Goodbye US-Burning Legion. Hello US-Deathwing

So I bit the bullet and grabbed myself a server transfer last week.  It was a tough call to make, I had a lot of good friends on Burning Legion, and I wasn't able to say goodbye to each of them, but in the end it was a call I needed to make if I was going to keep playing through Cataclysm.

1. Lack of established raiding guilds which match my schedule.  When I started playing the game, I promised myself that I would be scheduling my WoWing around my RL commitments, and I'm glad to say I've held to that pretty damned well.  This was one of the reasons I tried to start my own raiding guild in 3.2; no better way to match a schedule that to set it yourself, or so I thought.  Suffice to say, I learned the hard way the flip side of that coin.
2. Burning Legion is on the Vindication battlegroup, which includes the three Latin American servers. I know there are a few quality guilds on those servers who truly know their stuff, but as a general rule, I had to stifle a groan any time I saw a tank from one of those three servers. I don't care how good you are, playing with the 1300 latency from Brazil is going to impact your performance. Add in the language barrier, and all those random PUGs just got a lot less fun. I kept a level 77 green weapon to use exactly in those situations, because I knew I couldn't rely on the tanks or healers to be on top of things enough for me to go full-throttle.
3. Plain old burnout.  I needed a change of scenery.  The same old people and same old guilds can get, well, old.  And with the amount of turnover guilds have there, the people who I enjoyed raiding with over the past 18 months are scattered over a dozen guilds nowadays.  And that's not even counting the others who've jumped servers before me.
4. Latency.  The server farm hosting the Vindication battlegroup is located in Houston; Boston's data center is the closest to me.  I checked it out, I can cut my latency in half by moving to a Boston-based battlegroup.

So I did my research, and after a fairly exhaustive search, I have found myself a new home.  US-Deathwing has pretty much everything I'm looking for in a server: PVP, slightly favors horde, medium population, located in Boston.  The guild impressed the hell out of me.  It's a large guild, with amazing longevity, having been around since vanilla.  Accommodating to casual players, but gets down to business when it's raid time.  And those raid slots are competitive as hell, they'll rotate in new players when they need to, but excellence is expected in the main progression raid; they're sitting at 8/12(H).  Very reasonable (and perfect for my availability) two-day raiding schedule, plus SIX (!) ten-man teams go at various schedules during the week.  And the last big selling point to me was the minimum age requirement of 21.

I figure that with the pre-expansion lull and summer lull hitting at the same time, now's the time to make the move.  I'll be looking to earn my roster spot over the next few weeks; there should be plenty of time for me to lock it in before the expansion.  This will honestly be the first real test for me, to see if I'm up to the challenge a world-class guild can offer; I like to think I am, but this will be the time to show it.  I'll miss a few of the folks back on Burning Legion, those who are left there, but this was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.