By career change, I naturally don’t mean in real life.  I continue to earn my paychecks in my role as a random IT grunt.  No, I mean in my current MMO.

See, I enjoy playing healers.  It’s great fun to make the green bars stay mostly green, you usually don’t have to know a lot of complicated mechanics because that is almost always dumped on the shoulders of the damage dealing classes, and you’re in high demand.

Except.  In the current WoW expansion, I have the misfortune of playing a healing class that is pretty good in PvP situations but which is considered the bottom of the bottom tier as far as the raid and grouping meta goes.

And the WoW community is pretty prone to slavishly following the meta, even if they don’t always know why.

The result has been that I have found myself to be somewhat… lacking in demand.  And a healer who can’t find groups doesn’t have green bars to fill.

On the other hand, switching from a healing Paladin to a TANKING paladin only took swapping out a couple of pieces of gear and watching about eight hours of videos on How To Tank WoW Dungeons.  That is more hours than I typically devote to studying serious real-life stuff, and I am not blind to how silly that is.

Plus I changed my look to something more EDGY and TANKY to befit my new role.

Real tanks wear super emo armor.

Now that I’ve done that, and tanked my way through all of the dungeons in the Shadowlands expansion on Normal mode, and repeated it on Heroic mode, and AGAIN on “Mythic” dungeon mode… I have started running dungeons on the “Mythic Plus” modes, which are just harder and harder versions of the highest difficulty dungeons, but with better loot and with a completion timer ticking away while you try to clear.  My best so far is finishing a “+7” Mythic dungeon inside the time limit, which is a far cry from the top end but which is still much better than I would ever have expected for me.

I also tried tanking a single raid boss. It was a tedious experience, and I will not be repeating it.  WoW “raid tanking” seems to be a complicated affair of tanking just long enough to build up a debuff that will kill you if you tank any longer and then handing off the tanking duties to your co-tank until THEY have a debuff on them that will kill them at which point you take aggro again.  It’s … well, it’s obviously designed to make sure that raids always have to make spots for two tanks, and it works at that, but it’s just so far removed from anything I enjoy.

I am loving the dungeons, however, and am going to keep at those for a while.

I have also gotten geared up to the point where I can steamroll the lower-end dungeons, and I have taken to watching my in-game notifications for “guild member has joined the queue for X” at which time I jump in with them and do my best to ruin them for other tanks.  I’m awful that way.