Get this dragon off me!

As I have now gotten a bit into tanking some of my posts will be about it. Before I say anything else, here's my tank (if you were paying attention you might have noticed I just showed you my realm, nothing that you couldn't have figured out yourself anyways). As you can see her gear is not perfect but it works pretty good.
I have now been level 80 on her for a week and have now done quite a few heroics. My impression of tanking so far is simply, awesome. Besides getting a group in seconds with the new LFG tool in combination with the lack of tanks I can't help loving the power you get while tanking.

Being the tank of a group is way diferent from being DPS. If you have low damage or overaggro a lot as a DPS you will be kicked while as a tank all you have to do is tell your DPS to watch their threat if you get overaggro'd . The only possibility to be kicked as a tank is if you got ridicously low threat so the boss will enrage before it dies or you die like a fish in a desert which shouldn't happen with decent gear and healer(s) who knows what they're doing.

So I have now praised tanking as if it was the best thing ever, but if it is so great why doesn't everyone do it? There is one reason, a pretty obvious one. Responsibility. Even if you often can blame minor stuff on the DPS most major things as wipes and so on will be blamed on you. Often it wont matter who really caused the wipe, it will still be your fault because you didn't pick up the add. Nobody cares if someone started nuking it before it reached you, everything will still be your fault.

As if that wasn't bad enough tanks are in most cases the ones who will get criticized for their gear. A few days ago I was doing UK heroic, one of the easier heroics in the game at the moment and one of the DPS started complaining about my gear. Well, nothing weird about that, everybody is entitled to their oppinion and if he doesn't consider my gear good enough I wont try to convince him. The thing was that I had about 15-17% parry/dodge, 25k hp self buffed and defense capped at the time. He kept overaggroing and whining and eventually left. We replaced him and cleared the whole instance easily.

So if you want to tank, do it, it's really fun but just remember to never listen to what the DPS tells you. If you think you can tank it, you most likely can.