Hello, Iron Edge!
I am applying for the main raid.
Character: sânâ
Server: Draenor
Armory: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/character/eu/Draenor/s%C3%A2n%C3%A2Class/Spec: Rogue (DPS)
Member Type: Raider
Personal Info:I’m Dave, I’m 36 years old from Scotland, I work in Digital Marketing for a reasonably large and notable Media organisation.
Class/Spec:As a Rogue your spec is pretty much just ‘Rogue’ – i.e whatever is strongest/meta should really be what you play every tier. Shadowlands - especially during Sanctum/Sepulcher – has been a good expansion for Rogue players, in that all 3 specs have been pretty reasonably balanced and competitive. Sub is my favourite spec, so I’ll prefer to play it when viable, but it’s historically been the most poorly maintained Rogue spec, so I will always defer to raid needs in terms of performance, utility or damage profile, tier to tier.
I’ve played WoW since late Vanilla, I’ve mained Warrior, Warlock and Rogue for most of this time, with a brief detour to play DH in Legion, and Feral (for some reason) in Dragon Soul.
Basic stat prio for the expansion has been Crit = Vers > Mastery > Haste for Sub, Crit = Vers > Haste > Mastery for Outlaw and Crit > Haste > Mastery > Vers for Assa (I’ll always Sim my stat weights though, because for example I have such little haste in my current gear that it’s actually my highest value secondary stat for ST as Outlaw)
Rotation wise, I’ll focus on Sub so I’m not rewriting a Wowhead class guide section here, but I’m just as comfortable with all 3 specs.
Fundamental priority is to maintain your Slice and Dice & Rupture with 100% uptime, but refresh them outside of Shadow Dance, inside Pandemic window.
Another fundamental is to send Finishers on 5+ CP. Finishers at <5 are suboptimal use of energy, but pressing a builder at 5cp is a waste of combo points because you will overcap with Shadowstrike (2cps baseline), seal fate procs from Crits, and Shadow Techniques procs.
So long as your maintenance buffs/debuffs are active, it’s all about CD management. You want to send Symbols on cooldown, and Dance with every symbols cast.
Between Symbols, you want to never overcap on Shadow Dance, so you generally with the current 4-piece set get 1 extra dance between Symbols.
During Symbols/Dance, your builder is Shadowstrike on up to 3 targets, shuriken storm on 4+, your spender is Eviscerate on 1-2 targets, Black Powder on 3+.
Outside of Dance, we build CPs with Backstab – also a good chance to hit those pesky animacharged combo points from the Unity legendary.
When your dance drops you should send a Backstab on 5+ stacks of perforated veins before dancing again. If you’re minmaxing, it’s okay to press Backstab during dance if you have 5+ stacks, Shadowblades active, and I believe 6 seconds left on Dance.
If you’re playing Kyrian, Echoing Reprimand should be pressed on cooldown, outside of dance. If you’re playing Venthyr, press Flag directly before Symbols + Evis to maximise your stacks, and hold Symbols up to 10 seconds to line with with Flag (you should have for every 2nd Flag cast).
For ST, we play Kyrian Sub with Akaaris legendary. For AoE fights/M+, we play Venthyr Sub with Finality + Shuriken Tornado.
With 2 set, we just press Shadow Blades on cooldown – before tier set we’d hold until we had Symbols/Dance at least.
Funnel damage is sadly not as potent as it was before it got nerfed into the ground during Uldir, even so – if there’s a priority target and a load of adds that don’t need AoE’d, you can press Evis every 2nd global by using Shuriken Storm to build CPs. Anduin was a good example of this, funnelling into the Remnant and Monstrous Soul during intermission.
Vanish should be used on cooldown, but I do like to hold it sometimes in case I get really unlucky with crits between dance and need Find Weakness on the mob before I press Evis. Good for small gap-closing at target swapping too, which in practise is a little more value than just pressing on CD on a patchwork sim.
Alts:I have a Priest, Lock, Paladin, Hunter and DK at 60, the rest sitting around 50 or so. The Lock had decent enough gear for doing weekly 15s last tier, but I’m not much of an alt guy these days, Rogue for life.
