The art of ninja tanking is a lost art. But fear not. I'm here to help. I'm here to take the pain away. I will now reveal to you an ancient gobbie secret that we ninjas "learned" i.e. threaten the life of this one Goblin if he didn't tell us the secrets to ninja tanking. What we learned was this: Thief.

You have to consider that the player base turned ninja into a tank. The only way we were able to achieve this goal was to use the power of THF for SA TA hate control. No ninja has ever held hate without it until Abyssea came around. There was some merit to be found with /drk but it didn't change the fact that ninja and thief are two peas in a pod. They relied on each other to get exp. Where there was a ninja, there was always a thief.

You need a thief. You need a first provoke. You need SATA. You need a group to work together to make it work. That's how ninja tanking works and always will. All that was thrown right out the window with ToAU and beyond because players got lazy and tired of working for their progress. It was like, yeah whatever, whoever can have hate, stuff dies so fast we'll just cure bomb them. What can you do, really. But until that point, if you ever see it by skipping Abyssea, you're going to want a THF at low levels for tanking on ninja. You will never be able to hold hate in a typical PT and anyone who claims otherwise is very forgetful or a straight up lying troll out to stir drama. Ninja tanking was very very stressful for me(but rewarding) because I did it right, and I required the help of SA TA to keep hate on me at all times. You can go the co tank route. You can live with hate bouncing here and there. But if you want hate on you at all times, deploy your ninja abilities to their max potential and have a THF for SATA. And it doesn't hurt to static with a THF you can count on. I did.

Now, for your case, and I'm going to assume by birds and low level you mean colibri in ER [s]. If by chance you mean 55+ in ToAU areas, you might as well suck it up, take the invite to "tank" for at least some of the time to mitigate damage, gear up with what DD gear you can for at least when hate isn't on you specifically(I still went the eva route until hate was off me) and go to work the best you can until it's over with. Same holds true for low levels if there is no THF to be found. But at 55+ people are going to want you to do one thing: Kill as fast as possible.

The need for ninja tanking has died down considerably through the years as our gear improved, players became veterans, and the age of power leveling reared it's ugly face. Back when you could attain 6k per hour as the standard with a ninja tank, it was thriving. But those days are long gone and you must get through ninja experience by any means available to you. If that means feeling useless to a PT, so be it.