Karacature

Last night our guild hit up Karazhan again. The previous group had gone last Tuesday and cleared Attumen and Moroes, so this time we were taking on Maiden, Opera, and if time permitted, Curator. Normally, I go as DPS as we have enough tanks that don't have strong secondary choices like I do, however, this evening I was the designated offtank as we had no other tanks going other than Honorshammer.
This was my first time tanking in Kara. I was a bit nervous but I'm not sure why. I've tanked heroics and never had an issue and Kara isn't much more difficult and actually can be considered easier than some Heroics. Maybe it's because there are 9 other people in this raid as opposed to 4 others and some of the people I don't usually run heroics with or tank for. I think part of it too was comparing myself to other offtanks that Honors has run with. Would I screw up somehow? Would I be able to gel with Honors? Or would I be stepping on his toes?
When you tank a 5 man, you are usually the only tank and in some respects, you are in control. If you get adds or if one of the mobs resists a CC, you act and react with the rest of your team but you are usually the only damage soaker so your job is pretty straight forward. In a raid, when you are working with other tanks, you need to react well with them and certainly in one situation when we had unexpected adds during a pull, Honors and I did not communicate and we both tried to taunt the same mobs and left others running rampant. It was nobody's fault, really, but a little more practice should have us communicating better. I need to get some experience being an offtank as opposed to the "in control" only tank.
Still, the night went quite well in my books. I tanked Maiden as that fight is not very melee friendly and you only need 1 tank, so Honors was able to stand back and help heal. That went quite well - we only wiped once because the first time, Maiden kept targetting our healers for her Holy Fire. Beyond that and a small hiccup with my ISP and their DNS routers dropping me in the middle of a trash pull, everything went well. We had some issues with accidental aggro and those Arcane Anomalies on the way to Curator were a pain but that was it.
We got Curator down to 33% on our second try, which is quite good. The Flares were hard to chase after especially when ranged dps can start generating threat via damage immediately, whereas I would have to chase them around. I could do nothing to generate any amount of threat on Curator while the Flares were up so I ended up not soaking any Bolts. We'll need to adjust our tactics some but I'm pretty confident that we can down him soon.

After Kara, a few of us ran Steam Vaults twice to try to get Rhubarb some better healing gear and get Lakini to Exalted with Cenarion Expedition. We got Lakini his rep and we managed to get Rhubarb one healing drop but for the most part, the drops were useless and sharded. What is with the drops lately? Most of the people needing specific drops haven't been getting them and needing 14+ runs to get anything. I'm still hunting after my Feral Staff of Lashing from Warp Splinter in Heroic Bot and so far I'm 0 for 3. I don't relish the thought of having to run this 12+ more times to get it. :(