NO ALTS ALLOWED

Here’s something I’ve never understood: 90% of guilds I come across tend to have a rigid and unfriendly stance on having alts in the guild. Oh, feel free to roll one, and we’ll throw you a ginvite so you can listen in on guild chat while you’re on it, but god help you if you ever expect to bring it on a raid. To me this seems counter productive to progress in general.

Let’s take Karazhan just for example, since most people are petty familiar with it. Attumen needs two tanks, Moroes leans heavily on CC (shackles, fears, traps), and Maiden is a decurse heavy, melee-unfriendly fight. While obviously those three bosses still lend itself to a certain raid structure, what should happen if there are already two rogues in the raid and one of the rogues has a spare priest for Maiden? You could use the rogue and just suck it up, but since when is ‘sucking it up’ awesome guild policy?

I’m biased, obviously, since I’ve rolled a prot tank, combat rogue, and healing druid to 70 in the hopes that I can fill any raid slot that needed filling in such situations. I hardly rolled the three classes thinking ‘oh boy just think, no matter what drops, I can ROLL, yeah!’, but that seems to be the consensus for people with one toon. Even, ridiculously, in guilds that use DKP systems, the norm tends to be that alts are awarded DKP separately based on the toon doing the encounter. Call me crazy, but in NASCAR, they don’t give the trophy to the car, do they? I’m pretty sure they give it to the driver. DKP is a measure of time spent working towards progression, so if you require my tank for this fight even though my rogue is my main, and I agree to bring it, then I’m basically just throwing money into wipes for no point? Okay, guild progression, yes… but then I have to throw my tank back on the shelf the instant the fight is over, until it’s formally requested again? Again, the ugly dragon named Loot-Whorism rears its head, because everyone just thinks people with more than one toon are looking for more than one chance to roll, but unless you’re dual-boxing, it never actually happens that one person will be rolling twice for the same item or set of drops.

The alternative is to just join two guilds, and not even tell your guild that Clark Kent the Holy Priest really is Superman the Uber Tank also, but when one is named Ixobelle, and the other is Izobelle, and they both are undead females with the same face, hair, and skin tone, and both turn the helm and cloak graphic off, it’s a bit much to write off to coincidence. They'll invariably get all upset when they see you on your alt at the summoning stone when you decide to raid with one or the other, because that certainly isn’t why they rolled their toon to 70… to play the game with it, lord no. To imagine that someone can be interested in reading up on both constant Threat per Second Generation and Effective Finisher Rotations for a combat mace specced rogue would blow their mind. Throw in recommended pre-Kara healing leather gear and I think I feel a head asplosion coming on.

But why should I be entitled to roll on healing gear if I brought my healer instead of my tank?! Um, because I healed during that fight when it was needed? Because the combined hours I’ve spent raiding between the three of my toons since joining the guild is more than double the time you’ve put in on your one? Obviously if the other toon in question has more DKP than I (as a human, not character) have earned, then the situation solves itself when they outbid me. If it comes down to rolling 100, then those that were present for the fight are all equally able to win the roll.

The fact stands that I tend to be a One Guild kind of guy. It just gets to be too much when I have to log one toon out to log another one to see if that guild is raiding again tonight because the first one isn’t. It just seems silly, and counter productive. Why lie and hide stuff from the very team you’re supposed to be playing for? If anything, playing more than one class gives you unique insight to all the classes combined, and how they can work together. It teaches you how to play your ‘main’ better than if you just strapped on tunnel vision Mage-Only specs.

Bleh… I’m bitter, I suppose. I guess we should be awarding those that only know how to play one class much more than someone who tries to excel in more than one area. Because people with a PhD in Economics and Physics are obviously not as intelligent as one who focused only on a single subject, AMIRITE? In reality, WoW is not a terribly complicated game, and comparing ‘reaching level 70’ with earning a PhD is pretty ridiculous, but the analogy stands… would you not let a double major help with your taxes because all that ‘Physics stuff’ would just distract them, and only clutter their brain? When confronted with a bi-lingual, do you ‘talk down’ to them, using simple strings of words like “strange black and white horse”, instead of the precise word Zebra? To me, a mage with a prot tank alt probably has a better grasp of how threat works on both sides of the coin than someone who only played one or the other. A holy paladin with a resto shaman alt is (hopefully) going to be an awesome healer, and can swap in or out depending on which fights will make better use of his talents as either.