Gear? What gear? We don't need no stinkin' gear.

Take a good look at that ElitistGroup report: the low-level blue gear, the ungemmed, unenchanted shoulders. Imagine for a moment that you saw that gear on a Blood DK, and you were in Heroic Pit of Saron.

Would you drop the group pre-emptively?

I almost did. I came this close to just saying, "heck with it" and waiting 15 minutes for a better group. I did whisper him with some snide comment to start, "You'd better be excellent, because your gear isn't all that hot". I apologized to him, after we had pretty much pwned the hill pulls right after Ick.

But I'm glad I didn't. Mister Blood Death Knight (Deathtalks-Mok'Nathal) did just fine tanking. He used his cooldowns properly, used both strangulate and brain freeze to position casters, and didn't have a stupid "Get over here!" macro'd to his death grip. We finished PoS just fine, with no wipes (although there were a few close calls, and I got killed by Ick when I tried to run away from him and walked myself into a corner).

So. A lesson to learn, that lots of other people have learned already. Gear doesn't make the tank. Sometimes you've got ungemmed gear because you're going to replace it in a day anyway, why bother spending 100g on gems and enchants for temporary stuff if it can (clearly) do the job just fine.

Now that doesn't mean I won't have the same worries the next time I walk into an instance with that sort of tank. The vast majority of the undergeared DK tanks I've healed were DPSers dressed up like tanks. But there are regular, hardworking DK tanks who know what they're up to, and you can tank PoS in that set of ... PoS gear. Which I'm sure he'll be upgrading pretty quickly over the next couple of weeks.