Mornara and Ikoli are 80, as you
may have seen. After training, which was not nearly as expensive for Mornara as it was for Ikoli, they both looked at their banks.
Now, both DraNgNon and I have been diligently hoarding blue-quality drops. The vast majority of them go to the first tab of the Bank of Balou. There Lithui, my banker/pampered city boy, looks them over and sells any pieces that we don't have an upcoming character needing. He also sends the ones that will be imminently useful to the correct character. So Ikoli had a few pieces of nice healing stuff in her mail, and Mornara had a bunch of plate tanking gear sitting in her bank.
I'd also been looking at what I could have crafted or bought and ready to go. This means that Mornara had the BOA hat and shoulder enchants waiting, as well as some pre-cut gems. And Viljo, with the massive amount of badges rolling in these days, had bought the Valor badge tanking bracers. Telt had enchants on most of these, and I had her do Ikoli's gear as well. Mornara also had very awesome tempered titansteel gear that Eeyan made for her, hat and boots and the two-hand mace.
Of course the best piece of gear that Mornara had waiting for her was all from her own hard work and Blizzards ridiculous new LFG system. You see, since the LFG tool came out you get two Triumph badges for doing a regular random Northrend dungeon. This does not have to be a level 80 dungeon. In fact I about fell out of my chair the first time I used the new LFG tool with Mornara and got two Triumph badges for running regular Nexus at level 73. So Mornara had more than enough Triumph badges to buy the T9 shoulders.
Yes, you read that right, my Death Knight hit level 80, and not one hour later (of /played time) she had T9 shoulders. I am not making this shit up.
Now, once I put on all this fabulous gear, and got a rune forged onto the most excellent titansteel guardian, Mornara was at 535 defense. This means that she actually has enough defense rating to be un-crittable for heroics. She wasn't high enough on the defense rating for raiding, but heroics were in reach.
DraNgNon thought that a Heroic was just the thing, so despite my trepidation off we went. After the usual queue of roughly two seconds for tank and healer Mornara and Ikoli rolled up in Gun'drak. Heroic Gun'drak. I think my continuous monologue of "oh god, oh god, oh shit, oh god" started about then. it didn't really stop until last boss was dead. Even though I was freaking out it was a pretty decent run. The first boss died when I had about 127 hp left and 3 of the 5 party members were dead already. We wiped once on the second boss, and the idiot ret pally left. We got a new non-retarded ret pally and blew through the rest of the instance. It wasn't as fast as Kuan and V or Eeyan and Telt do heroics but it wasn't slow either.
Even better about this heroic, when we first zoned in and I did my initial notification about my new-ness and lack of experience I wasn't met with disdain or ridicule. Instead the hunter and the mage were actually understanding. I think the mage offered to give tips if I needed it, and they both did mostly single target dps. I had actually been afraid that as a new tank I would be insulted a lot and would end up fighting for aggro with asshole dps. But this was nice.
