Surrounded - a Tank question

Hiho,

I notice tanks sometimes get their asses handed to them while doing trash pulls while I can almost chill and do damage on bosses, so I thought, the game can determine where you stand in relation to the mob - does this work the other way around, too, like in the-game-that-shall-not-be-named?

Do you mitigate better when the mobs are in front of you? Or can stuff hit your back and it doesn't matter?

I have a problem with such situation, because I have a lot of tools I could use to reduce damage on the whole group, but I have no time for that when the tank is on the edge and I have to pray the DDs kill the stuff before the stuff kills my tank despite me spamming heals.

Parry and Block can only proc from the front. So yes, tanks do mitigate better with everything in front.

I'm pretty sure tanks can only block and parry when the mobs are located infront of them. But I'm not sure. That's just what I was told while leveling DRK.

Thank you.

This doesn't seem to be common knowledge, I have such situations in almost every run I do - tank surrounded by mobs, which reduces me to heal bombing with no chance to speed up the run.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

Parry and Block can only proc from the front. So yes, tanks do mitigate better with everything in front.

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^ all of this.

Also a tank should be grouping the mobs to face away from the party anyway. If your surrounded then your only making the life of the healer and the DPS worse.

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Originally Posted by karateorangutang

^ all of this.

Also a tank should be grouping the mobs to face away from the party anyway. If your surrounded then your only making the life of the healer and the DPS worse.

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Yep. Unfortunately there are a lot of mediocre tanks that don't run through mobs and spin around so they are always facing away from the party. It's kind of funny to watch them play like a DPS, because maybe that was the only job they knew how to play before.

Doing it is more than just getting cleaves away from the party but also preventing damage in directions that you can't auto-block or get a parry proc which is so useful for jobs like DRK that have skills to mitigate damage when they get one, even though you can't really depend on procs all the time.

If you've ever selected your own character or another player, you'll see there is a blue circle around their feet. There is also a 90 degree area where the circle doesn't appear, this is known as being hit in the bad place :) getting hit there increases damage taken and chances of critical hits from what I've seen, effectively the same as any mob you attack having that same circle with the space. Proper placement and direction of mobs is good practice, proper placement of yourself as a tank should be essential.

I think most tanks get a sense of this, if only by intuition.

Sometimes it's tricky to space them in front of you. Some mobs, especially large ones, will fan out and flank you regardless because they try not to stand overtop another.

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Originally Posted by Daragon

getting hit there increases damage taken and chances of critical hits from what I've seen

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I don't think this is the case.

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Originally Posted by Viviza

I don't think this is the case.

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you are correct, i've checked it and there's no extra damage taken. I've clearly just been unlucky with critical hits when running through mobs to place recently.

The one problem with keeping all mobs in front of you is when you have large mobs mixed into the group. Since mobs (and chocobos) have collision physics, they tend to bump each other as they try to get closer to you, knocking some of them around to your flank (sometimes even further than that, depending on the size of the group). If you have ranged DPS, it's usually no big deal to dance around a bit and try to get them to line up again, but when you have melee DPS with positionals, you also don't want to ruin their damage potential ^^; So it can be tricky sometimes to determine when the DPS is focusing on AoE damage skills (and thus make it fairly safe for you to spin the mobs a little) and when they are doing positionals (for buffs or because there are other reasons to not do AoE damage skills, like in lower level dungeons where they don't really have those yet).

On the other hand... Those are the times you pop your tougher cooldowns and weather it out ^^;

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Originally Posted by Daragon

There is also a 90 degree area where the circle doesn't appear, this is known as being hit in the bad place :)

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Wow, never noticed that before. Nice little UI detail.

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Originally Posted by kazeandi

Thank you.

This doesn't seem to be common knowledge, I have such situations in almost every run I do - tank surrounded by mobs, which reduces me to heal bombing with no chance to speed up the run.

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Sounds like you're getting horrible tanks that don't know how to use/time their Cool downs or are under geared. The lack of parry and block shouldn't pull you down to cure bombing as a tank should be basing their damage reduction outside of both due to the RNG factor. But none the less all mobs should be facing the tank and away from the group at all times.

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Originally Posted by Noxifer

. If you have ranged DPS, it's usually no big deal to dance around a bit and try to get them to line up again, but when you have melee DPS with positionals, you also don't want to ruin their damage potential ;

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If you're doing large pulls, which is the only time I've experienced mobs trying to adjust themselves, Melee dps should always be AoEing in current Roulette dungeons anything else is a dps lost and their messing up their own damage potential.

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Originally Posted by Seku

If you're doing large pulls, which is the only time I've experienced mobs trying to adjust themselves, Melee dps should always be AoEing in current Roulette dungeons anything else is a dps lost and their messing up their own damage potential.

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I see that you conveniently didn't quote the part of my post where I gave examples of when:

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Originally Posted by Noxifer

(for buffs or because there are other reasons to not do AoE damage skills, like in lower level dungeons where they don't really have those yet).

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^_~

But yes, the higher in level you go, and certainly at 50+, AoE attacks should be the primary use in larger pulls. I don't play melee classes that much myself, so I don't really know the numbers on skill potency and how many mobs need to be in the group to make it a gain instead of a loss (my 'pet' BLM said at some point that the number of mobs needed to not lose DPS by using AoE has gone up slightly with HW and later patches, but that's for BLM and not melee, so... *shrugs*). I'm just saying that this doesn't always happen. For Reasons. =)

Won't work if they are directly at their flanks and behind them.

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Originally Posted by Twilite

Won't work if they are directly at their flanks and behind them.

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It would probably help if you say something about whom you're responding to O.o What won't work if who's at whose flanks/butt?