Forged Alliance

Name (first name only): Robert
Age: 30
Character Name: Daemus
Realm: Azgalor
Class: Rogue
Level: 90
iLvL: 565
Main Spec: Assassination
Off Spec: Combat
Trade skills: 600 LW/Skinning

Have you read and understand the following posts?
- Read This Before Applying
- Ranks
- About Us


Which of the following best describes your raiding goals? The rest of your application will be judged based on the answer to this question, so please make sure your character reflects your goals.
1. Raid whenever you have time in whatever group is most convenient
2. Raid consistently in a normal mode group and maybe some heroics
3. Dedicated to progressing through heroics at whatever rate the group is capable of
4. Hardcore heroic progression
5. None of the above, please explain:


What is your raid experience?
Came back in MoP. Started from 0. So only know SoO but have cleared normal many times.


Why did you leave your previous (current) guild?
Not enough progression raiding


How did you find out about our guild?
Word of mouth, Trade chat


Does anyone in our guild know you?
No


How many alts do you have and is this your main?
8, yes


What are your play times?
Evening till late morning


Which of our raid times would you be able to make?
Anytime


Would you be willing to sit out if it is necessary without a fuss?
Yes


What website(s) do you use to research your character(s)?
iceyveins, noxxic, etc


Have you spent a sufficient amount of time and gold on your gear, gems, and enchants?
Yes, Have every enchant and gem on all toons.


Raiders are expected to use consumables during raids. In the following categories what consumable would you use and why?
- Flask/Elixirs: Flask of Spring Blossums
- Well Fed: 300 Agility
- Potion: Vermin's Bite
Obviously for the added agility bonuses


If you are DPS, what are the hit / expertise caps your character needs to be viable in a raid?
7.5


What is the basic gemming strategy for your character?
Agility


What is the basic reforging strategy for your character?
Haste>Mastery>Crit


What is your favorite boss fight and why? What boss haven't you fought that you're looking forward to the most?
Sha, because he's it's fun rescuing people and killing adds moving around avoiding swelling pride. But while doing that I can pretty much stay on boss whole fight.


What boss mod(s) do you use?
VEM


What website(s) do you use to proactively research raid encounters?
Youtube videos


Please link your armory profile:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/a ... s/advanced

Is there anything else you want to tell us?
Priest - PvE 540 Holy / 533 PvP Shadow
Paladin - PvE 540 Prot / 550 PvP Holy - Want to go Ret for PvE.
DK - PvP 550 Unholy / 530 PvE Frost
Warlock - PvP 550 Destro/Aff
I have every profession except Tailoring at 600. I really enjoy healing and would like to gear my healers. My Paladin can heal flex easily.

Are there any ways that we can improve the application process?
Not that I can think of. Maybe being able to apply without registering. Like a application system that if when your approved you become registered . Something along those lines.

greetings, thanks for the app! unfortunately for you, as a fellow rogue i get to be extra picky about your application

Daemus wrote: Have you read and understand the following posts?
- Read This Before Applying
- Ranks
- About Us

i'll assume blinding yellow means yes.

Daemus wrote: What is the basic reforging strategy for your character?
Haste>Mastery>Crit

i'm curious as to where you found this stat priority, i think out of the possible stat orders this is the only one i haven't seen
the general strategy is usually to favor either haste or mastery, but not both. there is also never a case where you should be gemming crafty vermilion onyx. more generally, you are over the expertise cap by a bit and you should have dancing steel on your offhand.

Daemus wrote: What boss mod(s) do you use?
VEM

i've never heard of this so i don't know how well it works, but it looks like it is no longer actively maintained so you may be better off switching to dbm if this is buggy or missing updates.

Daemus wrote: Is there anything else you want to tell us?
I really enjoy healing and would like to gear my healers. My Paladin can heal flex easily.

healers are generally in short supply, so that may be a possibility.