Professions:I’m Enchanting/Engineering at the moment, I wish this question was as relevant as it used to be, fingers crossed professions become important and cool again in Dragonflight. If so I will likely swap Enchanting for Blacksmithing / Weaponsmithing specialisation.
Raiding Experience:Vanilla (Fury Warrior):
ZG: 9/10
MC: 7/10
TBC (Fury Warrior/Destro Lock):
Kara: 10/10
Gruul: 2/2
Mag: 1/1
SSC: 2/6
I stopped playing for the rest of TBC, came back towards the end of the expansion and actually pugged 5/5 MH, but didn’t touch BT or Sunwell.
WotLK (Combat Rogue):
Naxx 10/25: 15/15
OS: 1/1
EoE: 1/1
Ulduar: 14/14 (if memory serves I got Flame Leviathan, Deconstructor, Council and Hodir on hardmode)
TotC: 4/5 Heroic
ICC: 11/12 Heroic
Cata (Warlock/Feral Druid):
BoT: 3/4 Heroic
BWD3/6 Heroic
TotFW: 2/2 Normal
Firelands: 6/7 Heroic
Dragon Soul: 8/8 Heroic
MoP (Warlock/Rogue):
MV: 2/6 Heroic
HoF: 4/6 Heroic
ToES: 2/4 Heroic
ToT: 11/13 Heroic
SoO: 13/14 Heroic (killed Garrosh on Mythic first night when max difficulty changed from Heroic to Mythic with the WoW prepatch)
WoD (Warrior/Warlock):
Highmaul: 5/7 mythic
BRF: 10/10 mythic
HFC: 12/13 mythic
Legion (Rogue/DH):
EN: 5/7 mythic
Guild disbanded during EN, I played casually with random trade chat guilds and pugs from here until Nya’lotha
NH: 10/10 heroic
ToV: 3/3 heroic
ToS: 9/9 heroic, I may have done Mythic Goroth in a pug
Antorus: 11/11 heroic
BFA (Rogue):
Uldir: I did not enter this accursed raid
CoS: nor this one, or maybe I did it on Normal
BoD: 9/9 heroic
TEP: 8/8 heroic
Nya’lotha: 12/12 mythic
Shadowlands (Rogue/DK for CN – guild request):
CN: 7/10 mythic
SoD: 10/10 mythic
Sepulcher: 7/11 mythic
Previous Guilds:2006 – 2007: <the Friendly Fuzzballs> Not much to say, this was a trade chat guild, I was new to the game, they took me to ZG when I was level 57, we killed some bosses. I left at the beginning of TBC because I wanted to raid more seriously.
2007 – 2008: <Psycho Bunnies> I server transferred from one dead server to another because I liked the guild name and they had successfully cleared BWL in Vanilla with a team of casuals. I left in 2008 when my career took me to a new city and I didn’t have time to commit to WoW.
2008 – 2012: <Shades of Fury> After resubbing for WoTLK prepatch, I found a guild in trade chat offering 2 day raiding with some decent progress. We generally fell short of what we now call ‘Cutting Edge’ for many tiers, until we really focused to clear Dragon Soul heroic – sadly, some of the guild did not want to be pushing progress as hard, and we eventually split into two teams which was unsustainable.
2012 – 2016: <Infamy> I transferred to Draenor ahead of the MoP lauch to a guild that had performed really well in Cata and were recruiting. I played with them for 2 expansions, falling agonisingly short almost ever tier, apart from BRF. During both SoO and HfC progress, we were close on the last boss before prepatch landed. HfC was our last push, and the officers retired, leaving the guild a casual/social guild only.
2016: I’ll be honest, I spent so little time in this guild and got such a terrible impression of them, that I don’t even remember their name. The raidleader thought the best way to lead was to do his best impression of the vintage Onyxia ‘more welps, handle it’ video. Horrible atmosphere and disbanded out of nowhere on Cenarius progress.
2016 – 2020: After another disappointment at the start of Legion, I decided WoW should become a casual hobby. I’d been made redundant from my job, and was doing a lot of shift work, so I consider this period of my WoW career a bit of a soft retirement. I still played, but mainly sitting silently in trade chat guilds that I accepted because I was sick of spam invites and whispers when I was guildless.
