Usoria - Balance Druid

[Usoria]

1. ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER
   1. Character name: Usoria
   2. Class: Druid
   3. Mainspec: Balance
   4. Offspec (do you actively play your offspec and do you have any experience raiding with your offspec?): Guardian (Yes, and No...) - By that, I started off as Guardian and tanked mythics, before I switched over due to the slight dissatisfaction with the tedium of the spec. I've raided as a tank in the past, but TBC was effectively a different game.
   5. Battletag: BlackMetal88#21568
   6. Armory link:
2. ABOUT YOU
   1. Name: Nick!
   2. Age (approximately): 32 (Or to be precise : 32 years, 16 weeks and 1 day)
   3. Country: England.
   4. Tell us something about yourself (hobbies or anything else you want to share with us) Heavily into music, used to run a record label. Bald, bearded, tattooed. I look a little like a Boomkin, amusingly. Pics can be provided sometime.
3. EXPERIENCE & RAIDING
   1. Why do you like playing this specific class and spec? Played Druid since Vanilla (Yep, that old...). Always adored it, and from the moment Balance became a thing (patch 1.5 I believe), I fell for it. However, it was unplayable from Cata through to WoD due to the terrible Eclipse mechanic. For the first time, the class is the complete picture, and I cannot escape it's infinite charms and hybridity.
   2. What class/role specific resources do you read or use to improve your gameplay? (websites, blogs, etc) I used to heavily theorycraft on ElitistJerks, but now I rely on WowHead, MMO guides, Tankspot, Noxxic, and Icy-Veins.
   3. What is your previous raiding experience?
      Vanilla - Server first (Quel'Thalas EU) up to AQ20 (Affliction Warlock and Resto Druid)
      TBC - Raided up to BT as a Boomkin. Struggled as the spec was still niche.
      WOTLK - Top 5 guild (Nagrand EU) up to Ulduar (never cleared Yogg at the time).
      Cata through to WoD - Casual Raider. Birth of my daughter in 2011 slowed me down. No complaints!
      Legion - Done LFR. Feel free to laugh at me Hitting around 300-380k dps though if the stars align *Balance Druid puns ftw!)
      
      EXTRAS ABOUT ME
      
      Currently iLVL 866. All Mythics cleared (Inc Kara, but only once sadly). I've done m+7 a few times, with 3 chests.
   4. We raid on Wed/Thurs/Sun/Mon from 21:00 to 23:30 server time. How many raids do you expect to attend per week?
   I reckon I can nail at least 75%. If I don't you can tar and feather me (Wait, I'm already feathered).
4. EASY
   1. Why did you choose to apply to Easy? I joined Legion a little late and require a good team that can help me with the catch up but not at the expense of boosting or sacrificing own progression. Having scouted wowprogress, Easy has the perfect mix of progression and success that I can claw my way into and feel valuable to.
   2. Do you have any friends in Easy? I dont really have any friends. However I have had a long chat with Tanla.
   3. Have you been in other guilds and if so, why are you no longer in these guilds?
      
      Numerous social guilds while gearing up. Dark Portal Monkeys is a great guild but has very little online time and I find that there's nothing the guild can offer me that I can get by spamming group finder (and getting rejected forever)

Image

[Tan]

Rubs, Aleila, can you have a looksie pls?
Liking what i see so far.

[Caireann]

Hello and good luck with the application!

[Ramael]

Nice application, good luck!

[Nephesh]

Nice App Urs, good luck!

[Rublupine]

Looks good. Would welcome another Boomer (if we have space for more ranged).

We could do with thinning out the Mages...

Couple of questions for Usoria:

1. Could you describe your gearing strategy and how/whether that influences your talent choices?

2. Whats your view on 'Fury of Elune'?

3. Have you been watching the patch notes for 7.1.5? What are your thoughts on the upcoming changes?

[Guest]

Looks good. Would welcome another Boomer (if we have space for more ranged).

We could do with thinning out the Mages...

Couple of questions for Usoria:

1. Could you describe your gearing strategy and how/whether that influences your talent choices?

2. Whats your view on 'Fury of Elune'?

3. Have you been watching the patch notes for 7.1.5? What are your thoughts on the upcoming changes?

Hi, Happy new year! Thanks for replying!

1) Loosely, my strategy at the moment is to focus on gear that will jump my ilvl. If a drop is of similar or slightly lower, I will still use it based on the following considerations :

- What are it's stat weights? Currently I have a little more crit than I'd like, and a little less Haste than I'd like. Therefore, my priority is Haste, Mastery, Crit. Intellect still stands above all.

- Will the overall ilvl change be a boon or hindrance? At what point does having a lower or higher overall ilvl become a factor on overall raid success? I measure this based on the overall dps change on both AOE packs in Mythic + content, and single target dummies. A dps increase should always be the deciding factor.

- Legendaries. I only have the belt currently, which is poor, but I keep an 860 belt in my bank should another legendary drop. Should I get one, I will then reconsider the weights to gear for based on the above factors.

2) Both under, and over-rated. I say this as I literally respecced OUT of it 10 minutes ago. The damage it deals is insane, and has jumped me to the top of the meters a few times, however in order to get the maximum out of this, I need to be at 100 AP - by which point I usually Starsurge-Starsurge-Full Moon - Starfall - Lunar Strike spam for much higher AOE damage. Fury of Elune is probably useful in about 1 in 50 situations, solely due to the speed at which it decreases my resource.

It's too niche, but I can't rule out it being worth using from time to time. Maybe with higher ilvl and better resource pooling through haste and legendaries.

3) Undecided, as usual, taken with a pinch of salt; however - I think the legendary changes are extremely curious, and aside from new content which isn't quite what's being asked here, I'm getting a strong sense of "Blu-Tack" over the leaky pipe. Most of it could go either way, but the balance changes (pun intended) I don't strictly feel we need - but I welcome the recognition and would like to see how it pans out once live. The nerf to Guardians sucks though.

[Usoria]

Oops, that was me above.

[Rublupine]

I guessed it was you. Solid answers.

Thumbs up.

Also, we chatted in more detail online.

[Fungi]

I may have understood incorrectly.. Or at least the last section isnt totally clear for me. Are you looking at Easy as a guild that will allow you to gear up.... And then move in to a more hardcoreish guild? Reason I ask is because Easy is, compared to your past raiding experience, nowhere near the level of hardcoreness. We do not do raidbalancing.. We do not drop people that are not performing optimally... You will wipe for raids on a boss while your own performance has no influence on it.

A.