Hello people, today we're gonna have a short tale of how the switch from Mage to Warrior happened for me and some random thoughts about it.

Let’s first look back at my own playing history.
Interested in knowing more about the Warrior class as well as the Tank role in TBC (also because it was a highly demanded class for Arena back then, and I wanted to start PvPing), I decided to level a new alt after my Warlock. The leveling was quite fun, I thought, as I was buying new gear and especially weapons from the AH, and without normalized rage back then you could instantly feel a huge difference when you would switched from that quest green 1 hand sword to a purple Flurry Axe.



I geared it up slowly in Karazhan, Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep and Black Temple, but this was never anything more than a PvP alt all the way and the time for alt-glory was yet to come for the Warrior.



Indeed it was later, in Trial of the Grand Crusader, that Ekyz came to light and for the first time had an active part in progress, as we got World First Immortal in this instance.



After this, on other occasions it had been discussed that I could make the switch to Warrior as main, but since Kungen was still around this was in a DPS role. As we always ended up recruiting new warriors and never any mage replacement this never happened.

However, today things have changed. Kungen is gone and we had a good mage roster with Mancy, Hearnt and most recently Pizzalol. We then needed a new main tank and since the two roles merge well together, I got a promotion to both main tank and raid leader.



The change itself was quite rough as expected. Although I had good knowledge of encounters from the tank point of view because I participated in making up our strategies with Kungen, I had never actually put that knowledge into action and that's a very important thing in the way I play.

I got thrown into the arena the first week after Kungen's disappearance, not so much stressed about any encounter except for Nefarian and Sinestra. Nefarian because of the add kitting and
Sinestra mainly because there are many tank switches to do between Sinestra's main tank and whelps, and I was to tank said whelps. Placing them in the wrong spot would make them leave a terrible pool or respawn and lead to a raid wipe.

That's the main thing with going from a random DPSer to a main tank. Everything you do is seen by every single player in the raid and any mistake you do leads to a wipe. As a DPSer, and especially a mage, even if you make a mistake it can either be stealthy or you can just use one of the many tools at your disposition (Ice Block, Blink) to make it through alive.



Raid leading isn't an easy thing either, but at least I had notions of it, listening and watching Macken, Mek and more recently Kungen for years now.

The main difference for me between raid leading as a Mage and a Warrior though, is that as a Mage I have to think about my positioning (a safe place) and my DPS rotation (not so much for Arcane though, more about mana management or what's left of it). As a Tank I just generally feel that in the first tier of raid content I could just bring the boss where it is meant to be and watch what everyone is doing, reminding them of what they have to do (on encounters like Council in Bastion of Twilight) and what to watch out for, call dire situations etc.

I think I'm pretty good in that role.
However, if there is one bad thing about my raid leading, it is my inability to understand people's mistakes when they happen more than once. I'm pretty forgetful when it's the first or second time someone fails at an ability, I'll explain to them how to do it better and avoid repeating the mistake, however, when someone is not listening and keeps making the same error it makes me go ballistic (all that in a French accent of course!).



This all worked out pretty well for Firelands as far as Tanking was concerned. However, the encounters were much more demanding from the Tanking PoV, especially Alysrazor and I couldn't give as many directions as I would have wanted to to.

Thankfully Mek and Caleb were there to help people on their assigned healing or dps tasks and that's what it comes down to I think, a leader alone isn't as efficient as a raid leader listening and getting help from the other officers and his raiders.