Flipping like a coin toss

Today was a bit of a let down again. Maybe I'm pushing these guys too hard. I love how I think of them as sort of pets or plants that I'm cultivating... Anyway, I swapped my pally to tank and druid to healer and quested a bit. My pally's sword skill was around 200 so he was air-balling all over the place. My druid dropped 100g on greens and glyphs and was a modest healer. I swapped all my macros around, got the dps assisting the pally, got the druid on follow, all that house keeping that takes a minute. After all was said and done, I had some sloppy resemblance of my former team.

My brother came online and I asked him to tank UK for me. I dumped my pally, made my macros flexible enough to control the group from the druid as healer, and walked in with his 71 DK. Mana was a huge problem. When you walked in to BC, every single quest item in Hellfire was essentially an MC upgrade. The same can't be said for the beginning of Northrend. The stuff is good, of course, and the ilevel is a definite improvement, but a ton of the early caster stuff is spirit, stamina, and spell power. My boys ran out of mana real quick and I switched back to some of my BC dungeon blues to try to fix the problem. But really, it was the loss of the pally and BoW that was killing me, I think. Anyway, I either ran out of mana, couldn't heal my brother well enough, or couldn't keep the group up. We dropped the first boss but the second two guys basically two-shotted my druid healer and ended the fit each time. I was discouraged, to say the least. They were still 68s but whatever. I know my old guildies and I would have rolled through that.

And something just didn't feel right. My druid is a big fucking tauren druid. A monster. I even named him theboss. Like a boss, god damn it! He can't stand in the back throwing stupid hots all over the place and doing fruity things called Lifebloom and playing with seeds. So, just as quickly, I swapped everything back the way it was, for another 100g for each, and I feel better already.

Which leaves me with my original problems. I think I'm going to solve the group healing struggle by placing macros for flash of light on the keypad 1-5, for each toon individually. That might speed things up just enough for me, eliminating the party-click and assist-heal macro that I currently use. Maybe it won't be an upgrade but I'm fucking trying it. I gotta try something. I gotta make it happen.

As for picking up group aggro with my big bear butt... well, my bro's main is a raid-level druid tank and he has no problem with it. So, I just need to L2P in a serious way. It's all about rage management for me. I'll figure it out. I need to be a little more patient.

Lastly, my original vanilla main is an alliance warrior. I haven't played alliance side with anyone else in almost 3 years. We went horde together and never went back. Should I bring my boy over to the dark side when I have the chance with faction-swapping? He will cease to be my guy... the guy that starred in such horrible short films as the Padfoot and Condi series... the guy that was honored in the WotLK trailer (and no, that's not a joke, and Condi and I are still tickled pink about it)... the guy that kept pulling aggro off the main tank in my first MC run because I didn't understand why the MT wouldn't want to share damage...

If I bring him over to the horde he'll just be another alt. I don't think I can do it.