Step one: acceptance

Im coming around to the view that, however sensible it might be from a real life perspective to only play one character, alt-isis is something I'm stuck with.

Anyway, I've started up Shank (my warrior) again - must stop reading warrior blogs, perhaps that will help!

I was pottering around in Hellfire Peninsula doing that damn quest where you have to kill the fel cannons (it's noticably difficult compared to others of the same level, but I was starting to love fury dps again) when a call in General came for a tank. Not a great run, although I won't go into details, but in some ways quite a good reality check.

I'm fairly sure I used to be a pretty good tank, but now I'm only a fairly average tank - although a lot better than some I've run into! Partly it's rustiness (things like I was forgetting to use Shield Block to make Revenge light up) and partly I can get a bit flustered when things go wrong early in the pull - perhaps because I don't quite have confidence in myself, or perhaps because I don't have confidence in the dps...! I am starting though to learn things like letting the aggro-monster mail wearer off-tank skull, then just concentrating on keeping everything else off the healer.

The tank shortage also seems to be wearing off a bit. I think this has partly been self correcting, as people have seen the shortage and levelled tanks. And it's worth remembering that on the day when you're on your tank you can be in a group that then needs a healer.

I think the rumoured changes in WotLK should help things further - if Death Knights can tank with any talent tree (i.e. just specialising in different directions) then hopefully warriors will also be able to tank while also having a spec that lets them quest. There's also the possibility that we'll be able to switch between two talent trees, which will help even further. That will hopefully fix the tank shortage for 5-man groups (and in anything larger healers remain more in demand than tanks).

Hence, at least for now my plan is -

• Shaman main
• Warrior tank alt (ideally geared enough to tank a heroic, but nothing further)
• My rogue for sneaking around, opening lockboxes, and disenchanting greens
• And a balance / resto druid for seeing the Alliance side of the game