Tanking with a paladin (or with any toon) wasn’t something I tried until my toon was at least level 76. This was before the Dungeon Finder-tool came to life and you had to constantly spam both ‘Trade’ and ‘Looking For Group’ chat for hours before finally getting to the actual instance.
We were a small group of friends who had met in the game who liked doing stuff together; a druid, priest, hunter and then me, the paladin. I wanted to try healing, so I wasn’t interested in tanking at first. But having to spend hours trying to get ahold of a tank when you’re standing there with two other people who can already heal instead is just frustrating. So I made the switch. Ran a couple of instances in order get practice in on how to tank. Luckily, paladin is a class that is frightfully easy to tank with and I pride myself in knowing I can chainpull almost any heroic instance without causing too much strain on the healer. Mostly also because I heavily outgear them of course.
Then the Dungeon Finder-tool happened.
“Back in the day” one was always careful with how you responded to people, how you treated people, and how you played with others. Cause no one wants to group with an asshole, especially not for hours while raiding. The Dungeon Finder however now allows people from multiple servers go into an instance together. People no longer need to watch their mouths worrying word will spread about your shitty personality. They no longer have to worry about their reputation. And they sure act like immature assholes whenever they can.
If you spend an extra 5 seconds buffing everyone before running off to the first mob, you’ll be told to “go or gtfo”. If you don’t skip bosses they feel they don’t want to waste time with, they’ll tell you to “stfu or gtfo”. If something happens for a variety of reasons, regardless of who’s fault it might be which results in a wipe, you’re being quite graphically explained just how much they feel you suck and it’s all your fault. I’ve also gotten the really cranky healers who feels to exercise their non-existant power with threatening to not heal me for whatever reason they find logical.
I’m standing there with over 42 000 health unbuffed in Utgarde Keep Heroic, sweetheart. I can do this fine without heals, thanks.
Then of course it’s the whole thing about loot. Cause everyone has an offspec today. It still puzzles me when some people tell me they dont’. I can somewhat understand it if you play a pure dps class, but for hybrid classes having the opportunity to play multiple roles just strikes me as more of an advantage.
And because of offspec, you no longer get first pickings on your upgrades cause evidently “I can just run this again later, while you might -consider- tanking in a distant future and will need it more”.
Let’s just say it wasn’t my idea of fun to farm Halls of Reflection to get the tanking shield to drop only to loose the roll to a dps who wants it for PVP.
No wonder nobody wants to tank anymore. I don’t even want to tank anymore.