Tank in training

In case I haven't mentioned it before I play a DK. When Wrath came out I forsook my druid that I loved playing through vanilla and BC and started with the new hero class. I never looked back. I love playing a DK and I am EXTREMELY lucky that I found a top end raiding guild that would let me play one and raid.

While leveling I was aiming at being a tank. I tanked instances and got me some tank gear. As soon as I hit 80 I got myself in my current guild and they let me know right off the bat that they had plenty of reliable tanks and I would need to dps. That was more than fine with me because dps is fun and not really any pressure other than don't die and perform well.

Other than some 5 mans when the LFD system came out I haven't even off tanked since I was accepted to the guild. I have no idea about specs, theory, gear, rotations, cool downs, placement, movement or anything else related to tanking if it didn't hurt my dps. Even then I only knew about it to the extent that I could use it to eek out a few more points on that dps meter.

Last week I got my 4th 264 offspec token for my tank gear that was sitting in my bank. And when I say tank gear I mean that when anything with defense on it showed up in the loot window I rolled on it. Oh and Heroic Bryntrolls cause its a cool weapon with a cool healing proc that I feel is good for tanking with. So last week I go and fish out everything from my bank that has defense on it and do some research and throw stam gems and tank enchants on all of my stuff. Low and behold I am now WAY over the defense cap, over 40k health, over the mele hit cap, over the expertise cap and with about 30% dodge and 20% parry. This is better than some of the dedicated tank applications we get in the guild.

I figure I will just dive in and try to learn how to be a tank. Hell if things go like I stated in the last post it will be World of Hybrids where if you can do 2 or more jobs with just a change of spec then you will get the spot in the 10 man over that rogue or single spec paladin. Looking to the future, ability to do 2 jobs is way better than being great at one.

Cut to last night, our 25 man raid fell through because we only had 16 people on. Our continuation of the 2 10 man raids fell through because half of each 10 man were the people who didn't log on. (thank you blizz for fixing this in cata, see my last post) So we set up an alt run. I happened to be sick the night we did the 10s so I wasn't saved and they needed a tank. WOOT FOR ME! I get to learn how to tank with people who know I am just new and don't really suck as much as I am going to show them I do.

My biggest stroke of luck was that 2 of our 3 main tanks were in the run as alts and one of them even was on a tank alt. My off-spec outgeared his pally alt tank so I got to main tank in ICC 10 as my first trial at endgame tanking. Talk about trial by fire. :) For just about 75% of the bosses I had to ask what I needed to do or keep an eye out for as a tank. More than once I was asked if I pay any attention in the raids, lol. My guildies talked me through them and I think we only wiped 2 times on 2 separate bosses in the first 10 bosses of the raid. Sindra we ended wiping on 3 times getting to phase 3 every time with the last wipe at 4% but it was getting late and a few of us had to leave so we called it.

All in all the tanking experience was a huge success for me and even being self critical I was better than most pug tanks I see when I was at my worst. Hell one of the main tanks was happy on vent because "we now have an extra backup tank".

Here are some fun notes I picked up when trying to wrap my head around being a tank vs being a dps.

1. Don't run out on blood princes when Taldaron does his explosion thingy. Everyone else runs away from you.
2. Hitting every button as fast as you can is 2nd or 3rd on the list of importance now behind placement of the boss(movement), and how close you are to dying(self healing and cool-downs).
3. Remember death grip is only for when you are in tank spec.
4. Standing still is preferred. My paranoia about moving out of fire and stuff as dps was kicking me all night, but I never had to because the bosses like to poop fire on dps and healers not the tank.
5. As dps the stress level is constant (push every button at the right time to be perfect and get high dps), as tank the stress level is spiky (stand there and do not much until you have to do a ton of stuff all at once)
6. Bosses asses are huge and always in the way of you seeing important stuff. Learning to swing the camera around and see whats going on is going to be an important skill to learn.

all in all I am super happy. Tanking is incredibly more different of a play-style than dps. So much so that it has made me re-invigorated to log on and play.