Ok guys, I've had a lot of time to think the last few weeks, and I need to get some things off my chest. Please understand that I'm not mad at anybody, nor am I trying to call anybody out. I just want to clear the air, because if I let this shit build in my head any more, I'm prone to do some stupid shit I'll only regret later. Anyhow, I wanted to share some observations I have at the moment. And for those who have been with the guild as long as I have, you may recognize some of these points as things I've brought up before. . .

Guild Atmosphere

First off, I think we've lost a lot of the personality this guild had as we've grown over the last two years. When we first started off, we were a small group, struggling just to get by. Everybody was friends with everybody, knew everybody else's business, hell, we knew everybody else's names. Every night, there were lively discussions on Ventrilo about fuck EVERYTHING (sometimes LITERALLY about fucking everything), and we truly were more of a large family than we were a small guild.

Something has happened over time, though. Really, a multitude of somethings. First and foremost, we grew. It was a necessary evil, and one which I fully supported, at least at first, as there was no way to progress in TBC raiding without doing that or forming an alliance with some other guild that would lead to multitudes of problems and power struggles. Second, when we were recruiting to hit 25-mans, I really feel that we lowered our standards quite a bit. Not necessarily our in-game standards, mind you (we've let a few iffy players slip through the cracks, but for the most part we only recruit solid players). I mean personality standards. Sure, we generally only recruit people we can get along with, but we used to only pull in people that we really WANTED to hang out with, and who really wanted to hang out with us. These days, as long as you're a decent player, and we don't outright hate your guts, you're in if we have a spot available, or at least so it seems sometimes (Hell, I'm not sure a certain someone whose name resembles "Effin' A" even meets THOSE criteria). To top it all off, I think our Friends and Family recruiting (AKA non-raider recruits), while a good idea in theory, has been a bad idea in practice. We ended up pulling WAY to many people into the guild as friends of guildmates, when frankly there's no reason a person's friends NEED to be in the guild just to hang out. I'm pretty sure we've stopped using said Friends and Family clause, but it was still a contributing factor.

What can we do about it? At this point, I don't know. Honestly, with 10-man versions of all the raids in WotLK, I have this fantasy of pulling together 15 or so core people and reforming, but that's not going to happen (wouldn't be fair to the rest of the guild anyhow, as most of the core folks I'd pick are the guild leadership). We're pretty much stuck with everybody we have right now, but I do have one opinion I'd like to share. When I was first setting up the guild application, I included one unusual question, placed at the very end of the application, which I have based MANY of my personal votes on when accepting or rejecting new applicants: The Personality Quiz. As far as I'm concerned, people who don't even bother answering the quiz didn't even apply. People who give a serious question as a response, such as "What is your favorite piece of gear", or who are uncreative with it (I remember at least one application *coughGlopcough* putting "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck . . . " as a question) but at least get the basic idea I'm willing to give a chance, since some people just aren't that creative (I dunno what Glop's excuse was though), and the people whose answers make me laugh successfully make one hell of a first impression to me ("You're out of gas and the cat just fell off the roof. What time is it in New England?" - Brodwen)

Me as a Guild Officer

I've said it before, I'll say it again, and it will eternally fall on deaf ears. I'm not really sure I want or deserve the officer position I currently own. Hell, other than rants like this, and writing the DKP system, I never really have done much as an officer. Even as a guild master I didn't do much, as much as people refuse to believe it, my leadership style was to surround myself with the right people and delegating. And I'll leave it at that, since as I said, I pretty much already know the response I'll get.

The Tanking Corps

And now the biggest issue to me. Let me first preface this by saying that I have the utmost respect for Bittor. He is a truly excellent tank, and a great person. I in no way intend this as an attack on him, nor do I blame him for what I have to say. However, it is impossible to discuss this without discussing Bittor, for obvious reasons.

That having been said, when this guild was reorganized, one of the big points I made was that I didn't want to see the guild follow the common model of having a single "main tank" who was put on a pedestal, given first pick of all the gear, and looked to as the tank for every single boss fight in the game. It was a position I felt very comfortable putting forward, because for one I was guildmaster (one of 2-3 co-GMs at the time), for another thing I was the most likely to BE the aforementioned main tank given the guild makeup at the time, and thirdly, because I knew how much it sucked to be a marginalized tank, having been a pre-TBC bear in a standard raiding guild of the time (Patronus Veritas). I got plenty of main tanking experiences in T4 content, and even got a fair number of guild firsts under my belt as the tank (Prince Malchezaar comes to mind).

Over time, though, things changed, and today we obviously consider Bittor to be "the" main tank. The only guild first I can think of that he hasn't MT'd for us in 25 man content is Leotheras, and that was simply because he couldn't attend that night. And even when not working progression content, if Bittor is there, Bittor is the MT.

Now, I realize that in the current game, Warriors are more often than not the main tanks for guilds, due to both their superior mitigation and emergency abilities, and their limited non-tanking utility. That, however, is a hardcore raid attitude, and we have always billed ourselves as a more casual guild. Yes, Bittor is a great tank, and definitely worthy of main tanking. But frankly, so am I. As are a few other members of the guild, if given the chance. Sure, I do more DPS when not tanking than Bittor does, and I don't have some of the special abilities he does. But I honestly don't think that's even the reason Bittor tanks everything, I just think assumes that a warrior always has to be MT (Even on fights like Morogrim Tidewalker and Leotheras the Blind, where common knowledge is that bears perform better than warriors due to specific fight mechanics).

Do I expect this to change right now? No, I don't. But Wrath is coming, and the times are changing. Blizzard is trying to even the playing field between the four tanking classes. All four tanks will be more or less equally capable main tanks. All four classes will also be equally capable at non-tanking roles when their ability to take a hit is not needed. And thus, what I ask here is that all of our good tanks, of all classes, are given equal play. Let all of our tanks have the chance to be main tank on all of the fights. Let us all have chances to MT progression raids. Of course, I'm not asking to let the Eristras (Wuts Shield Block?) or Whirleys (Wuts Threat Generation?) tank Arthas, but giving the Adramaleks and Toriennas a shot at him, and at getting some guild firsts along the way, should be how we do things. Pantheon has Tubs. NO has Akraen. Prophecy is neither of those guilds, and should show that by having the tank diversity I tried to lay the groundwork for nearly two years ago.

The reason I bring this up is simple. I switched to Kirari because I really don't enjoy doing melee DPS, and with the amount of DPS time I was getting on raids, I decided it would be better to do DPS as a caster (which I enjoy somewhat). But I've come to the decision that, at least in WoW, I am a diehard tank, and miss it dearly. I intend to shift my focus back to Surania in Wrath, but if I'm going to go back to tanking, I really don't want to be "just another offtank" like I was for most of TBC.

Thanks for hearing me out, guys. SuraBear