How do you get back on the horse?

So, funny story. Last night I was hanging out in Boralus, trying to decide what to do, when a friend messaged me. “Hey, did you mean it when you offered to tank a Siege of Boralus for me?”

Now, while I have been Blood Spec on my DK most of this expansion, my guild actually has a surfeit of tanks, to the point where I’ve only ever raided as Unholy and am even considering going back to Fury because I find it to be more fun as a DPS spec. I’ve tanked a few dungeons as Blood, but not a Mythic.

However, it was for a friend who wanted to see the end of Siege of Boralus, and I’d been wanting to get in there myself. So despite the intense panic I felt (I didn’t tell my friend this because I didn’t want them to feel bad and also because I have a deep-seated fear of looking like I have human emotions*) I said Okay, sure, let’s get that done and went in. Despite having absolutely no idea what the trash did, we did pretty well — a few wipes on the last boss working out the cannons and how to deal with the tentacles, but overall a reasonably smooth run. It turns out I still remember how to do mechanics as a tank and not just how to hit Anti-Magic Shell and hope for the best.

But it was still a return to something I haven’t done seriously in a while, and frankly I was way rustier than I expected — several times I forgot I had abilities and only just barely remembered I had them, for example, Bonestorm which saved my butt on a couple of hairy trash pulls. And that got me thinking — for a lot of us, Battle for Azeroth means a return to playing after a hiatus or a switch between mains, or otherwise spending a lot of time playing catch-up.

So if you’ve been away from something — a class, a spec, a role, PVP — and are now getting back into it, my question is simple. How’d you do it? Did you just white knuckle it and hope it all worked out, like a certain Blood DK I know who tanked Siege of Boralus last night? Did you breeze through knowing you’d be swell, great, and have the whole world on a plate? Were you rusty or did it all come back as soon as you started? This doesn’t have to be WoW related — if you usually main Genji but have been playing a lot of Mercy lately, it still applies to your clutch Genji play last night. Share with us your story of returning to form.

*Editors Note: Adam can at least testify that Matt is Human, and not of the Old Ones