How/Where I learned to Tank

In previous MMOs, I have always played a healing class, but with FFXIV I decided to go Warrior Tank. In general, I thought tanking was easy from 15-50. It didn't take much work for me to keep hate and all I really learned was mob marking. I ran dungeons repeatedly because I enjoyed them far more than fates and I loved getting gear even if it was for a class I would play in the future.

Then I get to AK. This is where I have really been LEARNING to tank. I have learned more doing AK runs than anything from 1-49. I have been paired with both good and bad players, and players that were well geared and poorly geared. In fact I have been both the good and bad player, and the over and under geared. I have learned to keep hate off players with far better gear than I have. I have also learned to keep a party alive when under geared players make a fight go slowly.

In short, I was wondering if anyone else, who was initially new to tanking, found AK to be where they really learned the ins and outs of the role?

I got to 50 in about a week after game lunched, I learned pretty much learned what my abilities do, I say vigil is where I started to invest time to understand my class more. My friends didn't help either they would teach me to pick up adds by running off and gathering more and more. In short it taught me to be better. I love those guys.

I learned a lot when I started tanking in Ak and WP, holding aggro when rest of your party members carry relic or +1 is not an easy task.
<----(still rocking my lvl 55 sword) lol

I would say if you really did all the dungeons on the way to 50 you will find that each instance has something to teach you.

Sastasha teaches you adds during encounter, Coppermine teaches you to dodge red indicators, Halatali teaches you about patrol mob and phase shifts, Tamtara teaches you about poisons and tanking away from your party, Qarn teaches you to watch debuffs, keep calm and situation awareness, Cutter Cry teaches you to watch cast bar on top of red indicators. After that you have Stone Vigil which puts multiple criteria to test with addition to sudden ambushes, Dzemael which unfortunately being trivialized if you get AF1 gear still has some minor mechanics and lastly Aurum Vale which is a dungeon where if one role is weak the other must compensate for you to pass the dungeon.

And to some extend Guildhest will cover things you need to know which are also things that will be applied once you reach Coil of Bahamut

I'm by no means new to Tanking, but have found FFXIV to be quite flimsy with regards to aggro control compared to other MMORPGs.

I made a point of levelling via dungeons and the main story for my first tank class, so had it a little easier upon hitting endgame... but you're right in that at WP and AK level you'll come across a wide variance in Player gear and skill levels.

Hate isn't as binary here as in other games - once you have a Tank hitting a mob, you can't guarantee that a High-output DPS class (or worse, a healer!) won't pull hate off them. Don't get me wrong, I like the marking system, and it's reasonably easy to tell roughly where everyone's hate levels are on a bunch of mobs, and you can tell exactly where hate levels are on the mob you're currently targetting (in fact the only issues I've had with the targetting and hate readouts is in big Fates such as Behemoth and Odin where the target keeps vanishing due to graphic redraw limits)... but tanks actually have to work pretty hard to keep aggro against well-played characters of an equal or higher gear level.

It basically comes down to:
(i) Spamming Flash/Overpower
(ii) Rotating a three-step +enmity multiplying combo over and over again, only pausing to recast buffs.
(iii) Using Provoke when you need to get back on top of the hate ladder.

We have some other abilities (+damagetype buffs or stuns on the GCD, MP recharging combos, etc) which are nice to weave in in terms of utility and/or CC, but not in terms of hate generation. Part of the problem is that overhealing and regeneration effects pull a lot of aggro which you need to race to keep up with - even if you can keep up with a +1 relic DD going all-out, chances are you won't keep up with a +1 Relic WHM if they decide to start spamming Cure II or Medica II.

