In a Tank's footsteps tracks

With nothing to do Monday we decided to do Gruul's for old times sake... bring your alt, bring your friends and lets have fun!
It took us awhile before we finally gathered up enough people out of our friendslists and guildmembers of friends of friends but we got a nice group in the end. Some had never been there and most never done the task they were assigned to this time, playing on different toons the normal.

I was on my prot warrior as we needed a tank, otherwise i would have been tempted to come on the Hunter for the badges, but i experienced my first 25man raidboss since a loong time.... something different then tanking Karazhan. Eventhough the wipes at the start (pull on High King is tricky) i had great fun, to bad a few people we picked up didn't share the fun we had and weren't used to wiping i guess but we had fun either way and people were in a jolly mood in raidchat and on Teamspeak.
Back to me; i was tanking the King himself and while it sounds very important it was nothing more then keeping up Shieldblock and Thunderclap and press the "Oh Shit"-buttons when needed, my faith was mostly in the healers hands.
Besides that i had a couple of minutes to build threat before dps would attack the King himself so threat or rage was not an issue.
When we came to Gruul it started to be more interesting though... everyone starts nuking this dude like crazy as his damage increases so after a while he just hits like mad which makes it basicly a dps race. Apart from keeping myself alive as best as possible (debuff him and keep shieldblock and CS up) i needed to generate enough threat to keep ahead of dps.
Omen showed that i did pretty good as i had a nice headstart on dps and managed to maintain it (except for the triggerhappy feraltank who needed to stay 2nd on aggro for soaking the hatefull strikes but those bears need a serious nerf anyway :P ). The distance between us and the rest of the dps would allow me to go take a quick bio if needed, if only shieldblock would reapply automaticly.

This was the first 25man boss which i tanked completely alone and Magtheridon was the second one shortly after... what i didn't expect was that i ran out of rage every now and then.
I assumed they would hit hard enough to have a good supply all the time but i often managed to completely drain it while shortly after it would fill up after a big hit again. To use shieldblock i even had to pop Bloodrage a couple of times or hold back on skills to not go OOR again.
Unexpected but at least it gave me something extra to pay attention to as the general fight is pretty static, just stand there and make sure you keep shouting stuff about his mother and how she screamed like the dirtly little ogre she is last night in bed.
It was good to test my gear a bit more seriously for a change aswell.. with the buffs, food and Gruul flask i had about 18,5k health which was defo a new personal record. I also noticed quite a few parries and dodges so that reduced incomming damage aswell.

I've had a taste of the big boys stuff now and i'm hungry for more, wouldn't mind trying more mobile fights. I had my chance on Al'ar (TK) and Leo (SSC) aswell but i played just a small part in the bigger show there, not getting much chance to test threatgeneration.
Must be the dream of anyone with a serious alt, to try it out where your main has gone before.... boldy or not.
Too bad i didn't test my threat cycle macro's and still did it manually, perhaps next time.