Yeah if the Phinny Friends thing falls apart I'll be looking for a hardcore poopsocking racing to 50 group myself as a dps caster of some sort, necro probably or mage or wizard if that works better for the comp.
Specialization augs which literally last forever, AC augs, Heroic Stat augs, 40 percent focus augs, HP and Mana augs that excede vendor augs etc. Some of the gear isn't even terrible if you're willing to fill out all the aug slots.
I've been in AoS since the start of classic and haven't ever regretted it. It's the top guild for a reason, and it's been a lot of fun. Also GoD isn't like it was on Live back in 2004 or whatever. It was retuned and characters are way more powerful than they were back then.
No elections involved, but since opening our store a few years back I've been TO for ~ 6 or 7 tournaments a week for a few years. Not sure if that counts.
Wizards are monsters in Classic and Velious, but are pretty bad in Kunark, still quite good in luclin, but fall behind rangers in PoP/LDoN. And gnome is the right choice!
The 3 epics I mentioned are literally the only ones that aren't retardedly easy. Most people had their epics in the first week or 2 of kunark on phinny that weren't one of those 3 classes. Well and bard, but they fixed the bottleneck on that one.
Between instances and pickzones etc almost all epics are really easy now with a few exceptions.
Enchanter epic is the worst in that it has 2 2+ day spawns that happen inside cities so no pickzones or instances, these tend to be very highly contested.
Enchanter and Wizard both also have a multi...
Even aside from that, they still offer fire/cold and ac debuffs not offered by other classes. Not suggesting you should stack druids, but the first one is important.