Hate wasn't black and white in FFXI either, but at least there you had a few guaranteed "Give me a big spike of hate" ranged abilities such as that game's version of "Provoke", and 'Oh crap' buttons like "Invincible" which basically ensured you were going to be the main target for the forseeable future. FFXIV doesn't have that... the closest thing we have here to a "give me hate now" move is Provoke followed by an already-queued-up Rage of Halone or Butcher's Block combo, and that's not doable at range. The result is that there are certain endgame encounters where you really need to know exactly WHEN and WHERE a bunch of adds will spawn mid-fight if you are to have any hope of pulling hate on them before they wafflestomp half of your party... :)

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Originally Posted by TaneshimaPopura

And to some extend Guildhest will cover things you need to know which are also things that will be applied once you reach Coil of Bahamut

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Which guildhests would you recommend? I am not sure if I am an endgame person or if I will go into coil, but it is good to know. I have done them all at least once, and only one or two were really hard. I think the one with all the gigas was pretty tough if I remember right.

Hakkuke Manor! As a Marauder it's rough since your still missing the two key ingredients to threat gen (Defiance and Butcher Block both at lvl 30!?!) and some DPS may already have their Jobs. It's interesting because you really have to step up your game to stay on top. Plus, once you hit 30 and get the new tools, it all magically comes together!

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Originally Posted by Grogin

In short, I was wondering if anyone else, who was initially new to tanking, found AK to be where they really learned the ins and outs of the role?

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I'm the opposite. I play tanks in nearly every MMO I've played since 1998. This time I started with a healer. Since that day I've been basically teaching tanks the basics of MMOs in approximately 50-60% of the groups I play with (which is fine! Since someone taught me all those years ago. I didn't just wake up and know all this!). The tactics are present in almost all the dungeons, it's just that the game allows players to brute force their way through the tactics.

Haukke manor is really the first place that starts to try and really teach you the basics. Patrol managing, Line of Sight pulls, multi-boss agro, interrupt and management of diminishing returns, Bosses with Phases. It's all in there. After Haukke is Brayflox, which really doesn't teach much about tanking until the last boss, where positioning and planning is key to an easy success. After that is Qarn, which is really more focused on kill priority than anything else, and most of that is on the damage dealers. Cutter's Cry seems to put the most pressure on healers (not that there isn't pressure for everyone, but I started really feeling it here more than anywhere else.) Then....there's Stone Vigil.

Basically everything Stone Vigil or later is going to assume you learned your lessons well and is going to punish you for failure. Sure a good player or two can carry you through, but these are the places that should be approached tactically. Stone vigil puts Kill priority with CC, some can be slept, but the big nasties cant. There are lots of patrols and at least one room where a line of sight helps immensely. Now that I think of it, it's really not unlike Haukke. Darkhold comes up next I believe, and I've taught at least half a dozen tanks how to properly pull mobs in that zone. Between the Purple safe zones and the patrols, it's very easy to go too far at the wrong time and get your face eaten but with some forethought and choosing your fighting ground carefully you can really minimize the pain.

After going through all that, AK shouldn't be anything new. It's just might be the first time that one realizes they're being tested on the lessons they were taught starting at level 15.

Of course, if a class leveled entirely in FATE and didn't do the guildhests or the dungeons to learn their craft, then it's a bit like skipping a year of university and showing up at the final exam.

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Originally Posted by Grogin

Which guildhests would you recommend? I am not sure if I am an endgame person or if I will go into coil, but it is good to know. I have done them all at least once, and only one or two were really hard. I think the one with all the gigas was pretty tough if I remember right.

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The answer is all of them. And usually two to three times until you understand what you are supposed to do and WHY you are supposed to do it. Once you know what they are trying to teach you, you can move on. I love guildhests, I think they should really have better rewards to get more people to do them repeatedly and really learn their stuff.

What I tell most of my friends that are leveling up is to get the basics of your class down, and use 1-49 to gain perspective on what you are expected to do, and learn the basic tenants of what your abilities DO. At level 50, the game changes, things that were working before would be totally inconsequential due to new abilities. Almost every class gets game-changing abilities at level 50 that change how you play, or at least mechanically alter your normal strategies.