Daemus wrote: Are there any ways that we can improve the application process?
Not that I can think of. Maybe being able to apply without registering. Like a application system that if when your approved you become registered . Something along those lines.

thanks for the feedback! the registration process is mainly to prevent spammers / bots. there are forms like you describe as part of sites like guild launch, but i'm not a fan of those sorts of sites and they are not worth the effort required to build one independently, so we're somewhat stuck with the process we currently have in place.

anywho, track someone down online and we can get you an invite

i'm curious as to where you found this stat priority, i think out of the possible stat orders this is the only one i haven't seen
the general strategy is usually to favor either haste or mastery, but not both. there is also never a case where you should be gemming crafty vermilion onyx. more generally, you are over the expertise cap by a bit and you should have dancing steel on your offhand.

If I remove the gem im under the cap. It's just a stopgap till I can upgrade a piece or two with valor. As for the stat priorty I used what AskMrRobot and shadowcraft said and I found I do more DPS with my current reforge. As is the highest ranked Assassination Rogues in the amory always have very high mastery and haste with crit third. Basically what I did is every piece without hase or mastery I reforged the crit into the 1 it didnt have prioritizing Mastery.

As for VEM it is much better then DBM as it tells me what to do and puts arrows my screen even telling me the best place to move and what not. It has everything that DBM has but with the added Voice commands. As there won't be anymore patches for MoP it doesnt need to be updated anymore.

In the gearing process for my rogue, my simulations found that the T16 2 piece bonus causes crit to jump up to the top of the stat priority up to a point. Once you layer in the T16 4 piece bonus, haste overtakes crit. Finally, as iLvl increases and crit saturates (i.e., once crit gets in the 50% neighborhood and seal fate is proc'ing all the time), crit drops back down and you end up with mastery coming back up.

I would be very wary about gearing around the top characters on the armory; being in full quad upgraded heroic warforged gear causes stat priorities to go in unintuitive directions due to stat saturation.

-HP

Daemus wrote: If I remove the gem im under the cap. It's just a stopgap till I can upgrade a piece or two with valor. As for the stat priorty I used what AskMrRobot and shadowcraft said and I found I do more DPS with my current reforge. As is the highest ranked Assassination Rogues in the amory always have very high mastery and haste with crit third. Basically what I did is every piece without hase or mastery I reforged the crit into the 1 it didnt have prioritizing Mastery.

the thing about shadowcraft is that it bases it's stat priority based on your current set up. if you mess around with it and your gear enough, you can get any stat priority to appear favorable. what you should keep in mind is that from a theoretical standpoint, any expertise over 7.5% is wasted, so your goal is usually to get as close to 7.5% as possible without going over. reforging will always be more flexible than gems, so there are usually a small number of default gems that you should always use, and then you can reforge as necessary. it also isn't always ideal to reforge from the weakest stat to the strongest stat on any given piece, as overall that may not result in the best setup.

also, what inori said.

I have every tier piece already. The 4set bonus isnt all that great for assassination. So I make sure to have 2set and warforged all the others. So do think I should go with crit? If I reforge to crit I only gain 5% crit and lose 27% mastery. If I reforge out of haste/mastery and go full crit I would be around 44% crit but only 22% haste. And that would mean less uptime on envenom, cloak and meta.

It sounds like you know what you're doing and know how to do independent research, so do what your research tells you to do. If the points Jeff brings up are a concern, run them against your tools to see if they pan out or not (I haven't used shadowcraft in a while, but I think you can swap out gems/enchants/etc. within the tool so you don't have to make any changes in-game).

-HP

what inori said again, plus it partially starts to be a matter of personal preference, as well as encounter specific. for example i would argue that mastery has greater value on thok because you can maintain deadly poison on him with shuriken toss during the kite phases, while haste / crit are better on fights with multiple adds like spoils where burst is more valuable. in the end, it all usually works out to a couple percentage points of theoretical dps, and if you're already thinking about these things you should be fine. i just thought it was odd that you are using expertise / crit gems.

I did some tinkering so now when I'm buffed I got 40% crit/haste and 90% mastery. And 7.5% expertise for now, but once I upgrade a few pieces I'll have to reforge again. So glad they are removing hit/exp... What a pain in the ass lol

indeed, reforging seemed like a good idea at the time, since that one piece of bis hit gear never dropped, but even at the simplest level it ended up being a very fluid complexity that essentially just makes everyone rely on a computer program to determine what is ideal.