A Little History

For anybody who's interested, this post is the history of why I decided to make a tank, and my experience of tanking up to ZA. Read it if you want. If not, here's the gist: I've been prot since I had talent points, because DPSing is boring. With my small guild (we now have 23 raiding members), I now main-tank Kara and ZA. It's been a journey.

I first started my now-main character when I was unemployed, and doing a lot of 5-mans and UBRS runs with my Warlock pre-TBC. I noticed that a lot of the time, groups were looking for tanks, so I created a Night Elf Warrior for the sole purpose of being a tank. He would run around with my girlfriend's mage, hold threat most of the time, and run some instances sometimes. I got him up to level 24 or so.

Then I got busy, and kind of took a break from WoW for a while. When I started again, post-TBC, I started to level my warlock, so as to run with my guild, and got bored. Voidwalker, DoT, DoT, DoT, Drain Life. Rinse. Repeat.

Boooooring.

So, I took a look through the characters on my account. I had my horde-side shaman and mage, but my horde-side guild was (and still is) basically dead. I had my 19 twink rogue... but I didn't want to level him. And then I saw my warrior. My girlfriend had canceled her account due to shortage of funds, so I figured it was safe to level him further. So I did. My guild made fun of me for leveling prot, and rightly so. Arms or fury would have been much quicker. However, I think it was more productive for me to level prot, as I was able to practice my tanking skills while leveling. I'd do PuGs, and runs with the alts (or new mains) of guildies, and I'd tank the hell out of them (like the time we 4-manned Gnomer), learning how to LoS pull properly, when to use Taunt, how to properly write a "charge/defensive stance" stance-dance macro, how to deal with terrible PuGs, and everything I could absorb about taking lots of damage while keeping everyone else alive.

And it was fun. A lot of fun. So much fun that I now found DPS classes (like my long-neglected Warlock) boring. They no longer held any appeal for me.

Finally, I hit 70. "Okay, guildies, I'm 70! Let's do some instance runs", I said.

"No, we're doing Kara", they said. "We'll run some stuff with you at some point, though." And they did. My guild, Mageroyal Syndicate, on Zul'jin, rocks. It's full of amazing people who are at the same time nice, understanding, casual, and really good at the game. But I was fascinated with Kara. The guild forums had a thread listing their requirements for raiding Kara. 10,000 health, 10,000 armor, 490 defense.

I had been working on the 490 defense for a while, and had that wrapped up. But I had to get some more health and some more armor. So I did my research, I found the gear I wanted, and I quested and ran 5-mans and repped up with the appropriate factions until I had it all. My profession choice of Enchanting (and Mining) helped me gain a little edge in terms of stats, and after months of running various instances, I had my all-blue tanking set. Except for one piece - my belt. I had been unable to get the belt I wanted, and thus had a green-quality belt.

But I was Kara ready. So, I signed up for the run, got in, and started off-tanking trash. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed. It didn't feel nearly as epic as I'd hoped it would. But it was still fun - my guild is always fun. We took down Attumen on our first try, with me tanking my night-elf ass off. He didn't drop anything terribly exciting for me. But Moroes did (also one-shotted, with me sharing tanking duties with one of our A-listers). He was kind enough to drop Thireas's second epic-quality item (after the Gyro-balanced Khorium Destroyer): Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable. We went on that night to take down every boss up through Curator, with minimal wipes, and we called it after that due to time. Since then, I've tanked every boss in Karazhan except for the animal boss - who my guild doesn't do - even a guild-first Netherspite.

During that time, I was gearing up through badges and Kara drops, getting as many gear upgrades as I could, and reading the amazing Tankingtips.com by Veneretio. I learned many things from that site, including some insight into where I should be spending my badges.

My guild had done some ZA in that time as well, downing the Eagle and Bear bosses. I didn't feel like my gear was up to ZA level yet, so when one of the guild officers asked if I wanted to go, I politely declined and continued my gearing up.

A couple weeks later, there was going to be another ZA run, and I posted a reply to the announcement that I'd be interested in going. That same officer misunderstood what I was saying, and thought that I was, yet again, stepping out. He IM'd me to say that "with the ridiculous gearing up I'd been doing, he though I was ready for it". We cleared things up, and I was in on the next ZA run. We didn't get Bear within the timer, but we kept going on to Eagle, who we one-shotted. Then we moved on to Lynx - the gear-check.

And we got him in two tries. Guild first. I was main-tanking. Since then, we've downed him one more time, we've gotten Eagle within the time limit (doing him first instead of second), and I've almost surpassed our ex-T5-content pally tank in unbuffed health.

I think I've come a long way, and I'd like to record the rest here for you guys to read. Unfortunately, I'm not raiding terribly much right now, as I have a job where I work evenings. But that will be changing, as I've gotten a new job with normal business hours. So, keep an eye out for updates.