How a Tank is born

Due to some recent luck i've managed to get my warrior in a guild as an off-tank and while the DPS certainly need to improve before we can start easy clearing hard raids i'm finding it fun to mess around on my new tanking class.

This recently lead to me wondering exactly how I choose to roll a tanking class in the first place, what made me leave the comfort zone of my mage, priest and rogue and play a class thats designed to go first in combat.

I think one of the key contributers to my new fondness of tanking is quite honestly haveing been a specialist tank on raid encounters on my other classes.

My priest and mage have both tanked mimirons head before and i've had quite a lot of fun working out exactly what spells that lie dormant in my spell book would help me furfil this roll better.

My mage has even tanken it one step further as i've actively tanked the zombie spawns on gluth in naxx before and this was a realy hard task for a arcane mage to do but i somehow managed to pull it off after a bit of practice.

From these specialist tanking roles these cloth casters have created a small seed inside me making me wonder why i havent choson to play the role of the tank.
Looking back at it the responsibility and high entry barrier certainly put me off in the past but haveing taken that responsibility in special cases it becomes a lot less scary.

I had a lot of spare time so I decided to play a plate class and do a bit of experimenting into the whole tanking aspect of wow, this led to a very poor choice in playing my DK up to 80 while leveling with friends, hitting the def cap was much harder back then especialy for a class with no shield slot and the squishy nature of DKs was a bad stigma to have.

Needless to say that this charecter was scrapped, it wasent so much because of the whole cap issue thing it was more that the class did not agree with me, the rotation while tanking felt clunky and badly done so i never managed to master it very well.

I'd tried tanking on my paladin too but that felt equaly misplaced as i ran out of mana incredibly quickly in low level dungeons and that essentialy put me off playing the class as a tank at all.

My warrior on the other hand seemed to agree with me from the get go, the aspects of the class seemed to just click with me and i found myself playing protection as if i was in a state of constant fury.

Everything was kept quite simple from the start and new tanking abilities were added at just the right pace to keep me learning, it's no wonder the warrior was considered the only tank back in vanila wow as it seems just so well suited to the roll.

So i managed to get the class evolved right up to the point that I could start seriousley considering raiding with him, i'd learned the encounters for most boss fights and have managed to aquire much experiance from running dungeons while gearing.

There seems to be a sense of nervousness that I get when i'm tanking using the warrior class which is quite scary for the first raid that i did but everything managed to work well.

So from humble beginnings of being a specialist tank in raid encounters a new tank can easily be formed with enouth time and effort.
I'd encourage most players who are experianced at playing the game to roll a tanking class as it's one of the best ways to experiance encounters and a very nice experiance to have.

I can almost envision me taking this class and role into cata with ease and manageing to play it properly as a main, but wether it can stand up to my love of healing is another matter.
At least it'll keep me a lot to do when i finally manage to get round to leveling alts to 85.