This is admittedly a post that I am not entirely certain how to get started. I’ve been thinking about it for a bit and yesterday’s blog post was a bit of a filler while I sorted out my thoughts further. It is my Birthday today and as a result, I am getting around much more slowly than usual. I did go get bonus donuts though so that was tasty. When I started this blog back in 2009 its original purpose was to be a “World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking Blog” patterned off of another idol of mine who was doing something similar with her experiences as the main tank for a raid. I was the main tank from Burning Crusade through Cataclysm, at which point I hopped off that bandwagon and had to sort of reinvent the concept of this blog. Basically tanking is in my DNA and I have done a heck of a lot of it over the years.

Something happened though during Shadowbringers that sort of broke me. I am not sure how or why it happened, but I stopped being willing to queue for random groups with strangers. I would still be willing to tank for my friends, but those groups became fewer and further apart. Instead, I started spending most of my time on a DPS alt, because it didn’t really require anything of me to join a group and blend in. I am not sure if it was my lack of willingness to take responsibility for the success or failure of a group, or that the community as a whole was feeling less friendly than it did previously. Whatever the case I developed a mental block against tanking that held for roughly five years. When Endwalker launched I exclusively did that content with the Trust system and tanked zero dungeons for random people.

I honestly think I probably would have stayed in this “stuck” state indefinitely were it not for my recent foray into Pandaria Remix. It was a temporary environment with extremely low stakes and to get anything started… you either had to hope someone accepted you into their party finder group or in my case… just start your own. It quickly became just the status quo that I was forming groups on the regular, at first just for the world bosses, and then later for the normal mode raids that did not have dungeon finder support. I got so comfortable building groups that it sort of whittled away at that mental block to the point where I felt ready to do more. I think the magic of Pandaria Remix is that it is a 90-day experiment and no matter how bad things go… everything you are doing is just temporary which makes the player base considerably more forgiving about everything.

Even then when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV for the purpose of catching up to the pre-Dawntrail content… I stuck with a DPS character. This was in part because somewhere along the line I had stopped gearing Paladin which was my Endwalker main job. All the while though… there was a not-so-subtle itch in the back of my skull telling me that I really wanted to try tanking again. I set my mind to finishing out the story and then my goal was to siphon off resources to the point where I could build up a decent set of gear for tanking purposes. That plan didn’t exactly carry forth as intended.

When Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn first launched, I went all in on Warrior and it was my main job up until Endwalker. I loved EVERYTHING about the job… except Overpower which last I knew was a frontal cone attack that you had to carefully time in order to make sure you clipped everything in front of you. A lot of the appeal of Paladin was that I could have a much more chill experience hitting everything around me in a big circle. However, as much as I love the concept of Sword and Board, there was just something much more enjoyable about hitting things with a big axe. Essentially I got the itch to level my Warrior and then noticed that at some point when I was not looking Overpower was changed to function almost exactly like the Paladin AOE. This set a plan in motion to level up and gear my Warrior so that I could switch to it as my main in Dawntrail.

However, at this point, I was not actually tanking much of anything. For the first few levels, I was running a daily Frontline and then doing the Hippo Endwalker dailies to get essentially one easy level each reset. However when I got to level 88… I started to get impatient and started queuing for what I thought of as some of the low-hanging fruit like Mainstory Roulette. It went pretty smoothly and felt pretty great… which built up my confidence to start queueing for Leveling, and eventually the Mid-level roulette, and so on. When I survived the embarrassment of forgetting to throw my stance on… trying to turn it on while pulling… accidentally dragging it off my bar… and then wiping the group… I figured I could handle anything. Truth be told… easing back into tanking has felt good. It has felt like I am exercising a skill that I had forgotten about and put away in the closet for some reason.

At this point I think I am on my fourth day of doing all of the roulettes as a tank… or at least everything but Trial and Alliance Raid. It isn’t so much that I don’t think I can do those… but more that I am not sure I want the hassle of tanking those yet. I’ve started splitting time with Dark Knight and Warrior as I am trying to level up that job… with the ultimate goal of getting all of my tanks to 90 so that I can jettison all of that old tanking gear. I’m honestly having a freaking blast and I feel more alive in Final Fantasy XIV than I have in years. It is like I had forgotten at some point along the way, just how freaking fun the dungeons are in this game and how well-designed they are. Do I remember every mechanic perfectly? Absolutely not. However, I am remembering most of them enough to limp my way through the fights while also racking up a lot of commendations along the way. Comms feel good.

I’ve managed to get my tanking gear up to a decent enough level for starting the next expansion and I will keep picking up the rare tomestone gear as I move forward. I did buy a shiny crafted Axe because I did not want to deal with the nonsense of getting a similar axe and then trying to augment it. Once the expansion goes live I will be spending my Poetics on getting maxed out level 80 and 90 sets for various roles so that I can level those in a chill manner. Generally speaking that max raid tier is good enough to get you all the way through the next expansion. My goal is to get really merciless with what I actually hold onto gear wise, because I am tired of having my vaults stuffed full of random trash. I’ve also been having quite a bit of luck buying loot boxes with Grand Company Seals.

I guess my next goal is to reclaim my raid leader heritage and get comfortable forming Squads with my mostly unused Catmander tag. Baby steps I know… but I think the dam that burst with me getting comfortable tanking for strangers may also sweep downstream and eventually batter down the dam that that was placed there to stop me from leading larger groups. Also, appreciate Thumper the baby Siege Turtle because he is precious. Anyways… I am now looking forward to Dawntrail more than I have previously because I actually want to try and progress through the raid tiers and extreme fights while they are current. I am trying really hard to apply the lessons learned during Pandaria Remix to playing more serious games… because at the end of the day… the opinion of strangers does not matter in the least. However, it does seem a bit like some of the toxicity I was seeing in the FFXIV community when it had a mass influx of WoW players… has potentially died down as well.

I hope you have a most wonderful day. I am going to be cleaning my office… which is probably not the most exciting birthday activity but I put together a new cabinet and I need to migrate stuff into it.