Best Tank for a New Tank?

The truth is that all of the tanks are mind-numbingly easy to play from a rotation standpoint. Some may be slightly easier than others, but none of them would be any harder than maybe 3/10 if I had to put a scaling difficulty on it. This ease of rotational mechanics is by design though, since most of tanking is not anything to do with the rotation itself. Tanking is more about managing a fight than anything else.

Learning where to move the boss and when, learning enemy ability names and rotations, and managing your tank defensive cooldowns make up the majority of the difficulty of tanking. This is all stuff that can be learned and honestly FFXIV makes it pretty darn easy to do so. Enmity management in FFXIV after 5.0 is a complete joke, and most bosses don't even start carrying tank busters until later on, and even then they are not very dangerous if you are geared with current level gear.

The point of all of this is just to say that play whichever tank you like. They are all of relatively equal difficulty and they are all highly capable of doing their job effectively. Pick the one you like and you will have a good time.

I find WAR to be the easiest tank.

PLD is simple but has a few more things to think about due to its expanded utility v the other tanks.

Its heal is on global, meaning that unlike the other tanks, it's a viable tool to utilize for yourself and others more often, but as it is on global it also requires a little more thought as to when it is optimum to use it. The other tanks just need to think about whether their health is low, and weather their heal is ready to use.

The PLD's party buffs also require a little more thought. One requires positioning in relation to party, the other requires that it be followed up by a heal, either from yourself or the healer. Other tanks just have to click a button

WAR is my tank of choice because its kit requires the least attention from me. Freeing me to worry about boss mechanics, and how I can position enemies to make life easier for my healer and DPS.

WAR is just a one two three combo, with an occasional alternate finisher to maintain a self buff. No need to worry about whether the target has enough life left to warrant the alternate DOT finisher that the PLD has.

Its damage phase amounts to: 'Hit the red button and spam.' The only thing that really takes any consideration is when to use nascent flash on someone. But that's a consideration shared by other tanks with equivalent abilities.

Honestly my only complaint about WAR is the horrible looking aura effect you get from your beast gauge. I really wish we could disable that.

Any way. I would 100% recommend WAR as the tank to learn tanking with. Its tool kit scales well, and remains easy to use from level 1 to 80.

I am not particularly drawn to edginess and find the graphic effect of unleash to be quite ugly. So I have not played DRK much. But I know it suffers from a lack of mitigation cooldowns for longer than other tanks. With skill and good gear this isn't necessarily a problem. But as a healer main I have found DRK players are typically either very very good, or very very bad. So this class probably takes a little more skill to play then the others.

PLD is a very solid choice. So long as your not letting enemies flank you you will get extra mitigation thanks to the shield, so it's not so important to use your cool downs. BUT you should still be using them. At low levels it is very similar to WAR. At max level its very different thanks to its dual damage type rotation and its utility. Until you get clemency at level 56 it just feels like a weaker WAR though. From that point on, you will wish you signed up as WAR when you get good groups, and PLD when you get bad ones.

GNB I have not yet done much with, so I don't know how it compares across all levels. My experience with it has been positive, but my impression so far is that it requires more finger dexterity then WAR. The rotation is still simple, but your going to need to be able to reach a few more buttons thanks to the powder combo.

I'd recommend PLD. Straightforward rotation and mitigation. Nothing tricky.

Lots of people say WAR is easy, and this is wrong. WAR opener and IR window is easy, everything else is a massive chore and pain in the butt. But, WAR is probably the best dungeon runner post Lv. 76.

If you are looking to raid as a tank, then go DRK. They have possibly the best mitigation tool kit of the tanks... ignoring Living Dead... no one talks about LD.

GNB is a jack of all trades, and has possibly the highest dps. They have an "ammo combo" that is really annoying in raids from what I hear.

If you cant decided, and all seem fun, think of just maining all of them. They do all play very similar to each other.

I think WAR's pretty good when you feel confident with cooldown usage, because then you can speed things up a good bit by pulling maybe two packs, popping one defensive and going ham with berserk and AoE spam. WAR isn't anymore complex than PLD in all honesty.

Past opener and IR, WAR has a simple rotation, with very low APM. The main difference between PLD and WAR is if you want a consistent, moderately strong aoe for every pull, or a really strong AoE pull every OTHER pull respectively.

War has the least buttons to press. It's actually quite hard to decide which is easiest because they kinda all are. On the offensive side they are like simplified versions of melee dps. Keeping enmity isn't something that needs managing any more; this expansion making your enmity-booster stance so strong that non-tanks can never come anywhere near overtaking you. Only need the fundamentals like you said; generally face enemy away from the party and reduce your damage taken by using mitigation buttons with good timing.

None require anything more "tank-like" than the others, really. XIV in general requires almost nothing from tanking than that you use sprint, pull things, appropriately AoE on gather (with only Overpower offering any challenge in that regard), and then sequence cooldowns. I'd just advise them to go with whichever they most like the aesthetics of.

Thanks everyone! I think I'll start with WAR and move on to PLD if it doesn't grab me. I know nothing of any of the stories and ideally they'll all be leveled at some point, so I wanted to start with something well-rounded and not difficult in terms of rotation.

You've been so helpful! Thanks again!

Gunbreaker. Easy ST and AOE skill rotations. Couple self buffs and enemy debuff. Mind numbing easy and I love it. Plus a gunblade aesthetic.

Paladin and Warrior imo.

Paladin especially since it's a good offtank, does have a very good evolution when leveling up (you really feel that it's becoiming more powerful)

As a WAR main, I'd recommend new players to start with PLD.

The reason is simple, WAR has a cone AoE and PLD has circle AoE, so it's very easy for a newbie to miss an attack with Overpower and panic, it adds an extra difficulty which the opposite of what a new player needs.