Baby Tank, Baby Steps

Inspired by BBB, I decided to level a new druid. I want to level him mainly through tanking using the dungeon finder. Between the leftover shards, seals, and emblems on my main I was able to outfit by new bear with heirloom shoulders, trinket, chest, and weapon. A few more seals and he’ll have trinket #2. It’s been a while since I rolled a new nelf. The first thing that struck me was that all the starter area mobs are yellow. Even all the spiders. The drop rates seem to have gone up as well. Quested out of the starter area and headed for the mailbox in the next zone to pick up my gear and bigger bags. Dinged 10, and proceeded to do the quests to get my bear form. Once I had completed that, I headed over to Stormwind and made it my home. I figured I’d get level up to 16 so I had swipe and then start using the dungeon finder. I leveled up getting the VC prerequisites so I would have all the quests when I went in.


I had my talents set, glyphs set, my heirlooms on, my non-heirloom equipment the best the AH had, and everything enchanted. I even picked up some elixirs and buff food. I leveled my First Aid. I was ready and eager to tank. I have been mainly running as melee DPS for the last few months on my DK. Before that I was ranged on my Hunter. On my DK I have the pug pet and all the emblem gear I can get from pugging heroics. I’m not a total newb. I’ve seen a lot of bad pugs. It still didn’t prepare me for what I was about to face.

I queued as a tank. Three seconds later I was in Ragefire Chasm. The only other time that I’d been there was when my hunter did the wrathgate quest. I popped over and did both the instance and fished up the rare. Alas, when I tried to do it on my DK, I found it was no longer possible. Anyway, back to my first instance. I buffed everyone with MotW, popped Thorns on myself and let everyone know that I hadn’t been in here in a real long time. Meanwhile the DPS warrior gnome runs over and starts aggroing mobs.

I rush over, pick up the mob, and we’re off to the races. Every time I pull, he charges in and taunts. Or he starts pulling. The healer is going nuts, the warrior and pally are trying to tank, and I’m doing my best to keep the mobs off the healer. Somehow the entire instance gets pulled and we wipe. The healer and a DPS drop group and I follow suit. I repair and rethink my plan. I queue up again and back into Ragefire I go.

Oh look, the same warrior and pally. We proceed to tank the instance. By we, I mean me (queued as tank) , the warrior (queued as dps), and the pally (also queued as dps). After a few minutes of this the warrior says just let him tank and go cat form and dps. I let him know that I don’t get that until level 20. I drop out of bear and stay in my nelf caster form. I stick to dps and also help the healer out because the other dps also thinks they are a tank. Wearing cloth.

The pally goes AFK on follow for the rest of the instance. We somehow get though. I put the warrior, pally, and warlock on my ignore list so I will never have to group with them again. I repair and queue up again. Almost instantly the confirmation pops up. And this time the loading screen shows Wailing Caverns…..