Looking for tanking tips and advice.

So when I started FF14 ARR I mained Dragoon, and then Ninja. So I have always had a dps mindset. When I played Warrior i fell in love and now I am currently maining Warrior and picking up Dark Knight a little down the road. My warrior is level 60 and ilvl 240. When I raid I seem to get flustered with mechanics, dpsing effectively, holding aggro, and keeping myself calm. Any advice for someone who really wants to become a much better tank and main the role properly? Thank you!

I'm not a tanking guru, but I'll give you what little advice I can. You have worries, which include dpsing effectively and losing aggro. While I understand the current meta, as a tank, I'd focus on keeping aggro first. In a raid, being able to maintain aggro allows the other roles to do their job more efficiently. If you can't keep aggro, you're not tanking.
As far as mechanics go, every fight is different. Two things that have helped me greatly are watching guides, taking notes if I must, and forming learning parties in Party Finder. The game has a great community, someone's always willing to help. Heck, you can just make a party in PF asking for tank mentoring and someone usually pops in to help.
If you're upgrading gear, make your weapon a priority. It's harder to hold aggro when the DPS and healers have completed anima weapons.
Anyway, If you pose more specific questions, it'll help us help you better.

Much love, and thank you for tanking!

Hey, thank you so much for that. I think specifically im really concerned with the dpsing factor to tanking and making sure my damage is always optimal (so rotations). i have no problem with popping skills to survive. Another thing id like to ask is if i dont upgrade the anima weapon to it max stats can i still be as effective with diabolic gear and a shire weapon for example. Lastly, i have thoughts about picking up dark knight. do u have any opinions about the class, and its skill ceiling? easier than warrior? harder?

Xeno's aggressive tanking guide is a great reference. He's got a channel on youtube, the guide is one of many videos he's posted. There are also fight-specific strategies if that's what you're looking to get into, and he gives you a bunch of different rotations (MT opener, OT opener, full DPS). Keep in mind that things are changing shortly with Stormblood, so rotations might look different come June. I'm sure he'll update it accordingly. There's another great guide on the moogle post. Not as in-depth when it comes to rotations, but a ton of other advice, such as when to use fracture, rules of thumb, etc. Lastly, don't be afraid to use training dummies. Seriously, practice!

For your weapon, whatever gives you the best combination of damage and stats. Depending on where in the anima quest you are, other axes might be better while you complete steps. Upgrade a shire bhuj and bam! iLvl 270. So yeah, you can be effective with it until your anima is nice and glowy.

DRK: I'm in the process of leveling it up. So far I love it, but I'm not even at 50, so my bars aren't full of actions to manage, so I can't help you there. I can tell you that the class feels great to me. I don't know, I think it's slightly more fun and far more aesthetically pleasing to me. My biggest gripe with WAR is that the axe strikes make the same sound you hear in family guy when people fall or get punched in the face :p. Given the that WARs have the benefit of their highest potency combo also being their enmity combo, I can see how keeping up dps could be harder on DRK. Again, not at 60 and haven't done much content with the class, so take that with a grain of salt. I've asked around, and some people call it more complex and harder, where some call it superfluous button mashing.

At first try to play it safe, don't switch to dps stance until you're confortable with all tank mechanics of that fight, after that you can try to improve.

As WAR its really important to learn your pull openner, since most of the groups prefer a WAR to make the pull due to the big aggro generation they have with unchained.

Xeno's guides are good but you need to have a solid tank base for that. He always optimize dps. That is not wasy to do as a brand new tank.

As WAR you will mostly be off tank in 8 man content so most of your time won't be worried about keeping hate but you will need pay attention to not taking hate.

Never let storm's eye drop off unless it is unavoidable.

If you're not taking damage there's no reason to ever be in Defiance (and usually little reason to be in defiance if you are taking damage unless things start to get hairy). Keep an eye on your hate gauge as compared to the MT and if you're not at risk of stealing aggro then you want to alternate between Storm's Eye combo and Butcher's Block combo. If you're coming close to taking hate then you'll want to alternate Storm's Eye and Storm's Path until your aggro drops a bit.

Maximize your berserk time (don't hold it for excessively long periods of time because you're worried about pacification) you only really want to hold it if your skills are lining up for a triple fell cleave burst soon and even then I wouldn't hold it past 15-20 seconds (maximum) from when it comes off CD.

If you do find yourself MTing a boss then you'll want to open with a few combo rotations in Defiance with Unchained and Berserk up. This will secure aggro to a point that you can switch to Deliverance and not worry about it for quite a long time. MTing always alternate Storm's Eye and Butcher's Block.

In dungeons I usually switch to Defiance at the start of a pull and gather as many mobs as I can, trying to run in a pattern that I can hit the largest number with overpower as I run through them. When you come to whatever point you decide to stop, hit another overpower or two on the whole group to secure aggro and hit anything that you may not have been able to while running, then use equilibrium for the HP and then switch to Deliverance. Use your defensive cooldowns in deliverance on large trash packs in dungeons as bosses basically never hit hard enough to warrant your heavy hitting CDs in dungeons. If you have more than one mob, use Decimate when possible. Single targets use Fell Cleave.

