Heading back to Tanking

One of the benefits of playing a hybrid class is the ability to switch to a different role by spending your talent points differently and getting a different gear set up together.

Well the dual talent feature means it's easy to switch how your talent points are spent and gear now is very easy to get with random dungeons and all the badges you can get from doing it.

So have geared up for running retribution I carried on running the heroics in order to get a protection set up together. That, a couple of crafted items and a few drops along the way meant I've put together a pretty good tanking set which has me crit immune for raid bosses, 30k unbuffed health and a bunch of other tasty tanking stats. I've gone for a threat based build given that I mainly plan to run heroics (for zero queue time) and the majority of that tanking in there is trash pulls.

I tend to do a lot of reading around game mechanics to get advice on things I haven't done before, and there are some great references out there which mean you don't have to go in blind trying to figure out what does what and how to go about things. However knowing is only half the battle, it's only once you've actually gone in there and tried things out do you know how well you can cope and whether you've got the situational analysis to cope with mobs running around the place especially if the dps or healer has pulled aggro.

Not wanting to risk completely stuffing up a run with a random group I run a couple of random dungeons with some willing guildies and while they weren't perfect they did at least show that I could get the required trash packs under control and not have the aggro monkeys peel them off me.

While it was good to get those under my belt and get back into the swing of things the plan for short queues and easy frost badges would only work if I could do the job with four random people pulled in by the tool. Putting on some bravery I signed up (admittedly with DPS ticked as well) as a tank. After a couple of failed attempts where the DPS had clearly fallen asleep while waiting for the queue to pop, five ticks appeared and I found myself in Violet Hold.

I decided not to warn the group given that I had tanked this instance before on a previous character, and the mobs spawn at regular intervals meaning that I didn't have to worry too much about the speed of pulls and I could be fairly certain about what I would be facing for each portal. The only concern was the random bosses, but fortunately we got the two tank and spank ones and soon the place was clear and I had some extra badges.

I'd still be nervous about hitting the new IceCrown instances but everything else should be doable and a few more items should have me in a raid ready set of gear should our guild find itself in need of an extra tank.