* for our first activity we did a kayaking tour in Stockholm, where we kayaked to Rotholmen. It was nice to swim around, dodge on the slippery rocks, and we totally did not fall into Tutan’s trick…

* understandably after kayaking, we were all hungry and tired. And you know what they say about shopping for a BBQ when you are hungry. We ended up having food almost for the rest of our stay at the airbnb. Mango was kind enough to experiment on us and of course on herself by her made faux garlic bread… and no, aioli is not a good replacement for garlic…

* can we all agree that Zilent is an absolute legend when it comes to Eurovision knowledge? He is our raid leader for a reason!

* kayaking was not enough to see the beautiful city of Stockholm, we took the boat on Saturday to an island very close to Stockholm. Where we visited a local micro brewery located, and this turned out to be an amazing experience. Later that evening we learned Tutan can play pool and arcade very well no matter how drunk he is.

* rosen, one of the rarest of the ToTers joined us on Sunday. Some of us went to the Vasa Museum to witness the pride and failure of Sweden’s 17th century navy. Once again Zilent proved why he is our raid leader by defeating every single one of us in ping pong.

* and most importantly, Federico El Tercero, the pinata, survived this meetup. Will its fate be decided the next time?

* heralding the final day, a collective bribe gift was prepared for our esteemed guild leader, Grax. Shiftey presented it to him and we hope Grax approved of our meagre efforts.

* such a beautiful meetup was a complete success with a beginning of, if I am so bold to say, a love story! We all hope it continues strong.

Another happy birthday to Iron Edge!



I’ve had several “major” experiences over the years that have made me feel like I was getting older that nobody ever warned me about. You expect the day that you feel some weird pain you never felt before after you go for a jog, or the first time you spot a grey hair on your shirt. When it happens it might still surprise you how soon it came, but you expect it nonetheless. You don’t expect it to happen when you see a video in portrait orientation (still gross) where on the top half there is a video of some kids fighting in school, and on the bottom half there is someone playing Minecraft, while a robotic female voice with a social-media-optimised vocal inflection provides commentary on the fight happening in the top video. Nobody ever prepared me for that shit.

Another time this happened to me recently was when companies started mentioning their founding dates as recently as the early 2000s as virtuous feats to be used in marketing materials. Really? That’s not that long ago, or so I thought.

So here it comes:

Iron Edge (Est. 2005)

I mean, if organisations get to boast their founding dates, then surely a World of Warcraft guild is allowed to be extremely proud of turning 19 years old, right? I’d say so.

It has been another year of many great successes. Four raiding teams continued their progress. Cutting Edge achievements, branching out into the Classic domain and steady, fun groups that have something for everyone. A massive meetup in Gdansk, where we had more nationalities present than ever before, as well as having long standing members of the guild finally join us IRL. We had another great meetup for New Years in Denmark recently just like we did four years ago, right before the pandemic.



Looking forward to the year ahead, our guild is still looking strong and there’s no reason to believe it’s slowing down. In a WoW environment that focuses evermore on throwaway content with people you’ll never see again, we’re constantly reminded that we must be uncompromising in our values to demand high quality applications and keep pushing for building relationships online, rather than just playing a video game together. Regardless, WoW has an impressive content plan for (at least) the next three years that should keep us entertained. So it’s going to be a good year with lots of great things to look forward to.

We’re also looking towards the 20th(!) anniversary in a year from now, and we’re cooking up something good for it. So make sure you keep your schedules clear for the end of February 2025.

So, thank you all for another great year and see you on WoW, Discord or IRL.

- Rash

Iron Edge New Years Meetup 2023/2024!



In what better company and location could you possibly be to get hammered on New Years than with your friends from Iron Edge in combination with Danish hospitality? Maybe if you follow Tom to a second location it might be better, but at least with us you will likely wake up in decent shape and with the same number of kidneys as you went to sleep with.

Fab has arranged with the staff of a local hotel that they open especially for us for the great price of €53 per night (private hotel hype!). We will have food, drinks, games, 3-months of (Moons) salary worth in fireworks and probably Varum and Spets, our most vindictive druids!

