LOTRO Gold can be found from gathering ore. A lot of people are doing it which is easier. So you need to fight to get most of it without engaging any kind of enemy. When you find what works for you in LOTRO, you can start to rake in cash quicker than you could reasonably spend it. For tanking classes, Guardians are your standard heavy armor, sword and board class. They take a licking and keep on ticking. They also have a DPS stance called Overpower that lets them solo decently. They have skills to acquire threat very rapidly or even instantly. Guardians have skills that allow them to trigger conjunctions or fellowship maneuvers. This is a really neat LOTRO mechanic that lets all members of the group participate in sort of a super group combo. There are many of these and they do different things. Wardens are medium armor tanks that have an interesting mechanic called a gambit which is a series of strikes using spear, shield and fist combinations. They start at length 2 and go up to 5. Wardens are a pretty good solo class and can take on a very large number of mobs. Since you have played tanks before, I would suggest trying a warden first since it is probably different enough that you will love it or hate it. If you love it, you stay with it. If not, you fall back to a guardian. One of the skills of warden allows them to quickly remove corruptions from mobs. Corruptions are mob buffs or player rebuffs that can be very bad if left unchecked. All classes have some sort of corruption removal skill, but wardens are really good at it. Generally Race of Man has slightly better racial attributes. To the extent any race is disfavored as a tank, it is Elves, but none of the racial attributes are so dramatic that they overly hamper a player.
