relax while tanking?

[Errvalunia]

I'd have to say I disagree with not running with guildies. For the most part, won't they be the ones with the most patience? Or shouldn't they? They can go hard on you, outgear and out threat you all night and you can just strive to get better just as or more effectively, cause you won't have people bailing on you for one.

Practice, time and experience will give you the confidence. I'm always nervous going into a new situation, only on raids now, with people who are counting on me to hold aggro and stay alive and whom I don't know. Why? Mainly, I just want to do the pro job that I normally do. I take pride in that. I know my rotation, the fight(hopefully), and know how to handle situations when things don't go quite right.

Knowing your rotation is one of the most important parts. You need to build threat fast and maintain it. This will hold aggro the best. As you get better gear, it will become bigger naturally, but knowing what buttons to push when, is huge. When you do it right, there isn't much that can overtake you and I've tanked plenty of instances where dps way outgeared me. Not to say they never pulled it or don't come close. I still have plenty of scares from real high dps, but for the most part, in heroics, if they do pull aggro, it's because they are about to die anyway.

Knowledge of fights, not just your rotation, is important too. Take my first Gen Vezax. I was OT. Never got to void walker in time and caused wipe. Spawned too far away from where I was, knew I was going to tank him, but wasn't central to boss to pick him up. That's inexperience. I knew he was coming but not from where, now that I knew. Second time doing it we got the hard mode acheivement. (I think it's HM ach)
Anyway, you can get all the knowledge from these forums/videos to go into a battle with that knowledge and that can help you relax too.

Once you have the rotation down and you have some experience with your setup and UI and you know the fight (cause knowing is half the battle) you should be able to relax enough to perform your job competently enough for the group to be succesful.

Other than that, f@&$ em if they can't take a joke!

Running with guildies can be good or bad depending on how nervous you are--some people are very self-conscious about their tanking. And it depends how the guildies treat the noob tank. Our guild's balance druid has a bear offspec that we abuse for faster heroic queues, and he is always SUPER shy--if anything goes wrong he will apologize way too much. We reassure him, encourage him, tell him he's doing great (because he is great as a bear! not geared enough to tank our raids but he tanks the alt weekly runs just fine), I can heal him through any ugly pulls or stupid DPS, etc. It helps that we often run with tank/healer/at least one DPS, and the DPSer can reassure him that whatever aggro problem is not his fault (trying to keep aggro from our fury warrior going all-out is... impossible.) etc

But some people feel more self-conscious in front of people they know.

Personally, I'm learning how to tank by levelling my bear with my boyfriend's rogue (my bf being our guild's MT). We're in the early 30s, levelling through the dungeon finder. Duoing outland instances at our level was how I learned to heal (levelling as a resto shaman with his paladin).

[Maèl]

Ok, nervousness in ICC, that's a different thing.

There are spots that are tricky and most of them involve spawning adds.

For some tanks tanking the left side adds of LDW can be horror. Well, only if you can't keep your cool. In many cases, this is the perfect storm. You have the two melee adds that spawn quite a bit away from each other and the caster add in the middle. The melees cleave. Hard. Most of the DPS assisting yo is melee themselves. So you need to position them fast or you will have dead rogues. You can't really practice this and the dead rogue WILL be slightly annoyed.
Tell the dead rogue to die in a fire. You are not supposed to handle something like this alone. Our melees greet the middle caster add in the alcove with face stabbery. While they are occupied you can grab the add closest to LDW and taunt or whatever the melee add furthes away from LDW. It's easy to spot. It's running towards your healers. Once you have their attention, you position them. Now it's DPS problem not to stand in the cleave.
If, by contrast, you tried to grab all 3 adds you will lose one and possibly have dead rogues since you can't control fast enough where the cleaves go.
Last weekend I tanked in a very, very fresh, very, very PUG ICC25. Me as a warrior, tanked the right side. Cakewalk. We had a bare durid iz tanks on the left side. Quite often I had to pick up one of his adds making a beeline to the middle.
Why?
Was he bad?
Did he fail?
...there was only one melee assisting him even tho we had assigned 3. So 2 melees failed. We had 8 corpses and LDW died just the moment she enraged(I had even forgotten that she had an enrage). Let's just say, after this first run we weeded out half of the raid since the rest was even worse.