When: 29th of December 2023 to January 2nd 2024 - come and go as you please
Where: Fabs house, near Legoland, Denmark
Who: All members of IE and whatever happens to wander into Fabs unlocked door (it happens)

Airports we can pick you up from with carpooling:
Nearest airport: Billund
Stavanger - Moon
Aalborg - Moon and Prat
Copenhagen - bunch of people
Amsterdam - Rash
Hannover - Rash
Hamburg - Rash

Plenty of ways to get there for cheap, so see you there!

Iron Edge Meetup Summer 2023: Gdańsk!
30th of June - 2nd of July



After the wonderful turnout last October in Dublin and the corona break before it, we're ready to kick it off with another great Iron Edge Meetup in 2023. This time in beautiful Gdańsk!

We chose Gdańsk for its central location in Europe and it is affordable for as many people as possible to get to. Famous for its rich culture, history and entertainment, we think it's a great place to spend the weekend with your friends from Iron Edge!

The plan:

On Friday we will all gather in Gdańsk, find our respective hotels or other lodgings and then go out into the city and go explore.

Saturday will be the activity day selected by Naasty herself, where we have a couple of cultural activities lined up so everyone can pick what they want. After that we will meet up again and we will all have dinner and drinks together in a local pub.

On Sunday there will be another activity planned, which can be attended freely as your travel itinerary allows you.

I recommend you all find places to stay that allow for many people per room, such as large hotel rooms and AirBnB. Getting up to 4 people in one accommodation can get you a place to stay for as little as 30 euros per night per person. Of course getting your reservation and travel arrangement early is the way to go. If flying to Gdańsk is expensive, consider flying to Warsaw and taking a train to Gdańsk instead.

I suggest we all find hotels in the commercial area of Gdańsk, around the Bazylika Mariacka:



Please share in this thread if you will attend and what your intentions for accommodation are!

In attendance, names in bold confirmed:


See you all there!

Unearth the Secrets of Ulduar January 19



We finally have a date! Ulduar releases in a week from now, on January 19th. This means that January 17th will be our last raid of Naxx, OS, and EoE. Our first Ulduar raid will be on January 24th.

Looking back at Phase 1

It's been a little longer than 3 months of clearing Naxx, OS, and EoE weekly. As everyone expected, these raids are quite the pushover - both in the "playing WotlK now is a lot easier than back then" and the "Naxx was easy even for its time" sense. Nevertheless, I'm proud of us steadily clearing these raids week after week, even with a fluctuating roster and having to pug spots every week (btw, has anyone seen Kvasir?). Especially our blazingly fast sub 2h clear last week even though we didn't one-phase Noth!

The only thing we haven't completed are the raid achievements, which seemed not to be of great interest to most raiders (sorry, Timmy!). Then again, how could we even achieve "The Immortal"? Tyssar would need to be afk that raid and we'd have to bench Andervous on Kel'Thuzad.

But that's all yesterday's news. Let's leave Naxx behind, and have a look at what the next phase will bring. Are rets actually going to be lower dps than phase 1? Will Superge get some gear without hit on it? Will Rash finally start having fun?

Looking towards Phase 2

For everyone who is missing some phase 1 loot that they really wanna get, it will be easier for you!
The 10 man versions of phase 1 raids are going to drop the 25 man loot. Anyone wanna go Naxx 10, Dying Curse HR?
There is a "Mysterious Titanic Relic" in dungeons, which you can activate to make the dungeon more difficult. Doing so will cause the bosses to drop 10 man phase 1 loot. Get that Surge Needle Ring!

Vault of Archavon is going to have a 2nd boss starting January 25th. It will drop T8/S6 gear.

