woot, a success

I spent a few days away from WoW due to some out of town guests and then Ariel and I spent most of Sunday sleeping in order to make up for our lack of sleep. It was a good weekend though :)

Today I figured I would do my daily quests and then run a heroic as dps in order to try and get some more tank drops/boost my reputation with the Wildhammer faction because I'm very close to being able to buy my tanking boots from them. Then, after giving it some thought, I realized that those were just tactics to continue to avoid tanking in a real instance. Technically my gear blows what people normally wear in regular dungeons out of the water, so I have no excuse. Frank also helped nudge me in the right direction.

I opened up the dungeon finder, chose random regular dungeon, selected tank as my role and queued! Since tanks are in demand I got an insta-group instead of the half hour dps wait. The dungeon was the Lost City of Tol'Vir, and while my group changed specs and gear I introduced myself and let them know it was my first time tanking. I figured if I was honest with them and tried to be nice, they'd be kinder if I killed them all. I told them I would try to keep a decent pace, and that I wouldn't make them use CC unless they all thought we needed it.

The first few pulls were horrifying. Nothing went wrong, I was just so scared I would lose aggro and get the healer killed or something like that. I tried to remember the places in that dungeon where my random tanks usually pulled incorrectly and got a few groups. I tried to remember what frustrated me as dps, so I could avoid doing that as a tank. As it turns out we only had one death, and that was right as the boss went down, and the healer apologized and said it was his fault. They thanked me and said it was a great run in the end :)

I also made great use of nerino's boss info addon, so I could let them know the strat before we pulled each boss. Yay! I'm still scared of tanking, but a little less scared.

I think the thing that makes me the most nervous is the "random" aspect of the dungeons. If I know what I'm getting myself into I will read all of the detailed boss strats ahead of time, but there are so many dungeons and when I hit "random" I worry I'll get stuck in one of the instances I've only done once or twice. As dps you don't always know the intricacies of what the tank is doing. I probably don't give myself enough credit for what I do remember, but I'm positive that feeling of confidence will only come with practice.

See, successfully paying my student loans sets me up for all types of success :P (I did that this morning after careful budgeting and am very proud of myself for figuring all of that crap out...it's been MONTHS in planning).

We'll see what the future holds for my tanking skills. Frank said that once Sarah hits 80 on her mage we should all run Naxxaramas, the old Northrend raid instance. It'd still be mildly challenging, so maybe I'll tank that and get even more experience.