So, I'm doing dailies when the guild's MT sends me a /tell asking if I want to off-tank that night's Kara run. Now, my gear is pretty bad, and I'm aware of it - still got green shoulders and belt - but I've got 499 defence and 13k armour. Nowhere near enough stamina (10.5k HP unbuffed).
I say, sure. What the hell. There aren't any other tanks online. The guildies are a little leery of my gear, but the MT has been pulling me through heroics lately on his alt and observing how I do, so he clearly thinks I'm up to it. I wasn't aware what fights I was doing until we arrived. I was figuring I'd just be off-tank trash and adds most of the time. Turns out we're up to Illhoof and Netherspite, which makes me leery since they're well into the instance. Illhoof goes down like a baby, since my job consisted of tanking the imp and staying alive. I manage that pretty well. Netherspite I was worried about. The fight seemed complicated, the videos I'd watched helped but didn't assure me. I'm told to just stand in the red beam every second phase, do the hokey-pokey and "try to stay alive". Okaaay. Doesn't reassure me much.
Anyway, short version, we wiped four times before the server had to go down for maintenance. Once it was because of a bug that let him cast Netherbreath when we were waaay out of range, another because one of the DPS accidentally crossed beams. The other two were because of me. I spoke to the MT after, and found out that on the first attempt I wasn't staying out of the beam long enough, and the debuff stacked too quickly (I didn't fully understand what the debuff did). On the second, I was spending too much time out of the beam, and the healers couldn't keep up. This confused me because I'd been trying to count five-five and if I can't count to five then my problems are worse than I thought.
We came ludicrously close on our second attempt (2%) before we ran out of time. I felt kinda conflicted. On the one hand, we wiped twice because of me and the first time was going really well until I messed up. On the other hand, I just did part of Kara wearing greens, and that makes me feel awesome.
Given what I've said, do you think the problem was because of gear or skill? Do I need to gear up and get rid of my greens or is it that I need to do my homework? The guild has a shortage of tanks, so people are kind of looking at me to get into it, and any advice from tankadins here about starting to raid would be appreciated.