Cráb People

--IRL Info--
Name : Sam Qaisar
Age : 20
Location : Cheshire, UK // Durham, UK (During University term time)
Availability : Every night bar Wednesdays, and the occasional Friday and Saturday night due to being in the Territorial Army. Weekends where I'm not around, I can announce a minimum of two weeks in advance. On a night where I'm available, I'm available from 1830GMT until 0100GMT.



--Character Information--
Name : Huntsig
Armoury Link : [url="http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/talnivarr/huntsig/simple"]Click Here[/url]
Race and Class : Tauren Elemental Shaman (Although considering race change to Troll or Goblin for haste benefits)
Professions : Leatherworking (525), Inscription (525)
Time Played : 56 days (Joined midway between 3.1 and 3.2)
Previous Guilds : Like A Boss (social guild with university friends while I learnt to play), Bottle or Tree (casual raiding guild, was a core raid member), What Went Wrong (social while gearing for Cataclysm raids, and learning the new class mechanics)




--Raiding Information--
Preferred Raid Role : Ranged DPS
Raids Cleared : Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum (including 3 Drakes), Eye of Eternity, Ulduar (including Algalon), Trial of the Crusader (including heroic), Onyxia (both 60 and 80), Ice Crown Citadel (unfortunately with only a few heroic modes)
Notable Achievements : None really to speak of, other than being in a lot of Bottle or Tree's first kills in ICC, including their Arthas kill.
Raiding Experience at Current Tier : None, unfortunately, other than Argoloth, for what he's worth.

Explanation of Talent Spec
It's essentially the standard Elemental Shaman build, with many of the talents dedicated to improving the damage of Lava Burst (eg, Lava Flows, Call of Flame) and our filler spell Lightning Bolt, as well as providing useful raid buffs (Elemental Oath, Totemic Wrath.) My spec deviates slightly from the standard spec in that I haven't put 2 points into Reverberation, and have instead placed them in Ancestral Resolve. The reason for this is that I haven't had any issues with Fulmination causing Flame Shock to drop off, although this may change with higher gear level and more haste changing the proc frequency.

I chose Ancestral Resolve instead of Ancestral Swiftness, because in my opinion with the way Cataclysm has been designed, it's more important for me to take less damage, thus relieving strain on the healers, than to have the convenience of instant Ghost Wolf. Furthermore, if I'm Ghost Wolfed during movement, that's 1405 mana wasted, in addition to the fact I can't carry out my moving DPS flowchart (more on this later) thus reducing my effectiveness in the fight.

Explanation of Glyphs
Glyph of Lightning Bolt -- It's our filler spell, so more damage on this is always nice.
Glyph of Lava -- Lava Burst is our "big nuke," and is buffed by many talents, so this lets us hit like a truck.
Glyph of Flame Shock -- Longer uptime means less GCDs wasted refreshing, and also increases the window for Fulmination usage (more on that later.)

Glyph of Lightning Shield -- Means I don't have to refresh Lightning Shield during combat, saving GCDs, and meaning I can always ramp up for a Fulminaton.
Glyph of Elemental Mastery -- Took this instead of Thunder, largely due to a lack of raiding experience in the current tier, and having heard the horror stories, I think having something vaguely resembling a defensive cooldown might be useful.
Glyph of Healing Stream Totem -- Taken primarily as a Heroic/Levelling glyph to increase resistances, however this is likely to be replaced with Glyph of Thunder during raiding.

Glyph of Renewed Life -- Better safe than sorry.
Glyph of Astral Recall -- Because time is money.
Glyph of Thunder -- Tanks hate knockbacks. Everyone does really, unless you're camping the Lumberbill in Arathi Basin. Also, it gives me more mana back per cast, which is likely to be beneficial in a raiding environment.


Explanation of Gearing
Right now my gear isn't quite as tidy as it could be, but I feel I've made a good effort to set up a pre-raid set, currently all I'm missing is a chest piece from Ulthok in Throne which will push me to the hitcap, as well as give me 14.5 mastery. Essentially I look for items with Spirit/Haste until I reach the hit cap, after which Haste and Mastery are our top two stats, respectively (besides intellect, of course.) What this entails is that any items I receive with crit on them, will have the crit reforged into Haste or Mastery as appropriate.

