59-64: Home Sweet Home

In BC, I tanked a lot of heroics on my Paladin.  A whole lot.  I didn't start playing her until after 2.4 had introduced nearly BiS badge gear so by the time I hit 70, heroics were basically the best use of my time.  Additionally, I had a good friend who played a holy priest and the two of us could chain run heroics for hours.  Suffice to say, I can run BC instances with my eyes closed.

So when I finally hit Outland on my Druid, instances became a breeze (not that they were difficult before).  I knew every pull, I knew which mobs feared, which stunned, who hit hard, yadda yadda yadda.  This made runs go really fast and provoked countless "awesome tanking" comments from the group.  And it was all a ton of fun.  By the low 60s, Druids have acquired almost all of their tanking tools (with the exception of Lacerate) and have enough talent points to pick up virtually all the important survivability and threat talents.

Ironically, having all these talents and abilities means I'm able to spam one button almost the entire run... Shift+R which I have bound to the following macro:
/cast Swipe (Bear)
/cast Maul

The rest of my party can just AOE everything down and unless I'm chain stunned or something, threat has never been a problem.  If rage becomes an issue then I just hit "R" which is bound to simple Swipe (Bear); it still generates decent AOE threat.

One downside to Outland was that instance queues were no longer instant.  I'm guessing this had to do with DKs showing up. 

Those Silly DKs:

Queues were still generally under 5 minutes, but healers were now the limiting factor instead of tanks and when I was trying to queue in the morning on Saturday I was getting some annoying waiting times.

Through level 64, I was getting a mix of Ramps, BF, SP, and UB.  All of which are pretty quick and with almost no noteworthy obstacles.  The final few pulls of BF might be worth mentioning though - these are the pulls with two felguards and a warlock.  The trick is that the felguards will randomly drop aggro and charge a party member.  The best way to deal with these is to have the entire party stack up on the tank so that no one is far enough away to be charged.  However, in pugs it's usually not worth the effort to try to explain this to the group so I tend to just deal with the aggro dropping and charging.  Here's how I do it:

• FFF the Warlock to establish some aggro and start the pull.
• Mark one of the felguards as skull and first target to die (this means hopefully 1-2 of the DPS will get the clue and DPS it first).
• While DPSing the felguards, be ready to taunt either of them who decide to charge one of the other party members.  If taunt is on CD then charge and mangle to grab aggro back.
• Toss FFF on the warlock occasionally to make sure the healer doesn't get aggro.

None of the mobs hit hard enough that you should ever be at risk for wiping on these pulls, but having a bit of a gameplan going in makes sure no one dies and it makes you look like a better tank.