Then of course there is the new raid, Ulduar. A long-time favorite among WoW boomers and private server enthusiasts alike, Ulduar consists of 14 bosses and is the first time bosses get a "hard mode". Not just simply a heroic difficulty of the raid like later on in the game, but most bosses have certain conditions you have to meet while defeating them to activate the "hard mode" and get better loot.
Some of these hard modes add or change mechanics, and some impose dps checks on your raid that will be difficult to meet with phase 1 gear. We are going to skip all hard modes on the first week, unless we accidentally achieve the ones for Thorim (possible) or Hodir (highly unlikely). Let's get a feel for the raid first, and then mess with the challenging stuff.

While Ulduar won't be super challenging, the fights are definitely more complex. That's why I'm asking you to read up on tactics before the first raid of Ulduar so we all have a general idea of what's happening going in. Joardee on YouTube makes some video guides specifically for classic if you're into that, otherwise there's text guides on Warcraft Tavern. Maybe Wowhead is also going to release a guide, but it isn't up yet.

Another unique thing about Ulduar is Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings, the legendary for this raid tier. A powerful weapon for healers, it has to be assembled from fragments that randomly drop from bosses, then completed by throwing it into Yogg-Saron's maw and killing him after. To get this hammer asap, we are going to funnel all those fragments to one player. Obviously we want this to be someone in the guild, and we want to reward the most reliable raiders.
This meant the choice was between Stepan and Rash. Val'anyr works poorly for Discipline priests, so we have decided to give the first one to Rash. Congrats!

Lastly, I want to welcome some familiar faces to the classic raid. Starting next raid, we will have Spetsnaz and Stian aka Holyglacio aka Glacio aka Cloudio join us, as resto druid and holy paladin respectively. Welcome!

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight



Another expansion came and went and unlike with previous expansions where my opinion of its quality was pretty consistent throughout, with this one I really needed the few months break that we’ve had to reflect on what was supposed to be an expansion with a lot of potential.

Looking back on Shadowlands
Even when attempting to look through the usual expansion hype and excitement over newly added key features, Shadowlands really did have the potential to be a great expansion. Looking at it from a WoW historian perspective of “every other expansion is good”, it was coming off the brutal series of fuck-ups also known as BfA (which in turn was coming off of Legion, which was largely well liked). But that didn't really turn out to be the case. Even if you completely pretend WoW lore doesn’t exist anymore (like I do), any chance Shadowlands did have was quickly annihilated by the internal drama within Blizzard Entertainment, courteously provided to us by the government of California. 

The seemingly arbitrary deadline along with rather extreme boss nerfs to get Cutting Edge was the final nail in the coffin for me. Especially when you consider that almost every expansion, when viewing it purely from a raiding perspective, is actually quite good. Raiding has always continued to be the main reason why WoW is my video game of choice and that was also sadly tainted in SL.

That didn’t break our IE spirit, however! Perhaps partially thanks to the worldwide pandemic, we saw an even more stable roster in all our raiding teams in Shadowlands. The weekend raid saw a shift in leadership and was able to keep going strong. The ToT raid continues to be a shining example in what it means to be a casual raid in an increasingly hardcore and demanding raiding scene. And of course, the main raid steadily pushed forward with Cutting Edge titles and put up a very strong performance at the end despite very difficult circumstances.

Global circumstances also forced us to cancel two consecutive meetups, but we were still able to have a great time in Dublin last month.



And then at the tail end of it all, we launched a new WoW guild on the fresh World of Warcraft Classic realm Thekal, which has been steadily and successfully raiding nostalgic WotLK content and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This means that we are starting Dragonflight with no less than FOUR raiding teams in total!

And now, Dragonflight
Dragonflight scheduled for release in the middle of the holiday season was no surprise. What does actually surprise me a lot is the fact that they actually did not delay the launch at all and are releasing it ahead of the imposed deadline when they first announced the expansion. For some reason I feel more confident in Blizzard’s performance this time around considering these facts. Surely it would make more sense to delay it a few more weeks, right before Christmas, to release your game if it wasn’t finished, right? Although you shouldn’t put much stock into my predictions lately, since I’ve been wrong about every other precedent-breaking development.