The next annoying thing is staying alive on Fester. It's amazingly hard in 25 man when you are not evenly geared. Evenly geared as in: "I don't really need anything from this instance anymore apart from that elusive drop. WTH am I doing here?". So if you do not outgear that encounter, you need to plan your CDs. Have you macroed shield block to shield slam? Now is the time to uncouple them. You need this during the second inhale just before you taunt. You have never used indestructible potions? Start now. Trust me. You always wondered what the Glyph of Indom was good for(lousy ilvl245 badge trinket)? This is what it was built for.
Where do you think all this wisdom comes from? That's been trial and error by other tanks. Mostly error, I guess. You can't just learn from reading guides or watching movies. You need to fail. Repeat with me: failing is good. Just learn something from it. Believe me, DPS and healers screw up all the time. At least twice a minute. So you screw up once and get blown to bits? Weeeeell. Happens. Only take the blame when you are sure you screwed up. And fess up when you KNOW you did something wrong. I once taunted Fester while I still had 9 stack up. Uuuups. Big badaboom. Wipe, corpserun/jokes in vent, kill, loot. End of.
You are not in this alone. And there are 24 other people who have to assist you.

LD;DR
It's not only that you know the pulls. It's also that DPS know where to hit. Hard.
It's been said before. Practice.

[Drizzt]

Have you macroed shield block to shield slam? Now is the time to uncouple them. You need this during the second inhale just before you taunt. You have never used indestructible potions? Start now. Trust me. You always wondered what the Glyph of Indom was good for(lousy ilvl245 badge trinket)? This is what it was built for.
Where do you think all this wisdom comes from? That's been trial and error by other tanks. Mostly error, I guess. You can't just learn from reading guides or watching movies. You need to fail. Repeat with me: failing is good.

This is something i need to do. Also because my main is a bear and i have maul macro onto almost all my skills and in say something like surafang it causes me to accidently pull the adds

[Nazhir]

Not sure if this has been touched on but, to do with 5-man Heroics:
Often in randoms you will get impatient DPS who just can't be screwed waiting for you to pull stuff and will do it themselves, then expect you to taunt and AoE to get control of everything.

You can deal with this two ways - you can not taunt, and let them deal with it themselves. If they're putting out crazy DPS and are wearing plate, they'll probably kill the mob before it does any damage. Otherwise, they'll probably die. Funnily enough, if the latter occurs, they'll likely blame you.

Secondly, you can just deal with them and gain control of the situation. The issue is that sometimes, when your trying to gain confidence, the worst thing is to have mobs and pulls coming in that you didn't even know about.

Don't be afraid to speak up and tell others if they're doing something wrong. Remember to keep this in perspective, too. Sometimes a DPS will grab a mob to try and help you i.e. before it pats away. In this case it's usually alright, so try to judge the situation is it occurs.

For Random Pug Heroics, there's no reason to be nervous. If you screw up so bad they kick you... who cares, they're likely from different servers and there's another pug waiting. Do your best, be confident and take charge.

Hope this helps!

[Unforgivein]

if you are a new tank then you will be like this for awhile. I was, and every tank that has ever played wow was like it at some point. Once you get use to what your tanking and know what exactly to do at the given moment it becomes much eaisier, And that is what wow was intended for..It starts out hard and once you get use to it..it becomes second nature and you could tank with your eyes closed (Please Don't Try It Though :P) I use to get pumped up by listening to music to get in the mood to knock down anything in my path. I also just got use to tanking all the heroics..Every Pull, Every Fight everything it just gets a lot easier.

You will always get the one person or one group that blames you for everything and say your not tanking right.. And All I Say is shut up and you come tank this right now then if I'm not elite enough for you...

remember the more time you spend doing this the less time you will be nervous. And I know once you get into new content you will be nerveous like I said before every tank doesn't know everything and isn't the greatest. And has their own way of getting it done.. As a Apache saying goes "There are many different paths to get to the same place" so remember that when someone is saying you suck and that's not how you do it. If you know it will work you do it, and if they have a problem they can leave and wait 30mins-hour + for another tank..

God Speed fellow Tank