Update at 60
As a new 60 I'm not really strong enough to raid tank. I'm finding lot of social pressure which isn't entirely fair. As a guild we don't lack healers. But with several of our priests shadow, over half of our shammies specced for pvp and the shammies in particular liable to turn up to heal a raid in +str +crit gear we lack healing power.
But there's swings and roundabouts to that - I'm not being forced to spec resto or invest dkp in healing gear. If either of those things were true I wouldn't be able to develop the character as a tank at all
Because of our lack of healers I'm usually going to be healing when raiding. That's ok, I'll put the time in to get decent blues and make sure I do a decent job of it - certainly better than some of our other "healers". Like our enhancement shammies, I won't be investing my dkp in healing gear
What caused a lot of drama tonight is the fact I have a very good Holy Priest healer also in the guild. Several people objected to me rolling on a blue for feral tanking because I get gear on the druid plus I get gear on the priest so I'm gearing up two characters at everyone else's expense (that's how they see it)
To me if I bring a druid 2 days and bring a priest 2 days it's the same as two other people playing 2 days per week each. Each character is separately developing their own gear based on the contribution it makes. Frankly I wish I'd never told them it was me - I'd be having a much easier time if they thought the Holy Priest was just some dude who plays less these days and the Feral Druid was some new dude.
Well anyway people weren't very happy with me collecting items on two characters so I decided to put the Priest on hold for now. No big loss, it will be very easy to come back to him at some future date. I had been a candidate for class leader so I posted on our guild forum withdrawing my application for that job
The guild leader contacted me, asked me why, told me he was happy for me to develop two characters if that's what I wanted and said that he had been looking forward to making me the class leader. That's very flattering but I told him I didn't feel I could do that without dropping the druid unless we were going to have arguments in the guild so I prefer to put the Priest on hold
I imagine he then vented on officer chat because a little while later our raid leader announced he was upset and left the raid.
Several people felt the guild was losing one of its best healers. It's a blow to the guild (which is true - they are losing a good healer but they wouldn't be keeping it if they tried to force me to play it after getting a bit bored of it and wanting to do something else)
Also **cough** maybe some of the people moaning about me withdrawing the Priest could have done a little bit more to develop their own healing capabilities *cough cough**. I refuse to feel guilty simply because some people were hoping for a free ride to Tier 2 epics without speccing out of pvp and without spending time in Strat instead of WSG
I'm a bit fed up to be honest because if we were a min/maxxing guild where everyone spends all their free time farming elemental fire and picking dreamfoil they might have a right to expect me to play my best character but since 80% of us are really casual I kind of feel like they required me to put in effort that only a handful of people put in
Now I do put in effort and I like to do well. I expect my druid to be around 3rd or 4th best tank in the guild in a few weeks (most of our warriors aren't prot, some who are prot are rather clueless and don't pay attention well, many have poor gear or don't know what good tanking stats are - str agi stam is pretty normal tanking gear in the guild, probably only 4 have over 320 defence)
I'm now thinking about a dkp strategy for my bear which won't aggro the guild too much. Most of these players don't really understand the game well so it makes bidding on items like Foror's Eyepatch http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=19945 difficult because, despite being probably the best bear hat in the game, certainly at our low level, it's considered "rogue loot". As a Druid who isn't buying healing stuff I'm going to accumulate a ton of dkp pretty fast without much to spend it on so what I bid on I'm likely to win
I think it's a matter of picking my battles with care. I'd greatly appreciate advice from people about items that might really hurt the guild if I got into a tussle with others over them and what might be reasonable. For example our Ragnaros fights go like this -main tank tanks well, healers keep him up with a lot of frantic healing, rogues and dps warriors all wipe because they haven't bothered to get enough FR stuff, Sons come out and eat the casters. Obviously in this situation I can't ask for crafted FR stuff since its priority for our under-geared meleers and I'll be healing in that fight anyway. This is currently our big "we need to beat this boss to progress" fight. On the other hand bidding on "rogue loot" like the Foror's Eyepatch probably is worth a bit of an argument because the Rogues in our guild are notoriously reluctant to spend dkp on anything that isn't a weapon and most of them probably don't think it matches their T1 and T2 set hats
It's certainly a rocky road but I can be stubborn at times and the squabbling is making me more determined to build a kick-ass Bear tank. Any advice would be much appreciated - these guys are not bad people but they're just not very open to variants and some of them see a "healer" gearing up in tank gear as holding the guild's progression back
And who knows? Maybe some of the people complaining now will be pleased I perservered when Pansy the tanking bear steps in to save the day in some future raid :-)
As a new 60 I'm not really strong enough to raid tank. I'm finding lot of social pressure which isn't entirely fair. As a guild we don't lack healers. But with several of our priests shadow, over half of our shammies specced for pvp and the shammies in particular liable to turn up to heal a raid in +str +crit gear we lack healing power.
