LFM Need Tank

I’m back on the night shifts and as usual it’s all or nothing.  Without wanting to put a hex on the shift, so far tonight it’s mostly nothing so I have been catching up on WoW Bash.  These days the genuinely funny items seem fewer and further between but this one did make me smile.   There is the obvious issue that, apart from the priest who may be a healer, there is no ranged DPS in that group; it also made me smile that in a group of 8, 7 are plate-wearers and they are looking for a tank!

Tanking still seems to be the least popular role in WoW, going by PUGs at least.  It seems like that whenever I look for a PUG on either of my 2 healers I am not the only healer available on LFG, there are usualy several of us and there is always a long (and sometimes fruitless) search for a tank.  At the same time the LFG tool is always full of warriors, death knights and ret paladins.  This isn’t about knocking those players who won’t tank, on the contrary, whilst I have both a death knight and a paladin who are dual-spec’d, I have only ever tanked one PUG.  I have tanked guild runs to several heroics with varying success but whilst I will happily PUG on all my characters as DPS/healer the thought of offering my tanking services to a PUG makes all the blood drain from my head.

Part of this is my lack of confidence in my tanking ability as I have little experience.  I rarely tanked whilst levelling and certainly not to the same extent as I healed on Hulan as I levelled her.  Dimity tanked the occasional instance whereas on Hulan I PUG’d every instance (except the dreaded Gnomergan!) on the way to level 70.  Whilst my heart was in my mouth the first time I healed in the Dead Mines, I explained that this was my first time healing and I was open to any advice at which the tank piped up that the same went for him.  By the time I hit level 70 and switched from Shadow to Holy I was very comfortable with healing and switching so a proper healing spec just made it even easier.  With Ravenwynd it has been slightly different in that I have only started healing with her very recently but whilst the spells are different the principle is the same.  I have enough confidence in myself as a healer to know that sometimes things go to shit and it isn’t my fault, just because we wiped doesn’t make me a bad healer.

I don’t have that same degree of confidence as a tank.  In addition to a general lack of tanking experience there are several things that make me nervous about the whole thing.  Firstly, although I have run the instances dozens of times a healer I am not that familiar with them,  a  lot of my time is spent watching bars.  There are odd ones which stand out because there is some effect I have to look out for but mostly they blur into one big dungeon.  I have a bit of a reputation for turning up at the wrong meeting stone and this is mostly because in my head they are pretty much all the same.  I don’t take note of which mobs they mark out as needing to be killed first, one spider/ghoul etc looks much the same as another to me and as I don’t actually have to help kill anything I don’t even look at the targets most of the time.  There are odd fights where I need to be aware of some special effect but they are few and far between.

Secondly, I find the very different perspective difficult to deal with.  Although I do DPS it is mostly on ranged characters.  I have changed my settings so I am able to zoom out a long way so being up close and personal feels very strange.  Often all I can see (being a Dwarf) is a close-up of some mob’s knee caps; this is worse in those fights where you have to back up against a wall to stop being thrown about.  My unit frames will glow red whenever a party member pulls aggro but when I am watching out for fire/purple wee/black goo on the floor, trying to be situationally aware with respect to other groups of mobs/needing to position myself in a certain way etc, I find it very hard to watch unit frames as well.  ( I actually find this even harder as melee DPS as I also have to make so I stay behind the mob as well).

Finally there is the feeling of responsibility that seems to go with being a tank;  I am not a natural leader.  Left to my own devices I hate to be the centre of attention preferring to do my stuff in the background; I detest being singled out, be it for praise or criticism.  As the tank you are the focus of the group, all eyes are on you.  You decide the kill order and you make the pulls.  If you get it wrong you leave everyone scrambling to try and make things work.

Edited to add: BBB has a post today that addresses this same issue

The sometimes brutal nature of PUGs coupled with my own lack of confidence about tanking means that it is unlikely I will ever be seen offering my tanking skills in LFG.  As a healer/DPS I know when I screw up and I’ll put my hand up to it.  I also know when it was not my mistake that caused us to wipe and when some moron is bitching wanting to know why I “let” him die I won’t turn a hair.  Conversely I am so aware of my weaknesses as a tank I daren’t expose my fragile tanking ego to the harsh scrutiny of a PUG.