2020 - 2021: <Misplaced Elitism> and <ONYX> When the pandemic struck I suddenly no longer had to deal with a shitty commute (and in those early days, ‘working from home’ equalled ‘play video games during work’) so I decided to get a little more invested in WoW again to pass the time. I found a guild called Misplaced Elitism in the guild finder who were ‘pushing M+’ – really they were farming 15s, but I was rusty and it was a good way back into the game.
Since the game had so much uptake during COVID, the guild quickly filled up and we had enough people to raid. We made decent progress, clearing up to Ra-den in Mythic Nya’lotha. They had asked me to lead raids, but there was a lot of messy interpersonal drama in the guild, a lot of deeply personal sexist and homophobic stuff going around from an officer and a long time raider - and a lot of raging - so about 80% of the guild opted to leave and form <ONYX>
With <ONYX> I was an officer and the raid leader. I led us to a Mythic N’Zoth kill, which felt like a really big return to form, and we went into Shadowlands on a high. Unfortunately our progress was really disappointing in Castle Nathria - we had something obscene like 250 pulls on Council – and some of the same interpersonal stuff from <Misplaced Elitism> carried over into the new guild as well. I’m too old to deal with the petty teenage stuff, so I politely informed them I would be looking to move off the server and find a new raiding guild with a more adult culture.
2021 – Present: <gloom> and <Place holder>. I spent a month or so looking at warcraft logs to find a guild that was serious and capable, but not outside of my comfort zone skill and progress wise. I eventually settled on <gloom> which was a more casual offshoot of the top 100 raiding guild <bloom> on Draenor. I transferred, and about 5 weeks into the new tier with some good progress on early SoD mythic bosses, they announced the guild was no longer raiding. Luckily, about 0.5 seconds after I listed myself as available on wowprogress, I was contacted by an officer from <Place holder> asking me to apply. I did, and have been raiding with them since.
We achieved Cutting Edge Sylvanas, but fell way short in Sepulcher, with the announcement after our Mythic Anduin kill that we’d be taking a break until Dragonflight. As much as I was happy with the Sylvanas kill, I’ve never felt massively comfortable as I did in earlier guilds. There is a lot of ‘ironic’ racism, N-word with the hard R being passed around freely on comms, and borderline Nazi content on the Discord. I do have a good relationship with people there and think of them fondly, but I miss being excited to get on comms and hang out with people I can connect with.
Availability:I work Monday – Friday, 9am – 5:30pm GMT. I also do a good amount of freelance work, but I will always prioritise my own hobbies and interests, and do that on off days/over the weekends.
Communication:Me fail English? That's unpossible. I have a first class honours degree in English literature, but I am Scottish so having everyone understand my accent is an entire other thing.
Computer / Connection:I have a good rig running a 5900x and a 3080, so performance is no problem. My internet rarely has any issues, it’s copper wire ADSL (thanks British Government) so not exactly 10GB fibre, but it does the job.
Addons/UI:Standard UI setup for me, I use a custom Elvui profile, and the mandatory weakauras/bigwigs/details/infinite raid tools combo. The rest of my addons are more cosmetic or low impact, the only thing that’s notable is probably Advanced UI Options which I use to set my custom lag tolerance to 240 – more responsive than the default 400, but I can still fit 8 globals into every Shadow Dance.
https://imgur.com/a/cHX8X8YOther Games:I’ll jump into a AAA title once it’s on sale on steam once in a while, but it took me until 2022 to play the Witcher 3. I don’t have infinite spare time so 95% of my gaming is just WoW.
Why Iron Edge?This might sound corny but every time I’ve made a major guild change in the last 10 years I’ve considered applying to Iron Edge. I was on Kazzak for years and you guys always came up as a 2 day guild with good progress. The fact that you’ve existed as a guild for so long, with such consistent progress and several raid teams is a testament to how well your guild is organised and run, and how strong your community is. I’d be an idiot *not* to want to join Iron Edge.