Your heavy burst rotation requires you to get to 4 stacks of abandon at which point you will use Heavy Swing (do not continue the combo but this queues up Maim for later) > Berserk (5th Stack) > Fell Cleave > Invigorate (5 Stacks) > Fell Cleave > Raw Intuition (Vengeance if necessary) (1 Stack) > Maim (2 Stack) > Storm's Eye (3 Stack) > Heavy Swing > Skull Sunder (4 Stack if aggro allows otherwise use Maim) > Butcher's Block (5 Stacks or Storm's Path if you used Maim previously) > Fell Cleave > then try to sneak in a Fracture before Berserk wears off unless the mob is incredibly low on HP to the point that it will be dead before the 30 seconds duration of Fracture. You should be able to get Fracture most of the time if your skill speed is adequate but sometimes latency can mess with you a bit. You can move the Invigorate > Fell Cleave to right before fracture if Invigorate is on a short cooldown (10-15 seconds) when you begin your burst.

If you don't have any tanking duties coming up soon or you overgear the content to the point that you won't need your defensives for actual mitigation then don't be afraid to burn vengeance and raw intuition for stacks.

Basically WAR DPS boils down to maximizing deliverance, constantly be building stacks, and maximizing your berserk uptime/the skills that you're using during your berserk uptime.

Sorry that this is kind of disjointed, I just put down thoughts as they came to me. Also keep in mind that most/all of this is incredibly likely to change in less than a month when stormblood arrives.

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Originally Posted by Shibadrill

How exactly are you supposed to play DRK? Friend told me they only use darkside when they're having enough mana, but if it starts to drop down and there's no mana cds to use, they switch it off for a moment. Another friend said there's no need to use darkside at all while tanking, unless you need those couple of defensive cds, or if you need to burn something down fast.

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Both of your friends are wrong. Darkside is basically the primary mechanic of your job, you want it up at all times - your goal is to never use enough mana to drop Darkside. However, you don't want to just sit on all your mana, you want to spend it as often as you can. Your primary means of getting back mana are going to be Syphon Strike, Blood Price, and Blood Weapon. Syphon Strike is the 2nd hit of both of the combos you should be using most often (SE and Delirium). Blood Price should be used on CD as long as you're getting hit, the only time you'd want to save it is if an add phase is coming up shortly after it comes back off CD. Blood Weapon can only be used out of Grit, but another important thing you want to try to do as a tank is be out of your tank stance while tanking. This, however, requires you know when damage is coming so that you can pop defensive CDs for those bits, so learn the fights first with full tank stance, see when and where things get damage intensive, and then try and stay out of tank stance and pop defensive CDs for those bits. Once you're able to drop Grit you basically have infinite mana as between Syphon Strike, Blood Price, and Blood Weapon your mana returns will be insane.

But even if you decide you're not comfortable dropping Grit, always keep Darkside up. It's damage increase is waaaay too high value to let it drop for any reason. The only exception to this is when you're literally not hitting anything and the only thing Darkside is doing is eating away at your mana - in this situation, turn it off.

Also yes, as a tank and a healer you want to also contribute DPS. Basically, all 3 roles are the same - you constantly want your GCD rolling and you want that GCD to be useful - as an example, if you're using Powerslash when you already have plenty of threat then that GCD is going to waste. So it's all about maximizing your GCDs, essentially. Once you get used to it, healing and tanking are really no different than DPSing, it's just sometimes instead of the doing damage button you hit the healing/enmity button (and defensive CDs for tanks, but those aren't much different from popping offensive CDs as a DPS). Basically don't be intimidated by it, tanking can be pretty relaxing once you get the muscle memory down for it. If you find that you don't enjoy tanking, though, then there's no shame in sticking with DPS - it's the same difficulty, just focused in different areas.

Well, this coming from an i270 WAR so it may play different at i240 but:
1) Try to always reach the boss room with 5 stacks, so you can Unchain without Infuriate from the get-go.
2) If possible start the fight with Unchained > Tomahawk > Storm's Eye combo before using Butcher's Block. If you get away with it, you are perfectly fine to stand on DPS stance for the rest of the whole boss fight. (specially if you boosted the Butcher's Block with Berserk on Defiance). Your ilvl may make it tricky with some DPS.
3) The best thing you can do as a WAR on a big pull is grab everything on Defiance, Overpower them twice, manage to weave in a Maim, turn on Bloodbath, Vengeance, jump on Deliverance and turn Berserk on then Overpower rain them all. You become bloody a killing machine that needs near to no heals. Up to you how you do that tho. Preferably do this on the first big pull, and never on the one right before a Boss room.
4) A second set of CDs for big pulls also involves OPing everything twice on Definace, then jumping on Deliverance and turn Thrill of Battle, Convalescence and Foresight, then spam more Overpowers. It is pretty difficult to lose agro on anything on a big pull like this, so long the DPS don't do a focus target damage (in which case if they die is their fault).