Tank like a girl

Today’s tank is another healer who has discovered the joys of tanking. An alliance shaman by night, she raids with us during the day as Lashe. Like Shiawase from last week, she is in our sister guild over on alliance side and one of their raid leaders. They actually dared push to 7/12 in ICC now, one boss ahead of us. This cannot be! But anyway, I will let Lashe continue, she of the overpowered threat of Icy Touch.

I started playing WoW the first week it was released. Almost right from the beginning I chose to play a healer. Throughout the years I’ve been playing I became very comfortable with healing, and also fairly decent at dps when I wasn’t healing. But, there was one last role out there taunting me (hyuk) – the ever elusive tanking role.

Tanking had always intimidated me, and seemed like it would always be out of my reach. I am a healer! I don’t take damage, and tanking is HARD. I always had a close bond with the tanks I would heal, but I felt like I would never be able to do the job very well myself. So, I never gave it a chance.

Time went on, WotLK hit, and I continued healing. I still enjoyed healing, but I started feeling like I needed to find something more challenging in the game. I knew that it was time to swallow my fear and give tanking a shot finally.

The thing is, I didn’t plan for Lashe to be my tanky character. I was just playing her for fun, leveling her with my brother. I had never wanted to play Lashe much outside of the realm of leveling. I had heard all the negativity surrounding the Death Knight class and I had always refused to play the “popular class”, or to play the class that others may look down on.

But, I fell in love. Everything about the DK class was so exciting, I loved everything about it. The runes, the diseases, how all the spells worked with the diseases, the self-healing… everything. Every single time I played Lashe, I fell more and more in love with her and her play style.

At one point, someone in guild was putting together a group run of Underbog and was looking for a tank. I figured I might as well give it a shot since they were having a hard time finding one. I had already decided I wanted to tank.. why not try it on Lashe? I scrounged around the AH quickly, made a quick Frost tank spec, and asked for DK tanking tips from my guildies on my way in:

“Keep DnD down!”

That’s pretty much all the tips I got, haha. So, I kept DnD down, and spastic-ly pressed buttons and it was one of the most noob experiences of my WoW life. But I had fun and knew that this was just the beginning.

When I hit 80, I felt added pressure to be “perfect” so that I wouldn’t be lumped in with the the DK’s out there who gave us a bad name. So I was constantly researching, making sure I was doing everything correctly, and tanking heroics whenever I felt the courage. Slowly but surely I finally got up to the point where I could tank raids.

My first raid tanking experience was with DotH. I tanked Ulduar alongside Kadomi, and she made me feel so comfortable.. Giving me lots of tips on how to pull certain groups, whether to face them away from the group or not, etc. I was so nervous going into that raid cause I wanted to do well and was convinced they would ban me from raids forever if I made any mistakes, ha. But the raid went well, I didn’t fall on my face, and it was the start of a BEAUTIFUL relationship! *music starts*

I am currently one of the progression tanks for our ICC runs, and I’ve really settled into my role! I no longer get stressed out about tanking raids, my neck doesn’t have a permanent cramp like it used to while tanking (I was so tense feeling like I would wipe the raid at any moment!). It’s been a blast, and I am having fun discovering new bosses and mechanics with my guild, and working to master Death Knight tanking more and more as we move along.

Now that I’ve beaten a long and flowery path around the bush, I will get down to the whole point of this blog post! Why do I like Death Knight tanking?

Honestly, I could go on and on about it. I love the micromanagement of the diseases and runes. I love that there are 3 tank specs that can suit everyone’s different tanking styles or raid needs (until Cataclysm hits anyway!). I loooove the proactive cooldowns. I have gotten quite addicted to my cooldowns and love hitting them every chance I get. It adds a whole new level to tanking for me: planning ahead in fights and trying to time my cooldowns to help with burst damage etc. Blood’s self-healing goes right along with the same feeling I have for my cooldowns. I try hard to time my heals with spike damage so that I can hopefully help the healers out even a little bit. I love Frost’s AOE (another thing I will miss in Cata). I love having DeathGrip so that I can pull those pesky casters to me!

I also love that I am not a master at my class, I am always learning something new and am constantly working to improve. It is definitely the challenge I was looking for when I was thinking about tanking, and I can’t imagine going back.