Spiders, webs... and terrible poison, oh my!

Today I tanked Azjol Nerub for the first time, my guild leader Jaer was there and he encouraged me, he also told me about some add ons, programs that modify the interface of WoW, how I interact with the game that should make my life easier. Having him on the runs is both really cool and sometimes a little disconcerting, he knows pallies so well cause he raided on one that he can give me advice and having him means I pay extra special attention so I can do it right to impress him, but it also makes me a little nervous because he's a better paladin than I am. Today even though we died a few times and I was reminded to keep consacrate up he told me I did good, I think it's not fair of me to rely on him for my self confidence and when I got into the swing of things and believed in myself I ok, I am still adjusting my bars and getting used to tanking. It's not the most difficult thing in the world but it still takes getting used to sometimes. One of the things that was bad this time was that one boss had poison that leeched my life and healed hers, maybe my new addons will help with that. I feel bad that we wiped at all actually. I think it's not that wipes don't matter but that if you wipe and learn from it and then manage to clear the dungeon you did a good job.

Last night a trinket saved my life!

This week I ran a bunch of dungeons as tank, I ran 5 or 6 dungeons: Shattered Halls, Nexus, Auchenai Crypts(not sure about spelling), Sethekk Halls and most of Utguarde Keep. I say most of Utguarde keep because I wiped at least once on each boss in the dungeon once. My guild leader who is both an amazing player and a really great guy told me that I did a really good job even though we did wipe a few times and even though in the end two party members had to get level 80's to finish the Keep I would like to think I did well. I'm still reeling at this, I am amazed to find I am a good tank. One thing that helped me was the fact that I have ne of the most popular tanking trinkets that drops in the outlands!

When I first made my toon I never imagined I would be tanking dungeons with him, and when I failed my first attempt at tanking evar I never thought I would ever do as well as I did this week. My guild leader used to raid for one of the major raiding guilds on ym server and he told me I was doing a good job. One of the reasons that we had trouble was that our super competant healer was a few levels lower than the rest of the group, it's not to say that she was bad just that even a higher level healer would have trouble doing what we attempted.

In the middle of Utguarde Keep I suddenly realized that I had a project even better than PvP practices in WoW sitting in my lap. A project that is much better suited to the auto-ethnographic method, the story of me and my blood elf paladin. The story of how I decided to make him, how I leveled him, what happened to him and what I am doing with him now. This is part of the story of how I started to play WoW and comes from my encounters with the game and the other players.

I'm sure that it has less of the anthropological cachet of "I went to observe the wild PvPer in his native environment." that anthropology sometiems seems to sometimes revel in but I think this will make my project ulitmately more managable.