I’ll be honest about why I have never actually applied: the amount of tiers where I just missed out on ‘CE’ through Cata, MoP and WoD gave me something of an inferiority complex. I was always a little intimidated to apply to guilds that were outprogressing me, as if I’d slip up on a boss I wasn’t familiar with. It wasn’t until 2020 when COVID brought me back to playing WoW more seriously and I lead a pretty ragtag bunch of raiders (many of whom had never touched mythic raiding) all the way to Nya’lotha CE, I realised that I was more than capable of that level of gameplay, and since then I’ve not allowed myself to be held back.
I believe that CE can be achieved almost every tier by 2 day guilds, it just takes the right balance of people and the right attitude, and I think it’s pretty obvious Iron Edge can offer that.
What can I offer Iron Edge?Experience, strong gameplay and as little drama and stress as possible. I’ve been raiding since 2006, granted with a few tiers off, but I’m super comfortable and confident playing the game. If you are looking at recent logs I’d encourage you to filter by ilvl and boss damage for a fuller picture, also because of the nature of the guilds I’ve been in for the last few tiers, we’ve been extending lockouts every week, so a lot of my Best Performance Average is based on progress kills of later bosses only. I will admit to being something a log whore in the past, I’ve held some rank #1 DPS parses in my time - I even somehow squeaked a 100 ilvl parse on our first Halondrus Mythic kill last tier - but I know the vaunted orange, pink and gold ranking numbers aren’t the best measure of an all round raider.
Sepulcher Logs:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/eu/draenor/s%c3%a2n%c3%a2#difficulty=5&bybracket=1&partition=-1Sanctum Logs:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/eu/draenor/s%c3%a2n%c3%a2#difficulty=5&bybracket=1&zone=28Nathria Logs:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/id/56005159#metric=dps&difficulty=5&zone=26Nya’lotha Logs:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/id/22007339?zone=24#I have a lot of Mythic experience (not as many CEs as I’d like, but still plenty of experience), I’m not a massive high end M+ guy but if I enjoy a season I’ll push the early 20s for fun, I’m also a former Hero of the Horde and narrowly missed on the wins needed for my Glad mount in S1 Shadowlands after hitting 2400 in 3s. I’ve got challenge mode stuff on a few classes, I started collecting some old T3 pieces in BFA – I like playing the game and I think I’m pretty good at it!
I adapt to mechanics quickly, I prioritise my assignments ahead of personal performance and glory, I can contribute to tactical adjustments if it’s welcomed by the offer team, and I can shut my face and play the game if it’s not. I’m not a tilter and have never lost my rag on voice, no matter how needless or frustrating a wipe can be (did I mention 250+ wipes on Council of Blood?).
I also think it’s fair to say looking at my guild history that I can offer loyalty. It’s rare that I’ve left a guild, I tend to stick around to the bitter end. I’d like to think that I’m easy to get on with, I’ve never had any ‘enemies’ in WoW so to speak, or been at the source of any drama. I’d rather get on with my guildmates, so I try to be as accommodating as possible.
Where did I hear about Iron Edge?Wowprogress a few years ago, and the name always stuck in my head.
Last Words?‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’
-Wayne Gretsky
- Michael Scott
- Sânâ-Draenor
Welcome, Guest. Please 
October 03, 2024, 11:10:20 am
Apply as a Social
Name, age, location, work/school, etc.
Healer
Tank
Why are you playing your current class/spec? Is it simply because it's strong or because you think it's fun?
Any relevant alts you have and their levels.
What professions do you have and why? Any cool/special recipes?
What previous raiding/PvP experience you have, Setups, Ratings etc.
Previous guilds and reasons why you left them.
Times at which you are available. Include things like work shifts, upcoming exams, holidays, etc.
Are you proficient in english? Do you have Discord and can you listen? Do you have a microphone and do you use it?
Do you have a decent computer? Do you have fps issues? What's your internet connection like? Is it stable? Do you have high ping to Kazzak? Do you lag? Do you disconnect every hour?
List any addons you use for raiding and why you use them. Also include a screenshot of your ui (this is mandatory) and list any relevant key bindings that are not shown.
What other games do you play?
Why do you want to join Iron Edge?
Friends? Wowprogress? Openraid? MMO-Champ? Battle.net? Trade spam? Somewhere else?
(Write the name of the owner of the dog in the picture above!)