Gemming is largely straight forward, red sockets are pure intellect, yellows are intellect/haste, and I use purple gems currently instead of blues to gain intellect/spirit. My meta gem is currently not the optimal one, due to the bizarre activation requirements of Chaotic Shadowspirit Diamonds ("Requires more blue gems than red") being a nightmare to juggle around in my gear, and the fact this gem is going to be hotfixed soon to have a more reasonable activation requirement. Instead I replaced it with an Ember Shadowspirit to gain intellect, which is a straight firepower bonus, and the increased mana to help me in long fights (although mana isn't usually an issue, but I've not tried raiding yet.)

A minor note on mastery. I try to be as efficient as possible with it. Due to the fact the Elemental Spec mastery is "each point of mastery gives a 2% chance to proc a free autocast of Lightning Bolt/Lava Burst/Chain Lightning doing 75% damage," it's inefficient to have mastery values of, say, 14.7, as this represents wasted mastery points. To that end, I'll gem and/or reforge to get myself as close as possible to an integer multiple of 0.5 mastery as possible.


DPS Rotation
Elemental strictly speaking no longer has a rotation, it's a priority queue, due to our new talent Lava Surge that gives Flame Shock ticks the ability to reset the Lava Burst cooldown. The basic principles are to keep Flame Shock up, Lava Burst when it's off cooldown, and fill with Lightning Bolt. Due to its faster casting time, if mana isn't an issue for whatever reason, I'll weave a Chain Lightning into the rotation to better match the Lava Burst cooldown if it doesn't look like Lava Surge will proc in time.

Fulmination is a little bit more difficult to describe. It becomes viable to use after Lightning Shield has stacked to 7, however letting it stack to 9 can sometimes cause it to coincide with a Flame Shock refresh, so I pretty much pop it on "gut instinct" based off the Lava Burst cooldown remaining, remaining Flame Shock uptime, and how many Rolling Thunder procs I think I'll miss out on by leaving it stacked to 9. Sorry I can't be more descriptive than that.

Movement used to be a massive problem for Elementals, and to a certain extent still is, however we now have tools we can use to counteract some of it. While moving, I go through a priority checklist in my head, which is as follows :

Does Searing Totem need to be refreshed?
Does Flame Shock need to be refreshed?
Can I pop fulmination?
Am I close enough to throw a Thunderstorm and damage something useful?
Do I need to Thunderstorm to avoid running out of mana?
Can I cast unleash elements? (99.99% of the time, this is a yes, as it's not used in our rotation due to it being a DPS loss)
Failing all the above...Frost Shock!

Of course if I know I'm going to be moving for a significant amount of time, I'll pop Spiritwalker's Grace and just continue my standard nuking rotation for ten seconds until it wears out.



Raiding Addons Used
Omen -- Tanks are for tanking. DPS are for DPSing. Getting punched in the face by a boss rarely ends well for me.
Recount -- Useful to have up to see how I'm performing, and to flag up any gross errors I might be making ("My DPS is a lot lower than normal...oh..flametongue isn't on, woops")
OmniCC -- Set to display in intervals of 0.1 seconds, to enable the Chain Lightning weaving I mentioned earlier.
Bartender -- I like being able to customise my keybinds with ease if I need to alter bars or keybinds for a specific fight, and I like having all of my buttons in one place.
Decursive -- Now we have the ability to decurse, I felt it'd be responsible of me to install this addon.
Mik's Scrolling Battle Text (MSBT) -- Makes it much more obvious when Lava Surge procs, has a separate floating column on it so I can track totem damage.


Raid Logs
Unfortunately it seems that the raid logs for Bottle or Tree, and our BoT/VdoP PUGs on WoL are no longer available, apologies for this, as it unfortunately means you have no way to benchmark my performance. It's also not necessarily entirely relevant either, as the mechanics of how Elemental Shamans DPS has changed significantly.






--Computer and Internet Specs--
PC Specs : AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition overclocked to 3.5 gig per core, 8mb DDR3, GTX275 1792mb edition, overclocked pretty heavily. Overkill, basically.
Average FPS : 55-60 idling, 35-45 in raids
Disconnects : Only when I do something stupid like accidentally kick my LAN hub, which I've thankfully moved to another room to solve this issue.
Average MS : At home, about 55mS, at University it's likely to be lower as the connection is around twice as fast. I've also updated the TCP Acknowledge Frequency in my registry to stop packet queuing and push down my ping.
Do you have a headset and Ventrilo? I have both, and use them on a near daily basis, as well as skype.






