It's ironic that my first blog on a tanking website comes after I've pretty much had to give up tanking due to some real life concerns. I used to be that person that never missed a raid, and now that I'm not doing it, I have discovered something that surprises me to no end. I don't really miss it very much.

I found myself thinking about it this morning while I played fetch with the dog (I swear he can't take a morning constitutional without chasing a tennis ball). What changed?

To answer that, I looked back over my WoW experience. I'm not a new player to the game, but I wasn't there right at the start either. I didn't pick up WoW until about 6 months after the release. Until then, I stuck with SWG because I really enjoyed the complex crafting system and actually having to learn a pretty intricate game. There was a lot wrong with it, but it seemed like they only fixed the stuff that wasn't actually broken. Once Sony was nice enough to go ahead and take everything I enjoyed about it out, I went ahead and moved onto this to join the people I had started playing SWG with.

I talked to my friends that were already playing about what they liked to do in WoW. I ended up deciding to go for a Warrior. I rolled a gnome as a joke on a buddy that already played one. Little did I realise the joke would be on me with healer LoS. I hit 60 and joined their casual raiding guild about the time they were fully clearing MC. I was at best a mediocre tank in those days. We didn't a consolidated source of info on tanking mechanics in one easy to browse place. I can remember doing web searches for info and the horror that was (and possibly still is) the official forums. I didn't even understand the relationship between defense and critical hits back then and it wasn't something any of the other tanks really talked about in our casual guild. Looking back, I'm amazed at what we actually accomplished sometimes.