while and I wished them good luck, looking forward to seeing them again. When I came back well... I spoke with the Guild Master about some cool ideas I had for the Algalon kill video; he told me I wasn't going to record it and that I did not deserve the 'starcaller title'.

I got a little pissed off and asked him what's up with that. He told me I was unreliable, inactive and had been 'inactive for 1.5 months' (Ironically, I hadn't even been in the guild for that long yet); apparently I got replaced for a NON GUILD MEMBER, who can't run to the black holes in times and keeps wasting them tries; who does sup bar HPS. Apparently, he values his friends more than the raiders in his own guild. I was dissapointed with how I was treated, having handled my absence perfectly according to the guidelines; I obviously left the guild.

... application to Cráb People

Why Cráb People?
I'm a hardcore raider, one who always tries to perform to his best. A hardcore raider needs a good guild; I'm not willing to settle for second best anymore, I'm looking at a top 100 guild, one that I can grow in as a player and become better at this game. I want to defeat Arthas as one of the first, before any stupid nerfs. I am not interested in killing it with the tactics pre-explained and ready for me and several nerfs on his roof.

I'm also looking for a guild with a good atmosphere, with enjoyable people that do not only log on for raids and then log off again. In Ancient Prophecies, alt's weren't allowed, so often the guild was pretty much dead empty, because people were playings alts which weren't allowed in. This was very boring and not fun at all, quickly hurting the guild morale.

Cráb People seems to be a down to earth guild with people that are not lifted over the horse. Yet at the same time they know they are good and have to fight to keep that good position. People understand their class and how to properly use it in a raid. A guild where people do enough DPS to actually kill XT-002 and not wipe to silly things.

Why me?

I'm a healer who'se been around for a long time, I love this class and I play it happily every day. Healing is great fun and it's not a role I'm planning to move away from anytime soon. I understand my class exactly, I know what every spell does and how it can be best used. As a person, I'm friendly and easy going. I generally don't really lie in the way and I know when to speak and when to shut up. I'm not afraid to give my input into the tactics; for better or for worse at times.

All in all, I think I make a good addition to a raiding guild, I've several qualities both when it comes to playing and other related things to the guild. I'm great at PHP and web design, photo editing, digital art and video editing. I'm active and usually always around. I talk a lot and involve myself with the guild I am in. I'm not a raid logger.

Last Words

Bulbasaur > Mudkip

Thanks for reading my long applications. :)
--Amidith aka Jesse Brands

Amazing application. But for a hardcore raider you lack some gear

*Look over here yuvo*

Thank you :)

Gear is gear, I suppose. I just need to be a bit more lucky with drops and RNG... in Ancient Prophecies, we _rolled_ for loot. >,<
--Amid

Hi there, I was with Amidith in the Argent Dawn realm.
I have to say a few things about him, so u'll know :)

He is IMBA healer, Here is a few examples:

He is so IMBA, that when he accept a raid, he isn't not showing up,
he can heal while not there, that imba.

So IMBA, that when do accepting and showing up 20 min late, he still have
a different reason every time.

So IMBA, that when his PC got broken he still managed to log in and accept raids,
ofc not showing up again, cause he just heal from his car.

So IMBA, that he can do Firefighter with his eyes close. Unfotunately, with his eyes open
he can't do it. Thats why when he got replaced on that specific raid, the raid actually done it.

So IMBA that he got oom first on Vezax hard mode, and almost wiped the raid at the end (he just wanted to test his healing while oom),
watch the shadow crush on him at 4:42. almost wiping the raid.

So IMBA that after being AFK 2 weeks, he can come and asking to heal on Algalon instead of that non guildi who was on all the hard modes which ofc IMBA Amidith couldn't make them.

Thats Amidith.

GL.

Your just jealous of his IMBA application.

Trolling this guys thread is a poor way to get your point taken seriously and will just get discarded and ignored. For future reference, contact an officer with your opinions, complains or whatever else you feel fit.

As for Amidith, can you explain some of your talent choices?
More specificly;
5/5 Holy Specialization
4/5 Divine Fury
1/2 Surge of Light
0/3 Test of Faith

Why do you take Holy Specialization over Surge of Light? 1% crit vs 25% more chance on crit to get a free instant FH.
Divine Fury, 0.1 second less on GH is huge if you need to drop a quick GH on tank or Penetrating Cold target with 3 Serendipity stacks up. Not to mention the 0.1 second less on Holy Fire and Smite, which you can drop in between heals on several fights.
Test of Faith is in my opinion one of those talents you can argue if it is worth it or not, in my experience it is worth it since much of the time you will be raid healing on people with less than 50% health with all the AoE blizzard loves to add to boss fights and trash these days.

5/5 HS + 1/2 SoL vs 4/5 HS + 2/2 SoL

A fair question, during most of the time in WotLK, I had both capped, considering this later on when my gear got better, I began to sacrifice more crit for haste (as crit in my opinion, is a bit of a lack luster stat in the fact that it's very much RNG). As I didn't want to hurt my crit too much and to make up for more haste, I picked the extra crit chance. As for Surge of Light, that was the most viable place (to me) to drop a point, to see if that works.

I'm not decided yet when it comes to that. But so far I feel Surge of Light procs often enough I almost always have an instant flash ready (counting up COH + POM). It's subject to change though. I usually only use SoL procs to quickly throw some extra healing on a target I just GH'd to patch him up. I feel Flash Heal isn't that costly either way and too fast a cast that I find it necessary to have SOL maxed out.

4/5 Divine Fury

I dropped this together with 1 point in SoL to get healing focus. A try-out really, to see if not losing cast time is worth the short loss in casting GH is worth it. Just that reason; getting interrupted during a cast by AoE damage which is quite frequent in many raid fights, can often be heavier then 1 sec on GH alone.

Still I don't feel the talent holds up enough and I might reconsider dropping the points in favor to Divine Fury/SOL. As for your remark towards a Smite every now and then. I only really do that when I got SOL on me and it has only 1 sec left; unless there's a viable target to use it on. Else I really find it a waste of mana for a meagre 2k damage.

0/3 Test of Faith

I'd much rather get Blessed Resilience (+3% healing on all spells) than Test of Faith which isn't always applicable and a bit of a lack luster in my opinion. To get either of these talents, I'd have to drop points in Empowered Healing, which includes one of my most frequently used heals - Flash Heal -, as to such, I would losing a massive bonus to FH in favor for +3% healing on all spells. On a side note, it might be worth trying out and perhaps I will. I often tinker with my build.

I hope that answers your questions.

Zomg Grunn! Hanze or are you studying at the RuG?

Neither, I'm still stuck at the Alfa College, and when I'm done there I have plans to move to the UK and then proceed studying. Failing that, the Hanze would be a great option; but I've not looked that far yet.

Grunn ftw!