Other than that, I agree with you. It was the right decision, the other guy will be fine, and so on. But even knowing all of that, I felt a twinge of guilt even though I knew it was silly.

You can’t fill up with redundant players just because you like someone, heck, especially when you like someone.

Because it would mean him being benched or you being benched or some other person being benched.

Raid tanking is amazingly good fun in WoW but the competion is staggering. Tobold mentions above that the game mechanics squeeze the number of tank spots per team member at max level. They also (in my opinion) make tanking more fun so it’s doubly harsh.

At the end of the day other people’s fun is not your responsibility. This player sounds like someone capable of falling on his feet whether he wins a spot in another guild or starts his own.

In my old guild we inherited too many tanks as a result of a partial guild merger. This meant that the price you paid for tanking was that you had to tank sometimes and dps other times as we shared the fun around. It wasn’t ideal but people made it work pretty well.

As for feeling like a drag on the group when you’re not tanking that’s not a female thing. It’s a dps meter thing. On my DK I felt like a drag when I was low and worked hard on my offspec set. Eventually I was consistently top six when dpsing (out of 15ish). Perfectly acceptable for a dual tank spec Tank.

Now that I’m in this new guild I find that I still have more HP than our other tanks, though a couple of them do high a slightly higher gearscore than me. So far on the four raids I’ve done with our primary raid leader I’ve been given MT duty on everything. There was also a raid last week where one of our other tanks was raid leader. He claimed MT duty (Cool by me, his raid) and brought in one of our other tanks to OT for him. The bummer is my off-spec is DPS, and I admitted that it isn’t as good as my tanking gear, and was immediately passed over for a DPS spot in that raid.

I pretty much sat around for four hours while my wife went on the raid – usually we raid together so this was new for me. Did some dailies and stuff but it still bothered me most of the night. I guess other tanks are protective of their spots, and I’m not out to take anyones role away from them, it just happens that I’m a tank and people are generally happy to give me tanking duties once they see that I have the gear and skill to do whatever needs to be done.

I think the other thing to consider is what other toons a player can bring – I decided back when WotLK came out to take my druid to 80 and leave my other 70′s behind. However some of our other tanks have 3-4 other 80′s and would probably still like to gear them up, so it might open up the chance for them to mix it up a little if they want to. In my experience with WoW tanks are usually the last to admit to any class burnout, but are often times relieved to take a break from tanking sometimes as well.

It’s not about egomania or anything, it just sucks to not play your class. In FFXI at least you could swap to an alt job on the same character, so if your LS wanted to rotate tanks chances are you could be a true DPS, not use a DPS spec, or you could support or heal. Career tanks got shafted a lot though, especially as the game aged and more people got tank jobs to 75.

Fast forward to late BC…and it’s tough to get a spot tanking (man, in Vanilla, we’d spend hours looking for tanks…), and the same in Wrath.

So, I started my own guild.

Last night, I had to deal with my first bout of “tank drama.”

We have a bear who frankly…sucks. And doesn’t seem to comprehend it. Problems are always someone else’s fault. This is compounded by his tree gf’s (equally bad) eagerness to blame others for their badness. Fact of the matter is, when they’re there…we wipe. When they aren’t, we blow through content. It’s like our own personal hardmode, with normal level loot.

We also recruited another tankadin who has some learning to do, but is promising. I have to share my loot now (which is why I wanted a bear!), but at least there’s loot to share.

Last night, the RL told the bear to go DPS. He threw a fit to me in whispers…so I went Ret…with my ungemmed and unenchanted gear, and blue boots. The rest of my officers weren’t happy, but this gave me the groundwork for a new rule.

ALL tanks must have an offspec, and ALL tanks will rotate, save on bleeding edge (for us) progression content. This includes me…who went from 1-70, then 70-80 never speccing anything but Prot.

One other, semi-unrelated thing. I also have a rule that tanks don’t raid lead. It’s too much ego and power in one spot. Plus, it gives me a good excuse to not RL

What I mean is that when I’m healing on my alt, I feel useful regardless of meters. Its nice to be higher but I know when I’ve kept my target up.

But as dps, if I’m bottom of the meters then I feel like a waste of space. Actually it’s not so much being bottom (after all, someone has to be), but if there’s a big gap between where I am and where the other dps are then …

Spinks you mention “I think this may be less bad for the guys who have a healing off spec — healing feels as useful as tanking even with a slight gear deficiency. Dps as an off spec however?”
So in your mind healing is alright as they are quite useful but who cares about dps. I have exaggerated your point but do you think the dps are the lowest of the three groups by a distance or is it because you will be near the bottom of the meters so feel less vital to your team?
As a dps class I do feel like tanks and healers do look down on us. That is why I enjoy their being enrage timers (whether they be hard or soft) as it makes dps nearly as important.

Which means that if your guild follows the regular “progression” from heroics to 10-man raids to 25-man raids, at the last step you’ll find yourself with surplus tanks. Raid progression makes some tanks obsolete. No wonder tanks fear for their job!