I seem to be missing something…

Working on my absurdly overpowered baby warrior in little spurts.

I broke down and got him the helm and shoulders and cloak to go with the chest and axe… and I got him a full set of the same in the tanking flavor.

Obviously substituting the 1-handed sword for the 2-handed axe.

Although, I have healed an instance or two with a low-level tank insisting that it was just as good as having a shield… he made me say unkind things. There was possibly gnashing of teeth and questions regarding his parentage and drug use.

And obviously I made yet another blood elf.

Coincidentally, I wanted my first ever WoW character to be a blood elf warrior and was very saddened when I discovered that even if I had access to the BC expansion, my dream could not come to pass. Because picking up a sword and hitting people with it just couldn’t be done by a blood elf without some sort of mystical assistance in the form of a little blue bar.

So obviously as a blood elf I am repeating the questlines running out to Tranquilien for the umpteenth time.

With the addition of even more free XP (between the long pauses between playing him and the massive amounts of BoA gear he’s loaded with) I’m zipping through content at a frightful speed.

Oh, and murlocs have more spines now. This makes for many fewer kills.

This has had some interesting side effects.

While fighting some ghost-types that would increase their dodge chance by 60% or some obnoxious number I screamed “can’t dodge DoTs, bitch!” while watching my Rend ticking down on her with my axe *whiffing* wildly about her.

I also frequently feel that I am invincible.

As if the universe itself wished to prove me wrong, Knucklerot lumbered across the path before me.

I’ve been hitting 70+ DPS, even spiking up to 121.1DPS at level 13.

Of course I didn’t grab a shot of THAT 121.1 DPS, but 114.7 isn’t too shabby.

How hard could this be?

I failed to notice that Knucklerot is level 21 until it was a tad too late.

My overpowered DPS was no match for something that I couldn’t freaking hit. And I mean, seriously? He’s got to be 3 times my size and I can’t hit him? Whatever. Apparently an 8 level deficit was just too much.

As I prepared to run back to my corpse all the way across the zone (because obviously I was not prepared), paused to consider my choices.

3 minutes of resurrection sickness? Or running, on foot, allllllllllll the way across the zone? And alllllllllllll the way back to turn in my quests.

Hmmmm… but there’s that 10% durability damage to deal with. Let’s see, 10% of 0 is…. math is hard…. zero!

Bless you, zero durability BoA gear.

I was now in place to turn in a gabillion quests and in very short order was able to ding to 15 after a brief jaunt down the scar.

Level 15 means that I’m eligible to enter the dungeon finder.

As a tank because I suffer from brain damage!

Alright, let’s make sure all my talent points are spent (I would take Blood and Thunder in any spec just because I like the name) and swap all this prot gear on.

Got a helm… got some shoulders… a cloak… a chest… I’m looking pretty snazzy here with my 1-handed sword and in my off-hand…

Problem?

I had no shield.

There was a quest reward shield back when I was in the cradle, but I dumped it under the assumption that I would get a better one before level 15.

But I leveled so fast that I didn’t have to do a lot of quests and didn’t get as many mob drops on account of all the mobs I didn’t have to kill.

No problem! I’m on a high-pop server with a booming AH. I’ll just find a low-level shield on the AH.

And there was one.

With intellect.

Fuck me.

A quick search on WoWHead shows that there is a vendor in Silvermoon that sells a shield I can use.

A piddly, little white-quality shield but at least it’s not a 2-handed axe and it’s not an int shield. Both would have been blogger fodder.

Now, we are ready!

To log out.

My little quest for a shield took too long and now I have to raid.

So our epic tale of me being a brain damaged tank will have to wait for another day.