So you want to be a tank?

Be careful about doing stuff like popping bubbles, using lanters, breaking rocks, etc.

Those are usually jobs for DPS classes because most bosses have a frontal cone or cleave or something and if you go to use/break whatever you will drag the boss with you and it will be facing your target as you break and might decide to AOE which ends up causing problems, e.g. breaking rocks on titan, bubbles on the frog thing in Brayflox. The only time I've lost a pt member to the Brayflox frog was because I went to break its bubble and it got hit by the cone attack and died the instant the bubble broke.

This would have been helpful for the random level 50 WAR tank that jumped in our Ifrit HM group last having never tanked ANYTHING before.

This is an EXCELLENT thread, I love it! Thank you OP; I've wanted to try tanking but I've been too scared (it's a totally foreign concept to me), and this has really helped! :D

Being a semi-competant tank, it makes me happy I already know the basics. I hope lots of aspiring tanks happen to find themselves upon this thread, very useful :)

So that's what the ranged move is for, I was derpin' on that part X3

My problem is when I get an over-excited DPS thinking they're all that and a bag of chips, running ahead and pulling extra crap down on me and then criticising me for not magically pulling everything back onto myself and somehow eating 2-3 groups worth of damage without dying. "That's what the healer is for" Yeah, maybe if the healer had 2-3 times the cure potency than the maximum level for this dungeon allows... I'm not invincible, I'm just not nearly as squishy as you. X_x

DD should attack the target you attack. DD should never pass the tank. With that pull combo of ranged > AE, dps can go all out on that target and you'll keep hate so long as you keep it up.


It took me a couple levels to figure out what to use tomahawk for when I first took MRD up. I ignored it at first. Then I said "man I wish i had ranged attack like in xi, just equip a bow or boomerang." then thought "wait, didn't something say it had ranged?" And I went back and looked and said "well, maybe I can craft some sort of combo together to make this pull work." Then it didn't snap right away for GLD either, I didn't think that the pulling methods between the two would be nearly identical, but they are.

You'll also notice, overpower has a much higher range vs regular melee attacks, which means you can be further away from your target, and still pull all of them in to you.

I've done the dungeons over and over, enough times to get about 50+ pieces of green/pink gear. I'm taking my time and learning the best way to do things. Many people are once and done, and go fate grind up to the next story line. I only do dungeons to level, 4 jobs from 15-25 means over a hundred runs. It's all about repetitive practice, but I enjoy it. Get loot, get money, get xp.

After a rather terrible day of running dungeons yesterday as archanist, and having to use topaz carby to do about 50% of the tanking, I want to bump this and hope more aspiring tanks read it.

Tanking is quite possibly the most fun and easy thing there is to do, which is why it baffles me to no end that there are so many people who just aren't good at it; People rushing in, not using their enmity abilities, unable to keep mobs of healers... The list goes on. I also like playing a healer(and pretty much every other class), but I find it harder and harder to leave the responsibility of tanking to anyone else I may come across in the duty finder. Today it was so bad that I started snapping at the tanks, for example, and I never like being that guy.

There was a dumb .gif that was going around the forums since 1.0, and it does a good job of capturing how to properly tank: If you aren't acting like you're having a seizure on that keyboard/controller, you ain't doing it right. It's shocking to me how the OP's diagram(good diagram, by the way), was pretty much an instinctual thing for me once I started my first dungeon runs as a MRD tank, and I think the last time I tanked in an MMO was as a Paladin back in FFXI in 2005. Guys, this isn't rocket science. And saying things like "it's just a game" or "nobody's perfect", while true, are just excuses that people use to shield them from ever having to improve. Don't be that person.

Oh, I completely agree. I love tanking, it's a blast. I enjoy healing, too. it's hte dd jobs I don't enjoy as much. The one DD yesterday kept running ahead and pulling agro on the run where I was hte tank. He even ran into the final boss and ended up locking me out while I was viewing the cutscene. After the mess he said "mistakes were made, at least we won". Sure, that time, what about next time. We got lucky. I'm always looking for ways to improve on what I'm doing, I can't imagine people that don't.

Tanking in this game is easy. You want a real challenge, nin tank in xi against mandy's and no shadow counter. You had to count the shadows yourself by reading chat as it flew by. Don't get me wrong, it was fun, but you really had to work at it.

And for the love of god, if you do get agro as a non-tank, PLEASE do not run around jumping like an idiot. This does not make the monster miss you. You aren't evading any attacks. It does, however, make it 100x harder for the tank to get hate back.

Great post!! I think most new tanks are afraid to tank for fear of failure and the ridicule, myself included. You have to learn somewhere, and sometime ,so thanks for this post can't wait to start!!