Big bloody bear arses! Cannae see ‘roon them, over them or, mebbe happily, underneath them…

A few friends from the mysterious world of ‘Real Life’(tm) mentioned they were going to head to an instance when they got home and my little furry big, nosy ears perked up. ‘Want a tank?’ was my battlecry. ‘Of course!’ was their joyus reply. Sporeggar, since the beginning, had a tank shortage horde side. This was due to a couple of factors, mainly:

• Belfs. Sporeggar is a Burning Crusade server and so most of the horde side was made up of belfs as people rerolled on a new realm to test them out.
• A lot of people rerolled when they came to Spore - away from classes which had previously bored them such as their main tank prot warrior.
• A lot of people rerolled from the alliance and many weren’t keen on the look of the races on the horde side other than the belfs.

Ok, so the last two are speculation but somewhat based on what I heard from people in-game. Anyway, I had gotten so sick of tanking reqests (really!) that I’d spcced boomkin. It wasn’t me though, despite being a lot of fun, so I got myself back into a nice little feral number.

I admit, here and now, that I’m a 2.0 Druid - and I was adamant that I was not a healer thank-you-very-much! I felt a little weedy in cat but loved tanking. With help from a particularly amazing druid on the server I got myself some tanking gear and learned the basics - tanking everything but Prince and Nightbane in Kara until I decided I wasn’t enjoying the guild I was in and moved back to my irl-friends guild.

Despite being out of practice, I figured what the hell there’s nowhere said friends can go that’ll be much trouble - one of them is still only 69. I logged on and they had decided to go to BM. Well, cool, I’ve done that enough times to do it backwards, in my sleep. I had a quick read over this page on the DruidWiki as I’d heard there’d been some tweaks to tanking since I last played but I didn’t see anything that was especially different. A quick play around with my keyboard shortcuts and I was ready to go. We only had four by ourselves so we recruited another rogue and went with rogue, rogue, warlock, priest and, of course, myself.

First pull… priest dies, warlock dies. Ok, forgot, they’ve not been here before and I’m only just getting into tanking. Pulling packs of less than 10 is probably a good idea. Oh well, I guess I’ll start clearing the other si…

“The time has come! Gul’dan, order your Warlocks to double their efforts! Moments from now, the gateway will open and your Horde will be unleashed on this ripe, unsuspecting world.”

Oh bugger…

Only half the instance trash cleared and I’ve just started the event. Me, the one who’s supposed to know what I’m doing. “Screw it! Let’s do this!” I cried semi-cheerfully as my big furry rear hurtled towards the first mini-boss. At least this might be a challenge.

It wasn’t. It was one of the fastest Black Morass runs I’ve ever done with a semi-pug and especially surprising given that the only ones who were reasonably geared were myself and one of my irl friends - the first rogue. (Our other friends are sick of hearing us talking about our rogues - conversations like “OMG then I… like.. hit evasion and trinket and, like, dps was crazy and he totally died and it was sooo cool!” )

The only problem we had was out healer having a bit of a tough time on the second boss. He didn’t know about the debuff and I was way too out of practice to kite him enough for it to wear off. Oh well, frenzied regen + dodge trinket made everything all better.

Loot was, sadly, rubbish, but I’ve not had as much fun in Black Morass in ages!

It made me realise how much I miss tanking - I’ve tried it, dps and healing now on different classes and it really is a toss up as to which I prefer. Tanking gives me a feeling of control, dps a feeling of power and healing a toss up of both of those with a dash of fear. That’s a post in itself, though. I really need to stop making my posts so long and I wanted to add the following addendum to my I-love-my-druid post.

I was never a healer on my druid, never enjoyed it when I did try it and didn’t really have the aptitude back then, or the patience, to heal. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t love my leafier brethren and so I’ll let them tell you about why I’m putting the above picture here.

_{So much for trying to make a short post. Bah!}