Thank you, come again! (Part 1)

One of the perks about being a tank is that sometimes you can derive enormous satisfaction from tanking. A couple of nights ago, while questing on my 3rd warrior, S, in Borean Tundra, someone whispered me "Are you a tank?" Now I usually don't respond to these messages because sometimes people dont even have the basic courtesy to say "Sorry to bother you, but could you tank xx (instance)?" and just barge straight to "can you tank AN", but on this night, I made an exception (it sounded friendly), and replied:

What of it?

We need a tank for regular Old Kingdom. Would you like to come?

Now I must reiterate that I am a sucker for polite people, so I agreed without hesitation. I join the group, which are all gathered at the summoning stone already, and receive a summon (suspicions start creeping in at this point: Did they just lose a tank?). We go in, we buff up, I ask for party leader, and start pulling. omfgwtfbbqTHEMOBSARENOTDYING starts to run through my brain from the first pull. The second, third, and fourth pull are the same. I chanced a glance at my damage meter and nearly fainted was utterly horrified couldnt believe my eyes.

(Let me say here, that I am not a meter-person. I keep it around just to see how people are performing relative to me. There are too many ways in which the data could be skewed or incorrect.)

To the horror of horrors, I was leading the pack for damage done. Let's be modest, a protection warrior of reasonable gear at level 74 puts out roughly 700 DPS while tanking. Even considering my combat uptime, the DPS had to be really really bad for me to be at the top.

Allow me to sidetrack a little here. Our group consisted of me, a shadow priest, and three others from the same guild, a discipline priest, retribution pally, and fury warrior. Only the shadow priest was close to me in terms of damage done. His DPS was roughly about 1000, but he was still doing less damage than me.

At this point, I resign myself to a long instance. Who asked me to be such a sucker for politeness, right?

After awhile, we reach the first boss. I explain the fight, I pull. First attempt, nobody hits the Guardian add that spawns, the small spiderlings become immune to damage, and my healer dies from them while I could only watch. The fury warrior gets DI'ed near the boss after me, my healer, and the shadow priest die. I run back. Nobody else releases. Are they expecting a rez or something!?!? I explain to the fury warrior that perhaps he could try to shadowmeld after removing DI. He/she dies, and grumbles abit. They all run back in the end. I inspect the fury warrior's damage breakdown and spec. I choke want to /wrist nearly faint again. He/she is sporting a spec something like this (can't remember the exact thing, was too busy fainting), and his/her skill breakdown showed that Bloodthirst was non-existent.

It's 2am in the morning, I didn't feel like offering any friendly advice.

Boss dies on the second attempt. We work our way to the second boss. I explain the fight. I pull. Nobody seems to want to DPS the boss when he teleports. I work my ass off Shield Slamming the boss and the luckily the healer doesn't get incapacitated, and he also works his ass off healing those people. Boss dies in one attempt.

On the next pull, ret pally uses /rw to announce that he is going AFK. WTH? I'm not blind!! I can read party chat!! I keep pulling. Two or three pulls later, ret pally announces he's back... via /rw. I can feel my blood pressure rising. We reach the third boss without incident. I explain the fight, and resign myself to eating the enrages hope against hope that they can kill the adds so I wont have to eat the enrage.

Attempt 1: At 75%, boss flies up, summons add. Party doesn't seem to realise the add is there until it walks to the boss' spot. He enrages, and plants a Thundershock at my location. Everybody was clustered somewhere near me for some unknown reason. Everybody eats 10k nature damage; my healer and the ret pally die instantly, we wipe.

I say again in party chat: Please kill the add, the enrage is really painful.

Attempt 2: Everyone spreads out abit more, but still nobody seems to want to hit the add or even realise that its there. Fury warrior dies at ~65% boss hp due to Thundershock, I press one or two cooldowns at every enrage, hoping against hope that I live. The damage comes in by the (many) thousands. Not fun to see. Boss has 10% HP left, healer is OOM, I am out of cooldowns, and he spawns a Thundershock below me. My HP is at 4000 or so. Somehow I manage to dodge and parry his next few melee strikes and we survive; boss dies.

We proceed to the last boss. I explain the fight. Ret pally goes "Cool" when I reach the insanity part and starts linking all the gear that the boss drops. My patience is wearing very thin here. Attempt 1: I kill off my adds, and help two other DPSers with theirs (!!). Healer goes OOM during second insanity, the boss' Mind Flay is too pain, we wipe at 9%.

Attempt 2: The PUG shadow priest kindly provides us with Guru's Elixir. I kill off my adds, and hope against hope that I get transported to my healer's realm to help. I don't. After helping one DPSer, we go to the healer's realm. Joy. At start of second insanity, healer has 70% mana. I am confident we will down him, and we did.

Its finally over; timestamp reads 2:45 AM

Recount at the end

To be honest, although I was exasperated, I felt pleased and satisfied at myself for having successfully led this bunch of people through a more-difficult-than-normal regular instance. As for the second picture, number 1 is me, 2 was the shadow priest, and 7 was my holy priest. In case you're wondering if this was made up, its not. I won't waste my time justifying myself here. All-in-all, an interesting experience, though not one I care to repeat (yes I've had many of these already, and yes I seem to always land such groups), but don't count on it.

Edit: I didn't save a screenshot of that Fury warrior's damage breakdown, but I did notice he/she had 42 immune Hamstrings and some Thunder Claps, which meant that he/she was DPSing in Battle Stance some of the time (!!?).