You Don't Have To Be An Arrogant Prick To Tank Here...

When I started Ulushnar, I never intended him to be one of CD's Main Tanks. I envisioned him as a support healer/offtank. As it turns out, my normal goal-oriented playing style (must go here, get this, etc) combined with some lucky loot drops (Karazhan loved me in the first few weeks) and a not-considerable amount of gold spent has seen him outgear most of CD's tanks.

However, I fear this has either exacerbated or enabled my tendancy to be an arrogant arsehole. As a tank, you're percieved as the lynchpin of any group. You've got to be able to survive a beating well enough for the healer to keep you alive, and generate enough hate that healers and DPSers don't pull aggro off you. It's a challenging role and I've seen the mentality described recently as being like the Star Quarterback. You come to see any role other than MT as somehow beneath you.

Thinking back over CD's history, many of our best tanks have developed a bit of arrogance about it, a sense of entitlement even. There's room for one, maybe two main tanks in a raid, everyone else is an offtank. Cooperation with another main tank has always been a problem, since there always seems to be that attitude of "well I'll just go in there and grab aggro to see if I can". I've certainly been guilty of it and I've seen others do it to me. It's fine on Trash fights, but it can be a problem on challenging bosses.

This ties into Tuesday's Gruul's Lair run. I was basically an Offtank for the High King Maulgar kill, so once the first two adds were down, I was basically sidelined for the rest of the fight. I didn't have the gear with me to usefully perform a secondary role. Then on the Gruul attempt, the other MT, a Druid, ended up aggroing off me early on and taking over. Once again there was nothing useful I could do in that case.

I'm honestly giving consideration to stepping back from being MT atm. It brings my arrogance more to the fore than it ever was with Wulf and I'm obsessing about loot way more. It just doesn't feel healthy.