But there's swings and roundabouts to that - I'm not being forced to spec resto or invest dkp in healing gear. If either of those things were true I wouldn't be able to develop the character as a tank at all
Because of our lack of healers I'm usually going to be healing when raiding. That's ok, I'll put the time in to get decent blues and make sure I do a decent job of it - certainly better than some of our other "healers". Like our enhancement shammies, I won't be investing my dkp in healing gear
What caused a lot of drama tonight is the fact I have a very good Holy Priest healer also in the guild. Several people objected to me rolling on a blue for feral tanking because I get gear on the druid plus I get gear on the priest so I'm gearing up two characters at everyone else's expense (that's how they see it)
To me if I bring a druid 2 days and bring a priest 2 days it's the same as two other people playing 2 days per week each. Each character is separately developing their own gear based on the contribution it makes. Frankly I wish I'd never told them it was me - I'd be having a much easier time if they thought the Holy Priest was just some dude who plays less these days and the Feral Druid was some new dude.
Well anyway people weren't very happy with me collecting items on two characters so I decided to put the Priest on hold for now. No big loss, it will be very easy to come back to him at some future date. I had been a candidate for class leader so I posted on our guild forum withdrawing my application for that job
The guild leader contacted me, asked me why, told me he was happy for me to develop two characters if that's what I wanted and said that he had been looking forward to making me the class leader. That's very flattering but I told him I didn't feel I could do that without dropping the druid unless we were going to have arguments in the guild so I prefer to put the Priest on hold
I imagine he then vented on officer chat because a little while later our raid leader announced he was upset and left the raid.
Several people felt the guild was losing one of its best healers. It's a blow to the guild (which is true - they are losing a good healer but they wouldn't be keeping it if they tried to force me to play it after getting a bit bored of it and wanting to do something else)
Also **cough** maybe some of the people moaning about me withdrawing the Priest could have done a little bit more to develop their own healing capabilities *cough cough**. I refuse to feel guilty simply because some people were hoping for a free ride to Tier 2 epics without speccing out of pvp and without spending time in Strat instead of WSG
I'm a bit fed up to be honest because if we were a min/maxxing guild where everyone spends all their free time farming elemental fire and picking dreamfoil they might have a right to expect me to play my best character but since 80% of us are really casual I kind of feel like they required me to put in effort that only a handful of people put in
Now I do put in effort and I like to do well. I expect my druid to be around 3rd or 4th best tank in the guild in a few weeks (most of our warriors aren't prot, some who are prot are rather clueless and don't pay attention well, many have poor gear or don't know what good tanking stats are - str agi stam is pretty normal tanking gear in the guild, probably only 4 have over 320 defence)
I'm now thinking about a dkp strategy for my bear which won't aggro the guild too much. Most of these players don't really understand the game well so it makes bidding on items like Foror's Eyepatch http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=19945 difficult because, despite being probably the best bear hat in the game, certainly at our low level, it's considered "rogue loot". As a Druid who isn't buying healing stuff I'm going to accumulate a ton of dkp pretty fast without much to spend it on so what I bid on I'm likely to win
I think it's a matter of picking my battles with care. I'd greatly appreciate advice from people about items that might really hurt the guild if I got into a tussle with others over them and what might be reasonable. For example our Ragnaros fights go like this -main tank tanks well, healers keep him up with a lot of frantic healing, rogues and dps warriors all wipe because they haven't bothered to get enough FR stuff, Sons come out and eat the casters. Obviously in this situation I can't ask for crafted FR stuff since its priority for our under-geared meleers and I'll be healing in that fight anyway. This is currently our big "we need to beat this boss to progress" fight. On the other hand bidding on "rogue loot" like the Foror's Eyepatch probably is worth a bit of an argument because the Rogues in our guild are notoriously reluctant to spend dkp on anything that isn't a weapon and most of them probably don't think it matches their T1 and T2 set hats
It's certainly a rocky road but I can be stubborn at times and the squabbling is making me more determined to build a kick-ass Bear tank. Any advice would be much appreciated - these guys are not bad people but they're just not very open to variants and some of them see a "healer" gearing up in tank gear as holding the guild's progression back
And who knows? Maybe some of the people complaining now will be pleased I perservered when Pansy the tanking bear steps in to save the day in some future raid :-)