I love warriors, but I also love...

...Tanking! If you haven't already guessed it, before Dual Spec was available, both my warriors were Protection-specced, my druid was Feral Bear, and my death knight was Blood tank-specced.

My first toon was a mage. At that time, while raiding Karazhan in TBC, my guild faced a shortage of tanks. Wanting to try something new, I stupidly happily volunteered to level a warrior from 1-70.

My first warrior, H, during Halloween '07, directly in between Almonen and Khadgar

Also during Halloween '07, beside a fellow owl guildie

From 1-70, I was happy ashamed to say that I knew nothing about tanking. Nada. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. 零蛋.
Luckily, I had help from another warrior also in the guild. Looking back now, his "help" wasnt exactly that great or accurate, but it got me through the initial learning phases. And the rest just sort of came with lots of practice, trial-and-error, wiping, and what-have-you.


But enough about me. So, what does it REALLY mean to tank/to be a tank?


As a tank in vanilla WoW and TBC, you had two objectives, namely:
1) Staying alive
2) Generating threat

Fast forward to WotLK. In Wrath, tanking means all of that, and more.

Now, as a tank, you have to
1) Stay alive
2) Generate threat
3) Do DPS
Point number 3 stems from the fact that in Wrath, some of the threat multipliers in abilities were reduced, while threat moves hit harder, e.g. Shield Slam, Revenge, etc...the list goes on. Tank DPS is now a far cry from what it used to be, and every little bit helps (like you didn't already know that).

Not only that, as a tank/main tank, you are the person in charge of the pace of the instance you are in, be it a 5-man, 10-man, or 25-man. You are responsible to your group for moving at a fast and steady pace. Now, in a perfect world, we would all like to run instances where there are no wipes, and the tank just keeps pulling at a steady and constant pace. In reality, there will be tanks who puuuuull soooooooo slowwwwwwlyyyy that everyone else just falls asleep, or on the other hand, there will be tanks who pull sodamnedfast that the healer has to shout for a mana break, not to mention the PUGs where the healer will ALWAYS INSIST on having a full mana pool before each pull, when he/she doesn't even use close to 10 or 20% of it in a pull.

As a tank, it is your job to "discipline" your healer/DPSers, and use your own judgement as to how fast you can pull (different groups naturally have different tolerances). Ask yourself questions like:
Does my healer have enough mana to cover the next pull? Am I pulling before people are ready?
And you will be well on your way to becoming the tank that always gets praised for good tanking at the end of every PUG run.


And now we see why I like tanking so much =X
It gives me a... feeling of power, of being in charge. The flip side is, I know I cannot be trusted with power (lol), holding true to the adage that those most suited to power are those who have had the leadership mantle thrust onto them, not those who have gone searching for it.


Are you ready to be a good tank?