Tank/Officer Burnout
Posted 04-29-2008 at 12:50 AM by Galushi
I'm really starting to get sick of raiding.
Currently my guild is working on progression in Hyjal and Black Temple, and the occasional nights in TK to work on Kael'thas since we didn't kill him prior to 2.4. Two raiding guilds, at minimum, have fallen apart on our server since 2.4 went live. I believe they stopped raiding due to lack of attendance and very competitive recruitment from the top guilds on the server. I think my guild is going through some of the same things.
Through our progession in tier5 content, we always had our 25 online plus 2-4 people on standby any given night. Sometimes more. Though some people have moved on to other guilds, it seems most of our attendance problems are due to people just not showing up or having RL issues come up. Now every night we have maybe 22 confirmed signups, and often times a couple of them dont show up. So for the last week or so we haven't had a full raid and are struggling just to get thru hyjal trash let alone kill a boss.
Now to the reason behind this post. I'm the tank officer of the guild, and one of two dps officers ( I share it with a longtime friend ive raided with for 2 years, who now raids as a mage). Because of our attendance difficulties, I've been getting a lot of tells pre/mid raid about various things, and they're making me go crazy. Sometimes it's people trying to suggest somewhere else where to go, or asking if their barely kara geared friend can come, and I just don't want to deal with it anymore.
I realize that lot of guild leaders or raid leaders are tanks, and i don't know how they do it. I have a very hard time juggling my duties as tank with managerial decisions mid raid. PreBC i was a warrior class leader in my previous guild. Whenever i lead a MC raid I let another warrior Maintank it so I could focus solely on the leading. I feel like i slow way down whenever I get bogged with so much to do. Then the raid slows down and people get upset with that.
Hyjal trash is also very stressful on me. We typically take 2-3 prot warriors and a feral druid. We don't have a protection paladin, nor have I had any remotely decent ones apply to the guild. So Hyjal trash is a huge pain in the butt cuz the 3-4 tanks are scrambling constantly to hold agro on all of the mobs every wave. 15-20 minutes of straight chaos every boss attempt. That is, if we can get thru the trash to attempt the boss since we're short a couple players that didn't show up.
Lately I've been thinking how nice it would be to just not be an officer anymore, and even just respec to dps. My dps gear ranks about the best in the guild so I could easily hold my weight there, but then we'd lose our best geared tank, not to mention our most consistant one. But if we keep this up much longer, i don't know if i'd even want to raid at all. Maybe I'm not cut out for maintanking like I thought I could. But I feel like I've gotten in a position that i can't back out of without leaving the guild high and dry.
I love getting new bosses down, and most of them have been fun or at least laid back thus far (Bosses 1-3 in hyjal are basically tanknspank which i don't mind at all). But the work falling upon my shoulders as part of the leadership in addition to being the maintank is just making raiding a job. Jobs suck.
Currently my guild is working on progression in Hyjal and Black Temple, and the occasional nights in TK to work on Kael'thas since we didn't kill him prior to 2.4. Two raiding guilds, at minimum, have fallen apart on our server since 2.4 went live. I believe they stopped raiding due to lack of attendance and very competitive recruitment from the top guilds on the server. I think my guild is going through some of the same things.
Through our progession in tier5 content, we always had our 25 online plus 2-4 people on standby any given night. Sometimes more. Though some people have moved on to other guilds, it seems most of our attendance problems are due to people just not showing up or having RL issues come up. Now every night we have maybe 22 confirmed signups, and often times a couple of them dont show up. So for the last week or so we haven't had a full raid and are struggling just to get thru hyjal trash let alone kill a boss.
Now to the reason behind this post. I'm the tank officer of the guild, and one of two dps officers ( I share it with a longtime friend ive raided with for 2 years, who now raids as a mage). Because of our attendance difficulties, I've been getting a lot of tells pre/mid raid about various things, and they're making me go crazy. Sometimes it's people trying to suggest somewhere else where to go, or asking if their barely kara geared friend can come, and I just don't want to deal with it anymore.
I realize that lot of guild leaders or raid leaders are tanks, and i don't know how they do it. I have a very hard time juggling my duties as tank with managerial decisions mid raid. PreBC i was a warrior class leader in my previous guild. Whenever i lead a MC raid I let another warrior Maintank it so I could focus solely on the leading. I feel like i slow way down whenever I get bogged with so much to do. Then the raid slows down and people get upset with that.