AK is the first dungeon where the "difficulty" is 10 levels above your character (items are ilvl60), so weaknesses and short cuts you were able to get away with in previous dungeons are now exposed and no longer viable. Ifrit is around the same difficulty, and then you see bigger jumps in difficulty from Ifrit>Garuda>Titan>Coil.

This is a pretty common experience, but I will say that you will probably learn how to REALLY tank in Garuda. In that fight, a lot of damage is being doled out, and you have to worry about positioning a lot. You have a great attitude of getting better with each new experience, though!

I am not going to lie, I was a little leery of posting this originally, but the response not only to me, but the general idea of the thread has been very positive so far. Thanks to everyone that has shown the forums can be a nice place!

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Originally Posted by Grogin

I am not going to lie, I was a little leery of posting this originally, but the response not only to me, but the general idea of the thread has been very positive so far. Thanks to everyone that has shown the forums can be a nice place!

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The tanking forum is really an enjoyable place here.

You make good points, but with overhealing giving lots of Hate, it really puts some pressure on other classes..which I think is good. Everyone needs to be over the bar or else it all fails. If the tank taking too much damage, the healer will have to heal more, and take aggro, while you're trying to get the healer in the clear the DPS start to pull. Binary mechanics are never great for a game, and tank and spanks can be a snooze fest sometimes. I think the system they have now does a pretty good job at what it's trying to do

EDIT: Whoops, this was in reply to Maelwys's post

Short answer, Yes. I think AK is where you finally run into geared people(well geared people do WP now) I think the learning curve in AK is more of learning others jobs/what to expect from them enmity wise. IMO it's where you will tune yourself skill/skills wise and learn the advantages/disadvantages to other jobs.

@ Grogin

For Caduceus though not so much so for tank the Guildhest that helps would be Ward up (lvl 40)
More than a Feeler well basically is a reverse of Garuda Satin Feather.
Solemn Trinity (lvl 40) is sort of a minor simulation of Turn 4 Coil ST training.

I would say that Aurum Vale is a better training place than Amdapor Keep even if you get higher level gear that place can still get you killed whereas you can overpower AK with gears. As for Garuda she trains your tank positioning and awareness which will sorta come in handy in Turn 4 as OT. Whereas Titan trains you your natural instinct. Do alot of Titan and you just know when he is about to do Rock Buster and Mountain Buster to be ready or even clip a 3 seconds blind in it. Such internal timer will be good when you MT Turn 4 and MT/ST Turn 5 cause you need to expect the Skill+Melee of the Juggernauts and impending Death Sentence to selfcast Stoneskin right after a melee hit and before the Death Sentence cast.

Stone vigil. This is where changed to vit gear, used Defiance properly and learnt about cc.

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Originally Posted by baopee

I learned a lot when I started tanking in Ak and WP, holding aggro when rest of your party members carry relic or +1 is not an easy task.
<----(still rocking my lvl 55 sword) lol

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I used my GC green sword clear through Titan, because all primals hated me -- for well over 50 runs, frankly I lost track (though I did manage to get greed weapons for most other jobs). So for me, I learned tanking twice. In leveling dungeons I learned the basics and then again in WP/AK runs with +1 DPS I learned how to really hold aggro. Ha, and now with my relic sword aggro almost seems too easy. Almost.

I'd say probably AV, it taught me paying close attention to mechanics along with keeping hate and using a mark macro. Every other dungeon I could facetank through and rely on my healers. I think DD was the first place I really had to change targets mid combo to keep aggro. Had to relearn a bit with AK/WP, but now I can pretty much look at the healer's gear and guess just how many overpowers/flashes to use before settling into combo splitting so the DPS can tear the mobs to bits.

Yea I had my first wake up call in qarn. Then AK, really once you master AK you just bettered yourself as a tank then solo tanking ifrit is fun to learn to pay attention to boss rotations ifrits fun to solo tank