Raider Application - Death Knight (DPS/Tank) - Thàiax

[Applicant]

Hello, Iron Edge!

I am applying for the main raid.

Character: Thàiax
Armory: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/character/eu/Kazzak/Th%C3%A0iax
Class/Spec: Death Knight (DPS/Tank)
Member Type: Raider

Personal Info:

I'm Jonas, a 22 year old engineering student with my own apartment in Denmark.

Class/Spec:

I played blood in Shadowlands because I came back to play m+ and wanted the agency that comes with setting the pace and deciding the route rather having to rely on randoms.
I'm currently ilvl 295 and have no offspec.

For shadowlands, my stat prio was > Mastery/Crit.
We like haste for two big reasons; 1) Reaction time. Shorter GCD -> Death Strike when it's necessary.
2) Faster rune generation. With the meta of wanting to spam heart strike to extend dancing rune weapon uptime, rune generation obviously is critical. In fact, due to the nature of the rotation, the shorter GCD is *even better* compared to without the set bonus since death strike is naturally a smaller portion of the total GCDs spent.

Priority wise it's about not wasting resources. Dancing rune weapon is both dmg and survivability, so that always goes up first on a pull. Our most valuable resource is runes because of the set bonus, so we want to always have 2 runes regenerating. Once that is done we're looking to (in priority) keep up bone shield, blood plague, avoid overcapping on runic power and avoid overcapping on blood boil charges.

Finally, if it wasn't already obvious enough, defensives need to be pressed preemptively. So in practice what happens is mark a prio mob skull, pop a defensive or 2 depending on the difficulty of the mobs, dancing rune weapon, grab aggro with blood boil or DnD, marrowrend for stacks then assume normal priority.

Alts:

I've leveled all classes to cap at some point during my playtime in wow (late wotlk).
Currently my level capped ones are Warrior, DK, Rogue, Druid, Rogue and DH. The two latter are on Sylvanas alliance and are just for crafting professions to sustain subs.

None of them have any gear of note except the DK which I am looking to main.

I will reroll if DK isn't viable.

Professions:

Mining, blacksmithing, engineering, jewelcrafting, leatherworking & tailoring both on alliance (sylvanas) and horde (kazzak).

The DK which I intend on playing into DF has leatherworking and tailoring. I intend on staying with these for goldmaking purposes unless the new profession BoEs are (virtually) mandatory.

Professions are how I play the game for free, Shadowlands season 4 I was making ~600k/month without crafting legendaries or consumables.


Raiding Experience:

None of major interest.
I sniped 3 SoD heroic bosses for trinket drops during fated and got 80th percentile on my first attempt with a pug /shrug https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/id/67656195#zone=28&partition=4

Since it was a dead period in retail, I went and tried WOTLK classic, obviously it's super easy for everybody but I still managed to get straight 97th percentile https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/character/id/68836357

That is despite me missing a critical darkmoon card trinket which everybody on the leaderboard around me has, and despite me playing in a fairly random non tryhard guild.

Previous Guilds:

N/A

Availability:

As a general rule I can guarantee availability from 1700-2400 every day. Plans are normally made one or several weeks ahead of time.

In practice I am available from 1400 and onwards most days because that's when I'm home after a lecture, but that does not mean I can spend the next 9 hours gaming; I still need to study, other IRL obligations et cetera.

I can, and will, hellweek grind to achieve quick level cap and full prebis.

Exams are mid Jan. but I'm not busy to an extent that I can't raid 2 (or even 3) times per week.

The only period I will be truly gone is Dec 20th or 21st to ~Dec 26th

Communication:

I am fluent in English and vocal by nature. I am used to taking a leadership role and talking in front of a large group of people is not an issue.
In the context of raiding, this means I can guarantee you will hear me call out important info - but only that - info that actually matters.

Computer / Connection:

The only connectivity issue I've had since moving (~2 years) was resolved within 6 hours by me troubleshooting the issue with a friend who is an IT professional, sending a detailed report to my ISP and getting a new modem in the same day.

I have not had PC issues for many years, and am comfortable troubleshooting and fixing most common issues (so they will not plague me for extended periods of time should they arrive).

Addons/UI:

UI screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/LsgxtG3.png

Player frame top-left is not used at all and was smaller before the prepatch which broke my addon to resize it. I only keep it for rightclick functionality. I keep the target and focus on the right hand side close to my central UI, but it's currently broken because of prepatch so I can't really show you.

