Tanking cherry popped!

So yeah, I just got out of Blackrock Depths after tanking my first instance. I feel like a noob all over again. And I love it. We did good, but in the beginning I just mashed buttons randomly (I read a prio list but my bindings were perhaps not that great) and managed to hold aggro just fucking fine.

So yeah. I was in LFM because I needed a group for Sunken Temple, for warrior class quest about some fucking feathers or something. And someone randomly whispered me asking if I wanted to come to BRD. Now, I remember that instance to be really hard, but I mostly ran it on my shaman with what was most probably undergeared groups. But I figured, how hard can it be? I outlevel the instance and I have decent gear in almost all slots, and can probably fill the rest while we are down there (I got a few greens and blues, not exactly something that's made me excited before but I went "Woo! New tanking shoulders!" out loud >_>.

I made sure to tell them that I'd never tanked before. Never tanked a warrior, never tanked BRD, never. They seemed fine with it and I figured it'd be OK since most people were around 55. Turns out all of them were Swedish (for some reason they all went SWE!? almost right away). We slugged ourselves over there, me and a priest got there first and started summoning people and in we went. I wanted to show how awesome I was so I chainpulled the miners that are in the antechamber thingie, making sure my rage was optimal and just generally being badass. Inside the instace things were about as easy except for one thing: THE HUNTARD. Yeah, a PuG with a stupid hunter, who'da thought. He kept pulling out of impatience when healer was low on mana and did not turn off his pet's growl. And the damn pet kept ripping mobs off me and kept taking damage and he kept nagging the priest and ret paladin to heal his pet. I swear to God, I had a full playing board of PuG bingo right there. We told him to turn the taunt off, he told us his pet in fact did not have a taunt. At least we weren't wiping so we made do with simply not talking about it anymore. We went around randomly first cause noone had the key (epic confusion throughout the run since there are a gazillion types of keys to keep track of) and the other four had never been there before. I felt big and manly when I walked around with only a vague idea about where the first three bosses were, but we did the Law circle thing and managed to progress. Turns out the hunter was 15 (he said he was turning 16 tomorrow when the paladin said he had to have a quick afk to eat cake with his grandma cause it was his 17th birhtday...), the priest was 29 and the warlock probably somewhere around my age (he called the rest "kids"). Go figure.

I noticed being rage starved pretty much all the time until I figured out the key: CHAINPULL MOAR. Not that I thought rage would be pouring in as fast as a mob looked at you, but having two of them beat on me only allowed me to do shield slam as often as it came off CD basically. Having figured that out, I reached tanking heaven when controlling packs of 8-10 mobs at the same time, moving them according to my slightest whim. Trying to peel off and kick my healer's ass? Not on my watch! Taunt! Shockwave! Fuck yeah ain't going nowhere bitch. Playing a warrior as opposed to a mana class is a completely different game, I got that figured out. But actually tanking, playing the threat game, it just blew my mind. The first group fell apart somewhere around us ninjajumping to the entrance to Molten Core and realizing we were stuck cause noone had the key.

Me and the priest found three new DPS and came back, made sure we hade the key quest and even though the PuG really sucked (worse this time, there was a impolite mage, a really stupid paladin (who was 48 so he had the biggest aggro range with hilarious results) who refused to stay close to me and a DPS warrior with a tanking complex) I stuck around because I was enjoying it so much. I still don't know if it was because it was something completely fresh or because I genuinely enjoyed tanking and will keep on liking it, but I will keep going until I find out. I befriended the priest and we've agreed to do Strat and Scholo someday this week. Will be nice to get some more tanking experience under my belt before I venture into Outland for levelling and the hopefully harder instances there. Still refreshed from the experience I ventured back to my home server, where people don't have guild names that are "potatodruggies" or "chase a naked man" or character names that are "iamalock" or "elitepala" or "dillfather" or "cheesesandwich" or "gandálf" or "hateful" or "unnecessary" or "pelledruid" NYAAAARHRG. Time to sort the lineup for tonights Ulduar-25. Tanks and healers as always but lacking DPS. Comfortable problems.