Closing Remarks
I'd just like to say thanks a lot for taking the time to read my application, any and all feedback on my gear, talents and glyphs is more than welcome, as are any questions you might have. I look forward to hearing what you have to say :)

Just realised I forgot to add something, I'm intending to log my next Argoloth10 kill so that you have at least some sample of my raid DPS to work with.

Nice timing, meer hours ago we decided to recruit another elemental shaman.

However you say "Every night bar Wednesdays".

This is a concern as it's possibly one of the most important raid days we have. Does this mean you can never attend a raid on Wednesday or is there some flexibility?


Edit: Clarified a statement!

During University term time I can't, no, except for in the third term. Basically October/November I can't, although if asked to I could do the odd Wednesday. End of January/Feb/start of March I can't, although again, I could do if asked. Other than that I can do Wednesdays. I realise this is a significant problem as this is the principle raid day, unfortunately it's a commitment I can't avoid.

If it's of any relevance, I'd be back from work at about 2145GMT, although obvious this is almost 3 hours too late for the start of the raid, so likely not much use.

Ah yes, my bad there, apologies.

Just an update, acquired new gear today, some BoE legs and I led a group of friends and a couple guys from trade chat into Bastion of Twilight, and downed Halfus and got myself an epic head, so I now have some logs for you.


Our awesome wipe at about 20k health (melee DPS and some of the ranged stacked onto the tanks, we got knocked down, and fireballs just annihilated most of the raid)
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/t8w3 ... 634&e=9019
My average DPS was, if I remember correctly, 20.7k DPS.


The kill logs.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/t8w3 ... 274&e=9631
Average DPS was, I believe, about 21.7k DPS. I made a few minor mistakes, and my fire elemental didn't feel like cleaving the whelps, but on the whole quite happy with my performance there given it was my first attempt.

Hi there Sam.

Thank you for applying.

As Meanlead mentioned it's a problem that you can't show on Wednesdays. We might be able to work around this though.

You are also a bit short on experience from what I can see. Do you think this is affecting your play? For us it's tremendously important that people have a firm grasp and fully understand what's going on in an encounter and being able to dodge flames and keep up interrupt rotations a hundred percent. Do you have any experience with focus-interrupting?

I personally don't feel it's affecting my play, as I've spent all of my time in WoW playing the Elemental Spec, so I have a thorough knowledge of how it works (just don't ask me about Enhancement, they're a mystery to me). I think the lack of experience is also a slightly lesser factor now that the actual mechanics of Elemental DPS have been altered with Cataclysm. As for raid awareness, one thing I wish I had was experience of The Burning Crusade, as everytime I've asked a friend about a boss, I've been told "it's like Boss X from Raid Y in TBC/Sunwell," however I make sure to watch tankspot videos and kill videos online, so I think this isn't as much of an issue as it could be. I like having as much knowledge about an encounter as possible, and during progression raids, or raids which I've not done before, I'll usually have my laptop connected a second screen displaying the Wow-Wiki summary of a boss's abilities and spells, something which is useful on fights like Valiona and Theralion (which I tried for the first time last night) where there are multiple abilities which require a quick response, requiring you to know in detail, before the fight, what each one entails.

I've got a fair bit of experience as an interrupter. During Trial of the Grand Crusader with Bottle or Tree, I was responsible for a lot of the interrupting of things such as Fel Fireball on Jaraxxus, or the Warlock's Hellfire in the Faction Champions. This is a role which I carried on into Ice Crown, as in my opinion it's better to lessen the damage the raid takes, reducing chances of someone dying, rather than recklessly trying to top the DPS metres, something made even more important now with the healing changes in Cataclysm.

When I'm required to interrupt, I'll use both a Windshear target and a Windshear focus hotkey, so that even if I'm DPSing an add, I can see the boss cast and interrupt it with a single push of a button. In a particularly interrupt heavy fight, I'll normally go and swap my spec to put 2/2 in Reverberation, to ensure I don't miss an interrupt due to having Windshear on the tail end of its cooldown. Furthermore, I have some experience of on the fly interrupting from my experience in PvP Arenas, where I'd often have to respond quickly to a healer's casting.

I'm afraid I have to decline this as our Elemental Shaman spot has already been filled.