Piety's Rant Box: Lowbie Tanking

We interrupt the Disco guides with the following rant:

I normally play a healer.

I'm a nice healer.

And, my dear tank, I treat you well.

I have excellent gear, I keep up when you pull recklessly, and when your gear is terrible I compensate with shields and heals, casting PoM on you on every cooldown and reserving Pain Suppression only for emergencies to ensure your maximum threat.

I very rarely get recognition for this, and that's ok.

I've also played tank. My former main was a prot pally. I keep an eye on my healer's mana, I don't pull if I see them standing a good distance away, not moving. I give recognition after at least one big pull per instance (complimenting good healing on easy healing pulls is something I don't do, because I want the recognition to mean something).

And so, as I was leveling a baby DK the other day and figured I might as well go into frost and tank some instances in BC along the way. Even before the random daily dungeon system, I leveled largely in instances on the prot pally so I figured it must be even faster now...

My first instance made me want to quit. A shitty attitude healer and his harebrained warlock friend had clearly managed to drive away the previous tank after just 2 trash pulls of Hellfire Ramparts, and I instantly found out why.

We pull the caster dudes with the growy guy in the middle. When I say we, I mean the warlock starts casting and I run in to try and get aggro. On the several caster mobs standing a good distance apart. The warlock then pulls the next group behind as well. Now I have the still-alive growy guy plus beastmaster and friends and several casters nuking the shit out of me. I die, then the group dies.

The healer starts off with "WTF tank y u take so much dmg i heal u like 4 times!!!"

I honestly just stared at the chat screen.

Out of sheer bafflement (particularly at the "healed u 4 times" comment) I pointed out the size of the pull, and suggested people not "help" me pull more adds.

We kill the remaining mobs and one more 4pack of trash. Then the next 4 pack. The warlock somehow again manages to pull the entire rest of the corridor, but not until after I've engaged the other pack and put all my runes on cooldown. He of course maximizes his dps by starting the AoE before they reach my Death and Decay. I deathgrip one to me, throw icy touch on another and start praying for a Blood Rune. The healer's oom by the end of the pull and I managed to keep many, but not all, of the mobs on me. The fact that all of the dps were dpsing different mobs didn't help, but that was partly my fault, as I probably wasted time in panic and I should have started marking skulls.

We all live, and the healer already shouts: "WTF how u not hold aggro ffs!?!?"
I start commenting on the warlock's aoe on mobs that weren't pulled and the healer just rants at me that it doesn't matter, I should be able to hold aggro on everything, in the appropriate lack of spelling. At this point I am fuming, demoralized and just plain flabbergasted at the sheer amount of abuse being piled on me.

Aside from the fact that I'm not overgeared, I'm lvl 60 and a DK. This means that unless I skipped the beginning DK zone, this is going to be one of the first, if not the first, instance I've ever tanked as a DK. The only way I could have experience tanking as a DK is if I leveled another DK as tank on another server already. And then in the middle of the warlock's GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO and his ranting, he suddenly says "afk phone".

Somebody, not me so it must have been one of the non-warlock DPSers, votes to kick him. I instantly agree. So, apparently, does the other DPS. I assume the warlock doesn't as they were friends, and he leaves once the healer's been kicked. Somebody, may have been me, says "thank God for that" in party chat.

We requeue and wait a couple of minutes for a new healer and DPS. A tree drood shows up, and a DPS content with me pulling initial aggro. We clear the whole instance with no deaths, and while I sometimes lose aggro to the hunter or DK on the big AoE pulls, it's nothing the healer can't handle and I am trying my best. Nobody rages, we move swiftly through, we clear the whole place with no deaths despite just AoEing everything.

Now, I freely admit I am not the best DK tank evar. It was my first and only time yet tanking as DK and if it hadn't been for the tree and the patience of the other 3 dps, it would have been my only one. But once I had people with me willing to actually give me a shot, it went smoothly and quite reasonably fast.

And so I have a new rule. It's apt for a DK, we're supposed to be so dark and emo after all. And that is to preserve my enjoyment of tanking with great determination. I may be subscribing to the primadonna attitude people are lamenting all over the web, but if I don't do this, if I don't follow this basic self-respect rule, I will not tank instances. I have the thick skin of any long-time MMO player but I also have a limited tolerance for abuse. I will become too demoralized, too exhausted, by the kind of attitude I encountered, because tanking stresses me out. It's a high-pressure position. I play DPS and healer, those two are also stressful, but there's a whole kind of stress reserved for tanks: the stress of leadership. And to quote a gem of truth from a very experienced tank: leadership is a service role and tanks are the leaders. Once you realise this, you start viewing complaints from your party members as you would complaints from clients or customers, and it means you're failing to do your job, even if you're pressing all your buttons in the right order. You set the pace and make the rules in service to the group. You take up tasks and responsibilities that others can ignore because somebody has to and that inevitably falls more easily to the guy pulling things and getting stomped on.

I still enjoy it, and I'll do it because I know not a lot of people are doing it, and because I am actually good at it, but I won't do it with people who are jerks. If a group member is abusive, I'm going to start aggressively vote-kicking, and barring that I will leave. If that means I'll be spending a lot of time with a random dungeon cooldown, so be it.

(edited to add: posts like these are the motivation to keep going)