Dranchor

Something awkward occured to me today. When I was browsing TankSpot it suddenly struck me that this was somewhat tank-correlated.

I'm going to give you some background here. I used to be an offtank, and I left the game about right before the 3.0.2 madness hit the game. I've since then continued to follow WoW monitoring my guild's progress, reading sites like TankSpot and WoWInsider etc.

The reason I left the game is that I'm participating in an exchange problem, which...

As I watched the enormous blue dragon carcass lying defeated at my feet but still ripling with magic, my thoughts started drifting away. Why was I doing this? I had earned various names under the common people. Bounty hunter. Adventurer. Hero. Why did I continue this enless fight to rid Azeroth of its villains? Why was I doing this?

Looking around to my comrades, I swiftly encountered their answers to my question. Some fifty yards away I saw my lifelong friend and priest Ji'ral sitting...

you have to stay out of it.

Last week, we had an extra BT run because we were on the brinch of killing Illidari Council when we had to call Sunday's raid. We went back Monday, killed them and saw Illidan.

This week started rather sloppy. I'm never on Thursday raids, but they only killed the first four bosses, whereas last week they killed six. So Sunday I was in Black Temple, getting my first shot at Bloodboil and Reliquary of Souls (I got [item]Shadowmoon Insignia[/item]!)....

In a search to find a subject that will still be on topic after Wrath hits, I thought about personalities. When you read tanking sites and get to know tanks, there's some things that are quite common. I'll try to give some characteristics many of us share, but this is by no means a list of things you need to be a tank, or a quest to find the ideal tank. It's merely a summary of things I noticed.

Dedication
Most of us tanks are very dedicated to what they do. We put a lot of effort...

I've found myself organising more and more PuG raids these days, often venturing into Gruul's Lair and Magtheridon's Lair. I start these runs and either lead them myself or let our guild's Raid Leader lead them (since he's better at it). Last Saturday I decided to from a Gruul run and without him ended up leading the run.

We had skilled healers, led by a shaman from my guild, good dps and three tanks. Myself, a lesser geared warrior and an equally geared paladin. We had only one other...