So Far of the Mark

Evening,

So I got on this morning and did my AH stuff and got everything posted. Then got on and did some of the rep grinding for Insane and then decided to finish leveling inscription. Logging on my mage I figure I will continue to level to 80 in BGs and so I queued up. 20 minutes later and having a hit a wall to stop me leveling inscription any more I decided to try to get a random run. Waiting the typical 15 minutes for a dps queue I zoned into Utgarde Keep and find my group. Paladin tank, druid healer, rogue and DK for dps plus me. Not a bad group, buff up and off get go. The tank is doing well holding aggro though I did pull a couple times due to starting to early or some lucky crits. The run went great until the final boss.

Now I have yet to figure out why this is so hard because it really doesn't seem that complicated to me. So of course we wipe and the DK drops and we run back getting another DK to fill the spot as we run. Attempt 2 wasn't much better then the first. So far the tank has shown just how unaware they are after all. She would not move out of the spinning axe until at least one dps died. With this wipe the druid healer drops and on the way back we picked up a paladin healer. I also zoned back in at the same time as the tank so I decided to look at their build and what a surprise.

She must have missed the actual point of a tank. Yes you want to be the one getting smashed in the face but you want to reduce the amount that smashing hurts as much as possible. Looking at her spec I realized she only had one point in each of the damage reducing or stamina buff talents in the lower tiers. She didn't even have Hammer of the Righteous which actually impressed me a little due to the lack of threat issues she had during AOE pulls.

I have seen some wonky leveling specs from people that didn't really know what they needed or didn't. But she seems to totally miss the mark on what it takes to be a tank. She didn't spec in a way to max threat or to max survivability. I am not sure what direction she was trying to go or if she just thought put most of them in prot and I can tank. I didn't really look much farther than this because I was so amazed. I also didn't have time to try to give her advice because after wiping a third time she dropped group.

So is this really something that happens often? Do people miss the basic point of roles by this much often? I realize there are a lot of talents and not all make total sense but for the most part a normal person could figure out the things that are worthless for your role, right?

/baffled