How to Build a Good Reputation as a New Tank (In the Post RDF World)

Orvillius is a human tankadin who was started back in Vanilla, but never reached level cap until WotLK. Orvillius dinged level 80 the week the random dungeon finder was released, in a Forge of Souls random, and spent the next couple months figuring out how to get invited to tank a raid. Despite these "handicaps" Orv established a reputation as a competent tank on his small server, joined a solid raiding guild (if one that was a little late to the party) and did manage to down the LK before Cata dropped.

Nymphy is a human arcane mage of the species called DPS. Also not been leveled capped before Wrath, she has since started a career of being belittled about loving the floor which has sometimes been at the hands of tanks. She felt like she had to come here to prevent Orv’s preaching on how to be a good tank and that it needed a dps perspective. While tanking is srs bsns, this post needed to be prevented from taking that tone. Who wants to read a dry account of tanking anyway?

Rhii is a mage-blogger-turned-resto-shaman who tries to talk seriously about healing at least once a week but usually just tells stories about fail PuGs and all the tanks she has on ignore. She’s been a healer since mid-Wrath, starting out raiding as a holy paladin and changing to resto shaman in ICC. She is moonlighting here at D/E the Tank because Oh My, Kurenai! no longer pays the bills. Wut?!

Back in prehistoric times, like when tBC was current content, 5-man dungeons were a BIG DEAL. There was a rep grind just to unlock the heroics, there were CC requirements as strict as, or even stricter than, Cata heroics, and there were attunement quests required to get in the front door of many raids. With all the time a player spent pugging for dungeons it was, speaking as someone who never personally got to level cap in BC, easier to build a reputation as a good tank, a good healer, an excellent chain trapper, a mage who never let their sheep expire, etc. In WotLK attunement requirements were removed and the difficulty curve of even the heroic dungeons was flattened considerably. This was great for casual players who wanted a level-capped toon, but not so great if you were trying to build a reputation as a competent tank! I don't think I've ever been in a guild where we had enough back up healers, so I'm going to just assume here that healers ding level 80 and have guilds offer them cookies and other bribes to come join their healing stables.

While Orv was leveling from 60-79 there was no dungeon finder, and he had to sit in the LFG channel pimping himself out, or desperately seeking a healer, if he wanted to run a dungeon. This worked in his favor as, after a while, he knew a few good healers, a couple of really solid DPS, and even another tank or two he could turn to for advice as he leveled up and unlocked new content. While that is more than many tanks have when they hit level cap today, I can't remember more than one or two occasions where those connections got Orv into a raid, and both of those were well after Orv had already established a reputation as a competent raiding tank. The point of this rambling paragraph is that while Orv did not have the benefit of the random dungeon finder while leveling, he still reached level cap in the same situation that many newly level 80 tanks find themselves in today. His guild was not going to drag him through heroics and older raids to gear him up, his gear was ok for heroics but sub-par for the current tier of raid content, and if he wanted to get into a raid he was going to have to PuG himself out.