Hyjal trash is also very stressful on me. We typically take 2-3 prot warriors and a feral druid. We don't have a protection paladin, nor have I had any remotely decent ones apply to the guild. So Hyjal trash is a huge pain in the butt cuz the 3-4 tanks are scrambling constantly to hold agro on all of the mobs every wave. 15-20 minutes of straight chaos every boss attempt. That is, if we can get thru the trash to attempt the boss since we're short a couple players that didn't show up.
Lately I've been thinking how nice it would be to just not be an officer anymore, and even just respec to dps. My dps gear ranks about the best in the guild so I could easily hold my weight there, but then we'd lose our best geared tank, not to mention our most consistant one. But if we keep this up much longer, i don't know if i'd even want to raid at all. Maybe I'm not cut out for maintanking like I thought I could. But I feel like I've gotten in a position that i can't back out of without leaving the guild high and dry.
I love getting new bosses down, and most of them have been fun or at least laid back thus far (Bosses 1-3 in hyjal are basically tanknspank which i don't mind at all). But the work falling upon my shoulders as part of the leadership in addition to being the maintank is just making raiding a job. Jobs suck.
Total Comments 5
Comments
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Even without the leadership role tanking is a high turnover "occupation." I've been playing since release and did raid prior to BC but it wasn't until BC that I found myself in a really serious raiding environment. Even though my guild killed Illidan a month or two before 2.4 the current progression raids in Sunwell just stressed me out to no end. After awhile the feeling that you're required to be online a X time upwards of 5 nights a week can be VERY stressful. With some other classes it is a bit easier to "skip out" on a night or two, but when you're one of the main tanks for the guild there is a sense of obligation that takes over and doesn't afford you such a luxury.
Anyway, I'm not really sure where I'm going with this except to say what you already know: your job isn't an easy one. Both being an MT and an officer are more often than not very thankless jobs. Do what you can to keep the game fun since that's what's most important in the long run. I, for one, didn't do that soon enough and as a result am retiring for a while from the raiding scene.
Best of luck,
-TemigPosted 04-29-2008 at 02:55 AM by Temig 
- I'm in the same situation : RL, MT and officer at once.
Sometimes I wish I could kill people because of their absence turning a farm raid into something horrible, or even a cancelled evening...
Being the raidleader and both the best geared and most skilled tank can be very frustrating sometimes when things go bad... like when you're supposed to clean BT in 4 hours and it takes you 4 nights
I've been here every night but two since I joined my guild, one year ago. Always present, always performing at 150%. The probleme is that I can't trust my warrior (druids are fine) offtanks yet : when I recruited them they were just too bad, and even if they are fine today, there still is a pretty big skill and gear difference between them and me.
Anyways, I sit out of the instance from time to time, but I don't take free evenings, I'm just not confident enough yet.
But I don't have any problem with overwhelming amounts of whispers I'm kinda the bad cop in the officer crew, so not many people whisper me 
.Posted 04-29-2008 at 03:25 AM by juggernauth - I'm the GM and MT of our guild, I absolutely refused to lead 25-mans too because of the exact reasons you describe. Our RL deals with the constant whispers he gets by making sure he comes across an unapproachable, so he knows that when he does get a whisper, it's something worth taking some time to deal with. The people whispering him nonsense soon stopped when they simply got ignored.
I on the other hand take a slightly different approach, and just reply to any tells during raids with 'sorry mate, raiding atm so can't talk, will talk to you later' and then follow it up after the raid.
Regarding being burned out from tanking 5+ nights a week - you'll simply have to take a night or two off and let someone else MT. And if they don't have the gear, pick someone reliable and make it a priority to get them the gear in the next couple of weeks so after that, you don't feel so pressured to be there. If you get to the stage where you hate raiding, you won't turn up at all, and that will hurt your guild far more than having one or two nights off a week.
Good luck with it!Posted 04-29-2008 at 05:54 AM by Hamarr - I actually took our guild off 25 man raiding as of today. The officers and I just weren't having fun anymore. We killed Illidan in Feb. and were looking forward to Sunwell. Then we lost a bunch of geared good people and the thought of regearing people just to do sunwell was too much. We are retiring from raiding until WOTLK.
Good luckPosted 04-29-2008 at 11:26 AM by loadtoad - So i've decided that I'm just taking the rest of the raid week off to get my head straight and play some alts and just do whatever i want without having to adhere to our raid schedule. Was even nice when a friend called me up and wanted to go to a hookah bar tonight i could actually say i had no plans and could go.
Posted 04-30-2008 at 07:05 PM by Galushi
