Knowing how to activate any of your Oh noes buttons is good for any class.

there’s just one advice for new tanks you may have left out: Never, ever tank an instance you are not comfortable with.

For the 2 years I’ve tanked, I’ve time and time again have let myself been talked into tanking instances in PUGs, that I was actually undergeared for – and you can imagine the results :(

With so relatively few tanks about, you will as a new tank be invited to tank in PUGs all the time, but be careful what you aggree to. I’ve had so much hazzle in PUGs, who had begged me to tank a heroic altho I only had run them on normal, so that I only tank for guildies now.

Experince in tanking is invaluable, true, but make sure to make that experience a good one. If you are in a guild, ask a more experienced tank for advice and training. All guilds need tanks and should help you out.

- Tankmekana (Hell yeah, gnomes can tank)

My best advice would be to be an offtank. Honestly i think OT’ing 10 man naxx is the way to go once you have run a few heroics and gotten a feel for the role. Its a good opportunity to see how other people tank while you are still figuring things out for yourself. One thing that we did in my guild was have the usual OT step in as main, have the new tank fill in for the OT, and then I would just DPS kitty style and pop in to bear if anything bad happened. Setting up like that worked pretty well for us because it took away a lot of the pressure for the new tank so he could learn what works and doesn’t work without the fear of wiping the group.

Also, be a friendly tank, not one of those angry ones. Tanks that yell and scream at their raid group trying to be the center of attention are way too common these days, we don’t need any more of them.

Built in to WoW’s interface, is actual hotkey spots for the different raid marks. I bound those to my numpad (seriously, get autorun off of numlock already, move it to ] or something)

I can mark quickly pre-pulls and during pulls if needbe as well.

As far as marking targets goes I use Opie to handle my marking. Basically, I hope down Shift+Mouse5 and it brings up a ring with all of the marks and then I move my mouse in the direction (N, S, W, etc.) of the mark I wish to use and then let go of the keybind and it will mark it. Really speeds up the marking, which is nice because I tend to pull fast.

Another suggestion would be to use some sort of addon (or party frames) that will monitor the mana of your dps/healers, they will love you if you actually are watching their mana during pulls so they can drink. Also, it helps to use an addon that will monitor if anyone other than you has aggro on a mob. Currently I use Grid to handle both of the suggestions. I suppose you could use Target of Target to see who a mob is targeting, but Grid will show a red border around anyone who has aggro and I can get that mob off of them.

Finally, I would say to any new tanks not to get discouraged. Lately, tanking druids haven’t really been the optimal tanking classes used by a lot of the high-end raiding guilds, at least on my realm (Bleeding Hollow). Yeah, we do have situations where we excel, but I have personally tanked every instance (pre-Ulduar) in the game without any issues, so anyone who says that druid tanks aren’t a preferred choice is full of crap.

Blizzard Devs: “Our nerfs will block out the sun.”
Druid Tanks: “Then we’ll tank in the shade.”