Identity Crisis

Note: The following post is somewhat rambly and meaningless.  You've been warned.

When I first set up my second spec, I chose to pick a tanking spec as opposed to a damage dealing or alternate healing spec.  I had several reasons for my decision, including wanting to be more helpful to my friends, being more intrigued by the mechanics of Paladin tanking than damage dealing, and because Protection felt like the right choice from an in-character point of view.  Since then, I've ended up tanking significantly more dungeons than I've healed (although I still heal more often than tank in raids), and my tanking set has slowly grown from the initial Blacksmith-crafted set I started off with.  I'm somewhat saddened by the fact that the day has finally come where it's now better than the set of gear I use for healing.

Now, don't get me wrong, tanking as a Paladin is certainly as amusing as I thought it would be, but there's part of me that will always be a healer at heart.  I'm definitely a better healer than tank, still, but that's partly because I've found that I don't really enjoy tanking as much as I enjoy healing.  When I heal, I tend to not mind people's shenanigans (such as pulling extra groups or standing in front of a mob when meleeing), but as a tank those same behaviors drive me insane.  It's especially annoying when my friends are the ones pulling such stunts, as I have no doubt that they know better and are either being silly or have just gotten so used to steamrolling content that they've stopped bothering trying to play their best.

Unfortunately for me, raid invites have become few and far between (due to a massive supply of healers and a relatively stable healing core, which I'm not a part of), and the new Dungeon Finder system makes running 5-mans with friends a bit tedious, since a friends group requires sitting around and waiting for folks to swap characters, finish whatever they're doing, and/or organizing the group and figuring out where we want to go, which just begins to feel like wasting time considering I have access to instantaneous Dungeon Finder PuGs.  Plus, it's just plain easier to be mad at a random stranger who decides to slack off than a friend who's not giving it his all.  Besides, even prior to the new system my experience was that bad PuGs were a rarity, with the vast majority of PuG groups falling on the "would run with again" side of the scale, so I don't really have the same fear of random groups that so many others seem to have.  Who knows, maybe my standards are just low?

So, if you're wondering what the above post means for you, me, and/or the blog, the answer is pretty much "absolutely nothing".  I just felt I needed to get the above onto paper (even if it is the virtual kind) so I can get a better view of it and figure out what I want to do.  I don't really want to keep tanking (especially if it means that I'm denied the opportunity to heal instead), but I'm also not sure if hanging up my tanking set and picking up a big two-handed hammer in Cataclysm is the right way to go, either.  Perhaps this will help me sort it out.