Over Before It Began...

The tanking dream almost actually happened!

It was agreed, I would take over for the next tier of raiding and I had started to prepare... actually levelling a tank class (female blood elf paladin)!

Got to 120, started to gear up and even ran a couple of LFRs.  Tanking G'Huun, even on lfr, at 317ilvl is not recommended by the way.  The other bosses were all fine although Fetid Devourer hurt a bit, but on G'Huun it was impossible to keep me alive despite me rotating mitigation and cooldowns.
(Personally I think the healers could have done more as I wasn't getting much in the way of direct healing but I knew I was undergeared so left them to find a better tank)

Meanwhile, repeat kills on our Mythic team are proving almost as difficult as the first.  We even wiped on Taloc once, ok so our monk had forgotten to switch to tank spec but we still should have been able to kill it.
Some wipes on Mother that aren't easily explained, maybe too many people crossing at exactly the same moment so Spirit Link doesn't get chance to take effect?  Not sure, it's only ever 1 or 2 wipes anyway so not worth bothering too much.

The next 3 though are erratic to say the least, some weeks they take 1-2 attempts and some weeks it takes 10 or more! 
Except Fetid Devourer that is, which always takes 10+ but that's for another post.

With me falling out of love with the Warlock and the frustration of wiping to silly mistakes on bosses we have already killed multiple times, I've not been enjoying the raids very much.
Leading has been a real drag too, people know what to do on these fights but it is still a constant struggle to get them to do the right thing, to think about more than themselves in any given situation (Again Fetid, will have to do a Fetid post)

Our progress boss in now Zul but we barely get any time on him each week.  It's not a difficult boss for most of the raid but a few people have specific tasks that need some practice to get right, or at least get the timing down.
For the rest of us, it is pure Patchwerk!  Stand still and hit the boss as hard as you can to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, letting some rogues cheese you through the phase so you don't actually have to deal with any mechanics.
I hate it!
If Blizzard released the fight this way by design there would be uproar, yet we reduce it to this to make it easier.  And the more rogues you have, the easier it becomes.

Anyway, again a rant for another day.

We only have 3 rogues (some guilds gather as many as 6 or 7!) and 1 of them is an alt who, by his own admission, is completely shit at it.
'Only' having 3 rogues (2.5 really) means the dps check for our cheese strat is incredibly tight.

My Warlock is the lowest geared char in the raid, poorly itemised gear too as I stopped doing all of the extra-curricular activities needed to keep him up to date quite some time ago.
Give me some mechanics to deal with and I back myself to bridge the gap to higher-geared players but in a straight stand-up dps check? 
I was bottom of the pack quite consistently.
And in a bid to meet this tight dps check, I'm now riding the bench.
Sad times.

At first I wasn't really bothered.  I wasn't enjoying the raids anyway and I knew my dps was the lowest so it made sense.
The more I thought about it, the more bothered I was though.
It was actually poor execution of those few specific tasks that had slowed our progress, not my fractionally lower dps.
At the end of the day though, I just didn't like that I had let myself get into a position where I was the one being benched.

What to do about it?
Well, after a rant in our officer channel about identifying the real issues in a fight and cheese strats in general, I started thinking about what I wanted from the game these days.
Not normally one for introspection, it took me a while to sort through my thoughts...

I still want the challenge and thrill of Mythic raiding.
I also want to be relaxed and enjoy it.
I want to enjoy the extra stuff outside raids.

The answer was obvious and I should have known it from the start... Elemental Shaman!
Why did I ever doubt it?