Prepatch also took away a few of my buttons, which for example is why S3 is empty and my weakauras UI having 2x icebound fortitude - one of them is supposed to be rune tap.

For keybinds I use 1-5, Z,X,C,V, F1-F4, G, the ones visible on screen and shift modifiers for most of the above. My keybinds are deliberate with quick reaction keys such as kick or defensives being easy to reach, or resource generator/spender being on the same button regardless of spec.

For raiding addons I use
Weakauras - we all know how strong custom auras for encounters can be. It's also the basis of my general UI.
Deathnote - being able to identify what killed me means it's easier to prevent in the future
Details
Pawn - quick to see if something is an upgrade. I sim after every piece of gear.
Plater - Weakauras-esque where I can make certain mobs stand out or similar. No reason to make the game harder than it needs to be.
DBM

For m+ I also use angry keystones to quickly identify how many % a mob gives to optimize a route where "unnessecary" mobs were pulled by accident, and mythic dungeon tools to create and share routes + stealth pot usage spots.

Other Games:

I'm in top leadership along with ~10 other people in the biggest group in another MMO called EvE: Online. We currently 33.641 characters amounting to ~10.000 real people. have I've played the game since 2018 and been in the top leadership position for just over a year now.
EvE is a game where everything is player made and loss matters. I am comfortable (and trusted) with the responsibility of making calls that directly puts very large amounts of value and man-hours on the table.
These days I take a more management / discord role so the position will not impact my ability to be ready and on-time for raids and general prep.

Apart from that since I enjoy the loop of fail->identify mistakes->improve I've hopped a lot between games, playing for a few hundred hours, reviewing VODs etc. to reach top few % in competitive PvP games then jumping to the next. Examples of this include
Hearthstone
Rainbow six: Siege
War thunder
Starcraft II
For Honor
League of legends

Apart from that, I enjoy strategy games from paradox, klei etc.

I intend on staying with wow raiding for the foreseeable future - I am confident the cycle of new raids coming out is enough to keep me interested which is why I want to do this in the first place.

Why Iron Edge?

I want to play with likeminded people. That's to say people that tryhard, identify and admit their own mistakes, call me out on mine, help each other improve and are able to take criticism.

These are the kind of people I've met through EvE - because they're the kind of people to end in a leadership position of such a big group of people. And it's great, simply great.

What can I offer Iron Edge?

Consistency and predictability. With my systematic approach to everything I do, you can be sure mistakes will not be repeated (a lot at least) and general performance variance should be low since I try to be deliberate about most actions in games - no autopiloting!

I will, like always, record and review my own gameplay. I will show up to every raid fully prepped ingame wise (gear, enchants, consumables etc.), having read up on the encounter but also checked what I messed up last time and how we fix it this time around.

Where did I hear about Iron Edge?

Wowprogress

Last Words?

I'm probably younger than the majority of you. I generally mix the best with people in their late 20s or early 30s and I don't see why this group of people should be any different.

With my approach to games, I normally reach my goals in 200-400 hours when everybody around me has put in 800+. Because I put in more time out-of-game learning from myself and those that are better than me.
In practice this ment during shadowlands season 4, I went from having 0 gear and never done an m+ before to solo climbing to 2500 rating in the span of 4-5 weeks.

2 of the people I met through eve and play other games with have both raided top 500 mythic. They've both told me I should jump directly into mythic and will be fine.
The 3 heroic SoD fated bosses I did were frankly too easy.

Finally, I realise I have very little experience. I am confident I can do this. Put me as trial and let me prove it to you.

[Thaiax]

I should've added; I don't have any strong preferences for DPS or Tank.

[Helken]

Purely hypothetically speaking: imagine you're progressing Anduin mythic as a frost DK and leadership asks you to not use cooldowns during intermission phase but instead use them on the 4 adds downstairs.
What would you think, say and do?

[Thaiax]

I don't have any specific knowledge on the fight.

Regardless, to begin with I'd comply no questions asked. If it means I lose out on using my CDs during a burn phase then so be it - in the end I'm here for progression, not logs. That means sacrifices are part of it.

During the next few pulls I'll try to get a feel for if the change is beneficial or not; although I expect that leadership will be correct more often than not, they have a lot to see to and my input on how good or correct the change is may still be valuable.

[Shimmar]

Hi Jonas,
Sorry to keep you waiting. Love the application and would be happy to offer you a trial for DF.

Jump on discord and request an invite when you're free.

Welcome!