What Do You Look for in a Main Tank?

Sundays are 25 man VoA/Ony/ToC. Our guild is not skilled enough for ICC 25 quite yet, so we keep pounding content we know we can do in an hour or two. No big deal right?

We had a hell of a time raiding last night. We wiped on Jaraxxus twice, Anub twice, and ony once. It was three hours start to finish, and on top of that it just wasn't fun.  Our MT/GL started by saying "I don't feel like tanking. I don't want to think so I'm going to DPS." There are so many things wrong with that statement.

You fought to be MT, even when Wrath came out and there were no longer MT roles. I got muscled out of tanking by a new recruit who wasn't better than me, which I was somewhat unhappy about at the time. If you want to be MT and you're kicking others out of tanking, you should want to tank.

I understand that sometimes you want to DPS - say that. One of the things you have as Guild Leader is that you should be upbeat about things. Say you want to try dpsing and give some of the other tanks a chance. That is the optimistic thing to say.  Don't be Debbie Downer, alienating most of the raid while you're at it.

He also perpetuated the idea that DPS is thoughtless and easy. Sure, DPSing can be thoughtless to you, because you can always fall back on the "I'm not geared/used to doing damage." Next time, just say "I don't want to try" if you don't want to try. Don't demean my role (and the roles of 14 other people.)

It didn't help that we had 23 people for ToC and 22 people for Ony. We don't pick up extra PuGs, because our guild is afraid of giving away gear. Healers were stretched thin. We had three experienced healers, one still coming up to skill, and one who has gear but doesn't really try. Mad props to the healers for getting us through those messes.

People were fumbling all around, missing interrupts, standing together, doing things wrong. It happens, I know. But it wasn't fun while we were doing it. Compare it to last week when our GL didn't show up, we cleared content faster, we had fun (despite some strange wipes on Ony).

I started this post thinking about what you want out of a MT, but it seems to have devolved to something else. Let's just say I'm glad we have some officers who will play jock jams to pump up the raid when we wipe. Otherwise I'd only show up for progression.

In other news, I'm going to try some crazy stuff with my arcane spec once I get a few more pieces. Should be interesting.

So, seriously. What do you look for in a main tank?