There aren’t any personal biases involved when you look at the numbers. Warriors are clearly at a disadvantaged position when measured against ANY of the other tanking classes. Just because we were the MT back in the old days doesn’t mean that our plea for tanking balance is really an attempt to regain that supremacy.

By every metric we are worse off than you. The mere fact that despite those disadvantages we can still complete the content doesn’t make the imbalances right. I am not saying Warriors can’t tank everything in the game (hard modes remain to be seen) but that doesn’t make it fair that we are relatively underpowered.

Long story short, the fact that people aren’t dumping their Warriors for Paladin doesn’t in and of itself demonstrate that the tanks are balanced. Viable doesn’t equal balanced.

Overall, I think the tanking classes are on fairly even ground. Unfortunately, the old standards and prejudices are still around and I frankly believe those that were once clearly on top miss those days. I know that I did not become a Pally tank because I thought it was easy or superior. Being once exclusively Holy, I just leveraged the fact that my toon is a hybrid and could fill more than role (and fell in love with that new role). I wish players would just focus on how to play their classes really well instead of complaining about how the grass is unjustly greener on the other side. As most of us know, its never that much greener, if at all, once you get there.

There are three things a guild needs in it’s members to be succesful with them. Skill compatability, Schedule compatability, and personality compatability.

Skill compatability means that the player must be able to play at least on the level that the guild requires of them. If the guild aspires to be a competative raiding guild, then they need their members to have the skills needed to make that happen. You can’t afford to take people who are specced 71 points into blood with spirit gems, even though they’re a nice person with 100% attendance.

Schedule compatability means that they need to make the guild’s raid times. For a long time I had a surfeit of ex momentum members in my guild who I thought were going to be a big boost. Turns out the reason why they came to us after momentum died was because they weren’t going to be able to make too many raids any more. I wasted a couple months trying to make things work with them before moving on.

Shifiting the raid times from 3-3s to 2-4s is probably a good thing. It’s easier to convince people to stay up an extra hour two nights a week, than it is to convince them to block out a third night for raiding. The question will then become, which two nights. That’s gonna be one of the tougher decisions to make, because that choice will heavily affect who’s going to continue to raid with you.

And last comes Personality compatability. They have to be able to fit in with the guild enough to not cause problems. They might be jerks, I have some jerks in my guild, but they’re MY jerks dammit. Some of this can be mitigated through hard work by the leaders trying to keep people settled, but you do need to monitor who gets along with who, and keep an eye out for a situation that you might need to pull the plug on.

The other important lesson to learn is that recruiting is a never ending process. Turnover is constant for all but a few special guilds. My 25 man raid team has 3 members left from my first runs into naxx. My pride and joy ten man A team? Two members left from our first run into Ulduar.

The important thing is to find the guild’s core. The indispensible players. I realized this when I had a sizable chunk of the people who I thought were important to the guild decide to faction transfer. Turns out I had them all replaced with players who were as good, and in most cases better, within 8 days of active recruiting. At that point, I sat down, looked at our roster, and figured out who’s TRULY indispensible in my guild. Turns out, out of a 90 distinct people in my guild, there’s 4 that I don’t think I could replace in less than two weeks. Myself, my Co-Tank, our super priest, and our great enhance shaman. Everyone else, while I love raiding with them, is not going to make or break our guild.

What you need to do is find the core of your guild, figure out what you need to do to keep them, and those will be your constraints. After that, it’s just a matter of opening up recruiting and finding other players who meet those requirements.
The Renaissance Man’s last blog ..Fail of the Lich King

I understand the current heroic/trash build is outstanding for threat and dps while simultaneously packing enough survivability to avoid any problems on raid trash and farm bosses.

I know some of my guildies will Ret-tank heroics, but I have no idea how their survivability looks against raid trash – or even when carrying several undergeared people through a heroic. I’ve only heard of this type of thing done for the Daily Random overgeared-smash-and-grab. I do know I’ve seen some mildly surprising dips in our DK’s health when he tanks a heroic in dps spec, Frost Presence, and maybe some tank gear.