Either way I am very much looking forward to this fresh new expansion. Blizzard is claiming to have some new ideas for some big changes and is eager to show us what they have in mind. As always, I couldn’t be happier to have this group of friends to experience this expansion with, as well as everything else we do together with this group.

Looking forward to the next two years!

Rash

And the pre-patch is finally live!

Took a while to get there, but it looks like Shadowlands is definitively on the horizon for this year.

Reflection on BfA
I didn’t particularly feel like writing up a list of our accomplishments this time around. But I do want to pick out one of them that really stands out to me in the context of what BfA was like. BfA will go down with a bittersweetness for me like no other expansion in the history of WoW. Bittersweet because IE thrived during BfA and sailed through it with an ease that we have never seen before.

In previous expansions we have proven that we can weather any storm; whether it be the black smudge on WoW’s history known as Cataclysm, the 14-month content drought of Pandaria, the absolute shitshow that was WoD - and now BfA, where seemingly all of the above came together to provide us with the ultimate and unequivocally bad expansion. And unlike those other expansions where we were forced to make concessions (quit raiding earlier than we would have liked, switched to 10-man, put bad people in leadership positions (yeah, that’s right, I’m blaming that on the expansion, fuck you). We didn't have to make any concessions to our values in BfA.

While the expansion was going on, on many occasions I felt like things really couldn’t be worse. But especially looking back at the highlight that is raiding in IE (which is a lot easier to do with Naasty’s wonderful videos), it really wasn’t bad. And I haven’t even talked about the fantastic, record-breaking meetups that we’ve had in the last two years – which all seem so far away now because of current global circumstances.

Looking ahead:
I’m not going to pretend that I’m optimistic about Shadowlands. It doesn’t look like Blizzard is backing down from their strategy of planned obsolescence and artificial time-gating, but I am optimistic about Iron Edge. On the upside; It really can’t get any worse than BfA. And besides, we also had some really big reservations about the systems they were putting in Legion and that turned out great. So, who knows!
Once again thank you all very much for the great times we’ve had together – and much more to be had in the future.

Welcome to Battle for Azeroth!
Another relatively smooth expansion launch, well done Blizzard! It’s been quite the celebration for Iron Edge as well. We’ve had LAN party’s in the UK, Holland and Denmark, as well as various other friends coming together and playing on launch. I’m also definitely not gonna be a sore loser and take the opportunity to congratulate the Danes on reaching level 120 first, a mere 10 hours after launch. One day I’ll find out exactly how you cheated, but for the foreseeable future you have my respect and my salty Dane hatred.

About BfA
It’s certainly been an interesting new expansion. What many people believed to be just Legion 2.0, turns out to be pretty accurate. World quests, Garrisons, Artifact Power, it’s all back in full force.  We’ve seen everything except the raiding content and War Fronts, which I’m told not to expect too much of. Now that’s not to say it’s all bad. Legion was one of the, if not the best expansion they’ve ever made *cough random legendaries cough*, so many of these things are plenty of reasons to keep playing for a while. We’ll definitely have to see where Blizzard is going to take WoW and raiding, though. The changes to looting and the significant balance issues still plaguing us are not a good sign going into it. But if we use Legion as a benchmark, I’m optimistic. On a more positive note, world PvP seems to be a lot more fun this time around, so there’s that. Who would have thought that a simple “War Mode toggle” would take all the bad feelings out of ganking #morallygrey.

About Iron Edge
So many changes! We’re seeing quite a bit of development inside the guild going into BfA, which is something I’m very happy to see. We’re rapidly approaching our 14th birthday and we’re still capable of adapting to whatever shitshow Blizzard throws at us. I’ve been very sad to see some of our most trusted veteran members and leaders take a step back from WoW. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank them for their hard work over the years. But their absence makes room for new members to step up and take the lead. So I’m happy to announce the following new leaders in Iron Edge:

Quickzor: Mythic+ Officer
Mythic+ has become a big part of WoW. We needed someone who is passionate about it to take the lead on this and form a community within Iron Edge that is much like our existing raid teams. Quickzor has been active in the Mythic+ scene from the very beginning and has worked very hard to build a community of players around himself. Mythic+ presents many complications that are typical of short-term, small-group gameplay. We want to wish Quickzor the best of luck building this brand new branch of Iron Edge, which will serve as an important part of mixing our more elitist raiders with our casual social members. Remember, if you want anything related to Mythic+, Quickzor is the guy to talk to. Let’s let this help us to get to know each other a little better.

