You should take the tanking AA advice here from crabbok and others listed in stickies and threads named as such, if thats what you want your role to be at 80.
Get as many AA's as you can as soon as you can, the bruiser Shadows AA line can make all the difference in the world.
Once you hit 77 you should pick up some of that set gear I believe its Rilissian something its better than mastercrafted. You can find it easy on broker just filter to leather and search Rilissian.
At 80 youre going to want to start doing as many TSO zones as you can for shards. At this point youre not going to be able to get in a group as tank, and if you did, it wouldnt go well, so advertise yourself as DPS until you start getting your shard gear. You can get a full t1 set pretty quick, the t2 is a decent bit more shard needy. Id say since you want to tank your goal should be a full set of t2 Jin Drake armor from the shard armor merchants in moors of ykesha.
You will also gear up from the drops in the instances that you do, and there is some OK jewelry for shards on the merchants too. Do your band of thuuga quest, look for pickup protectors realm raids where you can get some plat and hopefully doomcoils baton. get your fabled epic as soon as possible.
Can also run things like Vaults, Maidens, CoA theyre a bit easier than the TSO zones and are still useful somewhat.
I dont know your guild situation, but try to get into the x2 in lavastorm and roll on some t3 set armor patterns, or roll in raids with them.
Edit also
www.eq2i.com and
www.lootdb.com are your friends
Returning Bruiser
