Tanking TK....and ring choices.

Still not quite sure where this is going but I rolled up to TK last night on my tank again instead of my druid.

To an extent, I was exposed a little last night for my shortcomings as a tank...aside from the obvious. I had a hard time, never having seen Kael'thas before as anything but a tree druid, keeping up and knowing what I was supposed to be doing and it was frustrating for myself and my raid. Targeting the weapons in phase two takes some practice.

Eh, I dunno, I'm pretty brutal on where I need to be on things. I'm used to not making the mistakes I do now and while I could cop out and say "well, I'm in T4/Kara gear and haven't tanked in 6 months" I rather look for ways to fix it.

By the end of the night, I had it right and was tanking my assignments like I'm supposed to and got in Kael's face until I got zapped by the arcane thingy and wandered around for 10 seconds with the debuff. Ok, well, we'd never been that far so now we know to have the staff buff working there.

While I say I'll do whatever the guild needs, I'm enjoying tanking again. I don't know what I'll be doing from one week to the next, though and its tough that way. Gearing up two characters is difficult especially when both of them are specialists and PvP is both tough and less rewarding than for other classes. I've broken out my DPS gear as well and while PvPing some would be a quicker avenue to getting that in better shape, I'm tired.

I pushed to get epic flying skill for my druid and that's the 4th time I've purchased it but the cushion I left myself is dwindling and I will need to do dailies this weekend to stay ahead of consumable costs. Otherwise, I should be farming badges to improve my gear but who do I need to farm the badges on? I've spent ~250 on each of my two main characters but its divided and both could use upgrades. Had I spent them on one (farmed them on one, at least) ither character's gear would be that much better.

Farming badges is a hit and miss proposition. I have in the past signed up for events to get the tank in there only to find out we had too many and were desperate for healers. All the pewpew classes stand there looking dumb while wondering why I don't want to just switch to help them out. It really turned me off to activities other than raiding and frustrated me.

When I first started playing the druid, the tank was still fresh for me and his gear was on par with everyone else. As I played the druid, got better at is and upgraded my gear through raiding, people grew accustomed to him. The further in I got, the less people were used to my warrior and in the spaces where I needed badge gear to augment my raiding gear, the warrior sat alone in IF unused and forgotten.

So when I roll up to Kael and we have X number of weeks of progress but I stumble because its all new to me, its frustrating for both myself and the raid but is it justified? Especially considering I did get it after a few pulls and was handling my role just fine.

Well, the extent of my screw ups last night on Kael were allowing one of the weapons I was tanking to get loose and kill people on some of the early pulls. Some of it was poor targeting and threat gen on my part but some of it was aggro control by DPS, especially after we switched to single targetting and weapons low on the kill order got peeled by DPSers shooting at the wrong thing.

Anyhow...I dunno, I'm working on it. About the time I start to get comfortable again I'll probably be back on the druid, heh.

As far as ring choices go, last night I picked up [item]Seventh Ring of the Tirasfalen[/item] and God knows its because no one else wanted it. I currently have the exalted Violet Eye ring and [item]Shermanar Great Ring[/item] and I'm trying to decide which to drop. My first inclanation is the Violet Eye ring specifically so I can exchange it for the DPS counterpart. Yeah, I'm toying with going fury again too....

Anyhow, I'll be playing AoC this weekend and raiding Friday. Going to Vashj, who knows what I will be doing there.