Shimmar: Melee officer
This should come as no surprise to anyone. Sam has been one of the most stable and reliable members of Iron Edge and has effectively been an officer since the day he joined in late MoP. I’m very happy to be able to say that we have such a capable leader available to take Phoenix’ place, now that he has finally moved on to a better place, where all the dead dogs (allegedly) are. In addition to tanking bosses, he’ll be taking care of the melee camp and helping us make decisions related to the guild and the raid.

Mortos: Banker
I know what you’re thinking, you filthy racist. Get your mind out of the gutter. You know I would have never even dreamed of having an actual Jew run the guild bank. It’s just an unbelievably funny coincidence, okay? I couldn’t be happier to announce that there is someone willing to pick up the task of running our Guild Bank right where Tutan(pbuh) left off. Mortos will be in charge of managing the guild funds and making attempts to get a little more cash in there to keep it afloat. A daunting task indeed, but one he is surely up for.

In conclusion
As usual, these posts go on for way too long. We’ve got so many new members join IE in the last few months that we’re, once again, at risk of reaching the player cap. Welcome to you all. I hope you’ve noticed that we’re not some sort of random group of nationality-based anonymous characters that play a video game together for a few months every two years. Even in tough circumstances, we’re here, we’re stronger than ever, and we’re not going anywhere.

See you online, on WoW, on our forums, on Discord or in real life!

- Rash

The End of Legion!



When I made this overly optimistic forum post two years ago, I really hoped Blizzard learned from the mistakes they had made in recent expansions, but particularly in WoD. Well, as it turns out, they did! Legion was the most content-rich expansion since WotLK and it brought World of Warcraft back to where it was many years ago in terms of game quality. The legendary system sucked, but we knew that going into it. And let's be honest; if the legendary system was the worst thing in Legion, it sure as hell beats a 14-month content drought.

A rising tide raises all ships - and the Iron Edge spaceship was no exception to that. Legion was a great expansion for IE. Let's look back on some of our accomplishments:

• For the entire expansion we've had three independent raiding teams running simultaneously.
• The ToT Raid made its debut and exceeded everyone's expectations (including their own!)
• The Weekend Porkchop Warriors broke the barrier and started clearing mythic bosses
• The Main Raid was able to kill all but one final boss before the end of its content cycle
• We've invited so many characters to the guild, we've had to have an old-fashioned purge. We currently have 276 unique accounts in the guild!
• We've organised over half a dozen guild related RL events and meetups all over Europe
• Sadly we've lost a few friends along the way as you always do. But fortunately, we've made far more new ones
• We've seen Dane-hatred reach levels never seen before in the history of the guild
• We've conclusively figured out the answer to the deepest question in life. It is indeed much better to eat a cake than it is to sit on it.
• Despite my best efforts, Mythic+ has invaded every part of the WoW experience. God help us in BfA
• And lastly, maybe the achievement I'm most proud of: We've had no major drama incidents throughout Legion. I still have no idea how we managed it. Maybe we're just getting old?

And now on to BfA. If Legion was any indication of the progress the WoW development team has made under their new leader Ion, I'm looking forward to whatever BfA will bring. I realize now that much of the hype I felt when Legion launched was because WoD was so deeply disappointing. In this case, BfA's got a tough act to follow. The officer team is busy planning some changes that we're going to make in BfA so keep an eye out for these announcements on the forum in the coming weeks.

Thank you to everyone who was here for Legion and the years before it. Without IE and the people that make up IE, many of us would have quit this game years ago. Enjoy your summer holiday and I will leave you with our kill video of Argus Mythic, by far the most difficult boss we've ever faced in WoW.