not new to tanking, but new to ffxiv.

hello ive tanked in every mmo ive played, and tanked many years in ffxi. i didnt level a tank first in xiv because i believe that if your going to tank in a new game you should understand how that game works. im getting to the point where i want to start tanking. dark looks so awesome, but i normally use a paladin type in other games. anyone can give me a quick run down of the current way to gear your tanks. all they all just vit? or mix of both vit and str? any tips would be amazing. thank you.

just vit now, tanks are pretty much "get your ilvl as high as possible" for the most part. You will get vit and str from the left side of your equipment and your accessories you will want vit though melding str to it is very viable since its .45 stat weight vs .12 ish etc for any other secondary.

Maxing VIT is currently the best option. Both STR and VIT increase your damage, but by exactly the same amount, so there's not really a reason not to go VIT since it's damage + health rather than just damage. Your body gear will increase both for you but make sure to take Accessories which have VIT on them.

Regarding secondaries, the "Tanking Secondary" of Parry is currently considered to be extremely undesirable by the general tanking community because it's a RNG focused method of mitigation that doesn't help much when the most dangerous attacks to Tanks are typically either magical(which cannot be parried) or single huge hits(which you should never rely on a Parry to save you from). Basically, while it is a genuine increase in overall damage reduction it's not by enough to really affect too much. Damage Secondaries currently use a ranking of Crit Rate>Determination>Skill Speed. So if you want to be the most "efficient" then focus the damage secondaries but if you don't care then use whatever you wish because the number of situations where that kind of stat efficiency is truly necessary is blessedly low. Knowing how to fight fights is much more important, and few things will give you that knowledge more quickly than just jumping in!

wow amazing reply! sorry took so long to get back, been so busy spamming missions and all that in game that i forgot about the post. tyvm for the knowlage =)

In my opinion, the Parry stat is bad not so much because it's random but primarily because the stat just plain doesn't increase parry rate enougn, and even if it did, the parry mechanic is incredibly stupid in this game. Even the producer, Yoshida, admitted that the stat doesn't do enough but it would take too much fiddling with the numbers to fix it, so they'll look at it next expansion. Therefore, it's actually a good thing to avoid Parry. I know how stupid it sounds because it's a stat only for tanks, but I've accepted that the devs messed up, they've admitted to it, and it has to be treated as a dead stat.

That is so very true about Parry.
And when you get to the point of melding gear (if you do) Vitality, determination and crit are so much better

I should clarify about why parry is so stupid in this game.

It only works for physical attacks to your "front" in a game where target circles have four 90 degree quarters, not two 180 degree halves like WoW and many MMORPGs like WoW. At the same time, enemies literally push each other around to make room which inevitably means your flank is getting hit all the time. Even against a single target boss, the tank will have to move sometimes which again causes the flank to get hit. Therefore, Parry as a whole will be next to useless until it's changed so you can parry from flank, as well as block from flank for that matter. It does not matter if it makes no "logical or roleplay" sense. You have to give some of that up to facilitate functional gameplay.

That's not even mentioning how some enemies use magic damage as their auto attack and so parry does absolutely nothing for that. But this isn't as important as the former issue.

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Originally Posted by Teiren

It only works for physical attacks to your "front" in a game where target circles have four 90 degree quarters.
... Therefore, Parry as a whole will be next to useless until it's changed so you can parry from flank, as well as block from flank for that matter. It does not matter if it makes no "logical or roleplay" sense.

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I think so long as they exclude attacks from the rear, that would cover the logical and roleplay concerns well enough. An agile fighter should be able to swing his weapon or shield around as needed to meet attacks from either side (leaving only the question of how you'd meet multiple attacks at once, but that's kind of a separate issue from direction). They could even do something like Parry is at at full effect for attacks from the front and you have 50% or 70% of it's normal chance for attacks from the flank (and it doesn't work from the rear). It would still be a lot better than the current frontal-attacks-only rule. And I agree with you that they're going to need to fix this to make Parry useful. Maybe that's some of the fiddling that they'll be doing with it for 4.0.

Oh. Yeah, certainly. I wouldn't want them to allow blocks/parries from the rear. That would be silly. There should be a penalty for exposing that area both for roleplay and gameplay reasons. Adding the flank also would turn Dark Dance and Raw Intuition into actually useful abilities. They're not totally useless right now, but I think anyone that has used those abilities knows what I'm talking about.