The Daily Grind: What was your favorite experience as a tank?

My favorite experience as a tank was WoW during Wrath of the Lich King, back when my skill/gear was all that was necessary to pull people through a random heroic and any issue with our party could simply be resolved with MOAR tanking.

Tanking in Naxx 2.0 on my DK (Unholy, how I miss thee.)

After they brought in the Stoneskin Gargoyle runeforge. Before that, gearing was a nightmare.

Oh I remember my greatest moment as a tank... I was playing my Jedi on the Essles and we were ... wait... that comes later.

Tank build for my Warrior in Guild Wars PvP, I was the last guy alive and the other team had a ranger, a warrior ad a monk. They just couldn't kill me :D

The moment when i got the Maus in World of _TANKS_ and cruised thru Himmelsdorf death alley without dieing.

Then, i was a real tank.

I usually dont like playing heavy-armor tpe classes, but I would say my most enjoyable experience of tanking would be in EQ2's The Shadow Odyssey, tanking that Forge place (wow its been a while) with all the giants and the lava...on a warlock.

It was the daily shard double i believe and we couldnt be bothered spamming for a real tank so my robe-wearing apocalypse-spreading ratonga did it instead, very good fun. The two pick-ups we had with us were terrified ;p

*sigh* back when EQ2 was good.

Tanking in WoW's Karazhan with my warrior. It was fun! But then I got tired of always being in the worst point of view of the fight and didn't tank much in the next expansions.

Probably the first time I actually tanked a raid in WoW. Kara, 60(I forget cap back then) dwarf warrior, Foobar. I was freaking out, but it got me hooked on tanking for life. Meatshields FTW!

I was a fresh 80 tankadin running around in blues and greens with around 18k HP buffed. However, I consider myself a decent enough tank and play tanks in pretty much every single MMO I partake in. We went into heroic Halls of Stone and my party was complaining about how they should've gotten a "less newb tank." It was my first time in that instance.

When we arrived at the first boss, Krystallus, the rest of my party wiped near the end of the fight. I blew all my cooldowns and ended up finishing the boss off solo. The party was stunned, no one could believe i survived. After rezzing/rebuffing the party we ended up finishing the dungeon without any problems. It ended up getting me a lot of jobs as the tank in heroics, and I never had problems finding a group.

It just goes to show you gear score wasn't as important as everyone believed.

My first time actually tanking a dungeon in WoW's Hellfire Ramparts. My roommate and I had been leveling together, and we specifically asked in the LFG channel for people who were new to instancing. I was nervous, but we all had fun and one of the other party members told me that it had made her less scared of grouping with other people. Before the cross-server dungeon finder tool and prevalent speed-running mentality, I really liked tanking.

WAR again, Swordmaster because he is so fabulous, and Ironbreaker because, well, he is an unstoppable dwarf, what more is there to say?

PvE tanking though is just about the least fun i can have in an MMO, so i am very grateful for tanks.

In WoW, loved my tankadin....first tank i ever leveled and i leveld all the way up as a tank no dps spec or anything, it was such a blast, had never played a tank at all till wrath came out and i was hooked from there, now i make tanks almost right away on games.

A few stand-out tanking experiences:

Once upon a while when I never tanked yet, played a healbot pally and before the Paladin was considered a prime tank in WoW, a buddy asked me to tank for some tough group quests for him. I haven't had any real tank gear, so I donned my PvP stuff (to avoid crits, it still worked back then!) and proceeded to aggro a half-a-mil HP elite, while healing myself constantly, while my buddy was slinging some fireballs at the mob staying below my aggro. The experience of being THE front-line protector and staring the enemy 'right in the eye' felt much more paladin-ish to me than standing waaay back and spamming '1' key every 1.5 second.

Another one from WoW is my druid tank (shapeshifting to bear) in much later expansion. With Bash and Skull Bash bears became much more mobile, not just stand in place, take your hits meatshields, but rather rush in, throw a swipe at some mobs to get their attention and launch myself as a furry projectile to a caster about to poly one of my teammates.

And finally, the World of Tanks. While you are not a 'tank' in the RPG sense of the world, there are some tanks that are designed to take a beating. So when I got one of those - an american T29 - it felt like a revelation, a true 'heavy' experience - standing on the hill with my turret being the attraction of the whole other team, being pummeled with shots and just laughing that off and steadily turning my big gun: BOOM! - - BOOM! - .....

Anarchy Online - Enforcer - MONGOOOOOOOOOOO!

My favorite experience tanking had to be as a Warrior dual wielding in Everquest, Scars of Velios. My guild had disbanded for the night to "purge" spies from our ranks, so I joined with another friendly guild just to get some play time in ToV for the night. They ended up fighting one of the main dragon bosses, who I believe was Lord Vyemm.

When their tank went down in the first 2 minutes of the fight, I immediately stepped my game up and took over without hesitation. Their healers were confused because nobody even really knew me and they didn't know what I could handle. I ended up tanking the boss for a solid 37 minutes while their DPS slowly grinded him down, while rotating the boss to avoid cone attacks on the raid. When we finally beat the dragon, I got a great many thank yous and a lot of "blank stares in disbelief" if you could actually see them through a monitor :P One of my best nights in an MMO ever.

In CoH. When those know-it-all "I am teh master of teh numbers" repeatedly said "No Fire Tanker can main tank the STF. No. Never. They can't.".
Well guess what : It could, with nobody dying. How I laughed. :D

Meh a few more examples of tanking that made me re-think the whole 'stand in place meatshield' concept.

Back at the beginnning of the WoW TBC expansion I joined a real raiding guild as a pally healer, the guild tank took me to a heroic (Botanica, I think) to test me. To my utter surprise, he did not have a shield, but rather dual-wielded weapons (a dps signature). I was apalled - the heroics weren't as forgiving back then. While I was pretty confident that I can heal through the damage, but I would be the aggro magnet and will be killed first, I feared. It was the first time I realized that the best tanking is about timing and control - I never had a mob on me for more than one spell/hit. The guildie rushed/intercepted/pummeled and whirlwinded EVERYTHING, generating three times as much dps as the next guy and flying literally all over the place.

My next story is from the ICC times - when the DPS became overpowered and could survive an encounter with a few of elites in an instance. Blizzard also introduced very annoying (for the tank) knockback abilities for some dps classes that restored mana. Of course, they would want to use that, and of course the knockback would throw mobs around, breaking contact with the tank, screwing up careful positioning, making melee run around and spread their dps, etc. Hall of Reflection was one of the hardest heroics back then and one of the encounters is designed as a huge round room and the enemies come from all sides to the center, splitting defenses, CC and DPS. The usual strategy is to hide in one of the niches and let all mobs turn a corner with all dps focused on one at a time. And of course I (as a beginning warrior tank) got a overgeared boomkin and elemental shammy in my party and of cource they proceeded with the knockbacks, screwing up the strategy. Well, I told them they are morons, good dps notwithstanding and offered to alter our strategy to utilize their DPS and abilities - instead of hiding, since we needed to chase knocked back enemies outside of our niche anyways, move to the center of the room, and use their AOE abilities to the fulles and use the rest of the party, including the tank (myself) for temporary CC (stunning, intercepting, etc). It worked extremely well, I must say and we did two or three more heroics in the same fashion, where the tank was rarely the center of attention of all mobs and mob control was done through short-term abilities. Certainly unconventional, but much more dynamic.

Tanking a chain spawn of 25 Black Reavers in City of Mist with my Big Ugly Troll SK. What a great zone!