Tanking Karazhan

I main tanked Karazhan for the first time ever, on my warrior Shaeldre.

It was fun and actually not a huge ordeal! I was worried that my threat generation would be cause for issues, since sometimes I have problems in 5-mans. It actually went well! I picked up the tanking gloves from Maiden of Virtue and had a blast.

Romulo and Julianne was a problem for us. The other tank was dying, but after checking WWS (she was crushed 79 times for our successful attempt) I think that might have been the problem. Our other problems were slightly overestimating the amount of damage we did (we stopped dps on Romulo at 15%, killed Julianne, then couldn't bring him down to zero fast enough). Our successful attempt was pretty epic... it involved the Julianne dying and reviving that I just mentioned. Then I picked up Julianne again and we did the whole fight over again. It was nearly a 10 minute encounter... oh man.

Other than that though, the run went really well! If R&J had gone better we would have been able to get a few more bosses. We're going back tonight; I'm definitely not geared enough for tanking Prince though, so I'm not sure what we're going to do there. Probably cry a whole lot XD

Paladin tanking: A first look!

I tanked an instance for the first time since switching to Protection spec and it was... incredible! The last time I tanked an instance was Zul'farrak, and back then I was Retribution. Granted, I had some things to help me generate threat that I don't have now (Sanctity Aura and actually Vengeance helped too... haha) but the better Righteous Fury was really helpful.

Paladins are just... wow. I think I had the hunter trap twice, and only in Blood Furnace (we did Ramparts followed by Blood Furnace since Ramparts only lasted about 40 minutes). The only time I did have her trap was on some of those nasty felguard annihilator pulls at the end since I couldn't really tank them.

My pally is still a bit undergeared (a bit? I just replaced Triune Amulet with a BoE green that dropped in the instance last night) so I think I may have given our healer a run for her money sometimes, aoe tanking everything... it was great though. In both instances we only had 1 wipe (accidentally got two groups somehow) and only a couple of deaths. The only frustrating thing is if I went OOM during a pull, it became very difficult to get threat back, and of course Reckoning was no help at all with Seal/Judgment of Wisdom because I wasn't being hit anymore T_T Gotta learn to carry mana potions!

Looking forward to getting more tanking gear so I feel like a bit less of a mana hog on the healer... and definitely looking forward to tanking more instances. Maybe this is one character I can feel comfortable tanking with pugs in the group! I didn't even have to use salvation last night either so that was a huge help. People pulled aggro sometimes but it was usually in a big group where I have having some trouble targetting... I'll get used to it!

Warrior tanking

One of the things I really strive to do in WoW is play multiple classes and play them well. I don't want to be "that guy" who had one of each class but couldn't play their way out of a cardboard box with any of them.

So maybe not surprisingly, I've spent a lot of times on the forums and on elitist jerks learning about various classes. So far my greatest weakness is warrior tanking - I think I do really well in other situations (dps as various specs and classes is very easy for me, and tanking on my paladin is easy - I haven't tried to tank on my druid when it wasn't Black Morass so I can't really speak for my druid tanking skills XD, and healing is also something that comes pretty naturally to me).

I think part of my problem is I tend to group with people nowadays who outgear me. I am wearing mostly greens and blues when it comes to tanking (and the two worst trinkets IN THE WORLD). But I also hate to use that as an excuse, so I'm thinking that my next project will be to respec Shaeldre to protection and give some 5-mans a shot. Just need to pick my group members carefully (or make them be careful >:)) so I don't frustrate myself right back to Fury spec again.

I don't think Protection will ever be Shaeldre's main spec, but I still want to be in a position where I feel confident that I can handle tanking a 5-man instance so I can take pressure off my sister (the guild's main tank) and not feel like 1/3 of a warrior noob ;)