An introduction seems to be in order at this point, so: Hi! My name’s Eleanor, and I play WoW. I’ve been playing since January or February of 2005; I migrated to WoW from EQ2 (and from Star Wars Galaxies before that). I play a human paladin, Sailan, whose focus has always been healing – although of late I’ve expanded my focus to cover off-tanking as well, since a pally offtank is invaluable for AoE pulls in places like Karazhan. I find tanking challenging and interesting, but I wouldn’t want to do it full-time, that’s for sure. On the other hand, I’ve played main healers in every MMO since Ultima Online; a bit of variety would probably do me good.
I play with an Aussie guild, Southern Wardens, on the US Proudmoore server – we’ve been together for nearly four years now, from Star Wars Galaxies through Everquest 2 and now into WoW (with occasional side jaunts into diversions like Lord of the Rings Online to boot). We’re a casual raiding guild; we’ve just finished Gruul’s Lair and will probably go hit up Magtheridon or Void Reaver next – lagging behind the raiding community, certainly, but we got off to a slow start after TBC’s release thanks to major burnout on the part of most of the officers, and we’re picking up speed pretty well now.
Oh, and just to make life more interesting – and more complex! – I’ve been the Southern Wardens guildleader for the last six or eight months, the … *counts on fingers* … fourth, I think, since the guild migrated to WoW (although I was the guildleader in EQ2, as well). As if I didn’t already have enough to do… ;-)
I am so n00bed out on the MMO gaming.
I get tanking – but what the heck is off-tanking?
Off-tanking is basically secondary tanking – in some situations you’ll be facing more enemies than your tank can deal with. In those cases, your off-tank will pick up one or more of the left-over monsters and tank them.
So an off-tank doesn’t need to be nearly as well-equipped as a main tank, because they’re not going to be tanking all the time, and when they _do_ tank it’ll typically be against the weakest of the collected enemies. Off-tanks are often hybrids – people who are partially specialised (in terms of equipment and abilities) in tanking and partly specialised in some other area, like healing or damage-dealing.
Off tanks are the nougat in the tasty candy bar most parties end up being. They’re there (mostly) to protect the squishy, creamy filling that most primary healers are.
Tanks can keep a lot of aggro but with some pulls there just aren’t enough crowd control techniques and health/armor to manage all of the mobs at once fighting one tank. When this is the case an off tank will be expected to step up and take a mob or two himself to waylay damage on the primary tank or in a worse situation to prevent them from going after the priest.