Seeking advice for dungeons

Hello everyone, I'm new to the game (well I played in 1.0 so i have a lvl 50 PLD but really I'm new for ARR). I'm currently leveling Marauder since I enjoy tanking jobs (main tank also in FFXI) so anyways I was hoping to get some pointers and tips for dungeons, I accidentally entered one in my first day and well it went horribly wrong to say the least (sorry for everyone involved:P). What I gathered from everyone staring at me was I was supposed to guide the run and make the pulls right?

Thanks in advance!

Welcome back to Eorzea! :D

The best thing to do first would be to cross class Flash (and possibly Provoke) from GLA to your MRD, as that will be very useful for holding hate (don't spam Flash though - as your wouldn't have much MP natively on MRD you'll soon run out of it spamming it given Flash is a spell). Then, just work your way through the dungeon. Sastasha Seagrot is the very first dungeon which luckily is very straightforward, given it's specifically designed to help guide new players into dungeon running and learning their roles.

I haven't played as MRD/WAR in ages, but from what I remember is to use Tomahawk to pull a mob, and use Overpower (your main hate generating attack) when links are nearby to keep hate on you, using the aforementioned Flash as a backup. If you can crossclass Provoke as well, do it, as that is a good emergency button if you lose hate and need to get it back on you in a hurry (say, a healer pulls hate onto you and the mob is starting to eat their brains ;), as it works by taking the highest hate value in the party, matches your own with it, and then adds a single extra point of hate to it, so you need to immediately use another hate generating ability after to keep it on you.

Other than that, just relax and make your way through it - as I said Sastasha is actually meant for new players as a training dungeon of sorts so don't feel bad failing it (especially with a class you've never played and only having just returned to ARR from 1.0, a totally different game). Letting the rest of the party know before hand that is your first time in the role may help too.

Yep tank usually leads the way. If you don't know what to do, let the party know, you really don't have to worry until you get to a boss so just pulling the small trash mobs isn't too dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. Early on the bosses are easy enough. In the later dungeons, you can ask for help, go in blind, or just watch/read a tutorial if you want (none of them are extremely hard though).

As a tank, you want to be the first one to attack the monsters so that they agro to you. From there you want to maintain agro on all monsters so that they keep on attacking you and not your party members. Everyone will 99.9% of the time wait for you to engage the enemy because of this.

One thing to note about tanking if you're new to it in this game is don't pull too much. Each mob group is normally around 2-4 mobs, try to only agro these separate groups and try not to get too close to others to agro 5+ or it's going to eat away at your HP very quickly.

As a new tank, you have very little Agro abilities so the best way you can maintain agro is to mark up your targets with "Signs" (Computer shortcut Shift + M, I believe). The 1, 2, 3, etc signs are good indicators to your party on what order to focus on. I only use 1,2 Signs. Once 1 had died, I make the old 2 into a 1 and use 2 on a new mob. You can add these "Signs" to your hotkey bar to make marking a lot easier.

If you Sign up and your party follows your order, you won't need to use AoE agro like Overpower much. A good opening for a MRD on a group of monsters is Tomahawk > Overpower > Overpower > Heavy Swing > Main > Overpower > (Normal comboing). For bosses or single mobs, Overpower isn't needed and too expensive of a TP use to use too often. If you follow up that opening, you will most likely not need to use Overpower again until at least the first monster has died.

Thanks a lot for all the tips :) yeah it does seem a lot different than what I remember and good to know it is normal to pull 2-4 mobs at a time, I thought it was more like 1 at a time as in FFXI (guess I have to forget all I learned there, it is a different game after all).

Flash and Overpower are your friends as a MRD/WAR. Make sure to hit everything with one or both of those a few times, then you'll rarely have to worry about DPSers pulling off of you.

If you're not comfortable yet with tanking, just be sure to pull one group at a time. When you click on a mob, you can see little lines come out of them, and go to nearby mobs. Those lines indicate what they're 'linked' to, and they all will come with one another when one is aggroed.

Knowing that, you can be prepared for what mobs will come to you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lethallin

Flash and Overpower are your friends as a MRD/WAR. Make sure to hit everything with one or both of those a few times, then you'll rarely have to worry about DPSers pulling off of you.

If you're not comfortable yet with tanking, just be sure to pull one group at a time. When you click on a mob, you can see little lines come out of them, and go to nearby mobs. Those lines indicate what they're 'linked' to, and they all will come with one another when one is aggroed.

Knowing that, you can be prepared for what mobs will come to you.

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Ohh that mob linking indicator is great news, thanks a lot for that info, I was wondering if there was a safe way to pull less mobs or if they always came in groups.

Where you're most likely to see un-linked mobs that can be fought one by one is in the open world, where most people will be soloing. There there are a mix of single mobs and mob groups, and watching for those lines Lethallin mentioned linking them when you target one will help tell you whether you can pull one away from the rest or not. Some classes have a hard time solo handling more than one mob at a time unless they out-level the mobs. As MRD, you're a bit tougher and might only have trouble with it if there are a lot of them or if the mobs out-level you, but it's something to aware of for any class/job.


In dungeons, most mobs come in groups, but you're in a group there yourself, so the automatically linked ones are usually easy enough to handle at once. In low-level dungeons, where the damage dealer classes have mainly single-target attack skills, it's best to handle each linked group of mobs, and when those 2-4 or whatever are dead, move ahead 'til you reach another such group.

As you get into higher levels, where everyone has more skills to work with, a popular pattern for handling the trash mobs between bosses is to aggro the first group of mobs and keep moving ahead so they follow you until you reach the next group. You can sometimes gather several of these small groups together to form a big group of enemies. This gives your damage dealers a chance to make good use of their area of effect attacks to damage lots of mobs at once. You need to be careful with doing this, though. Lots of mobs hitting you will rack up the damage you take fast, so only do this if you trust your healer's ability to keep you up through it. You'll also need to help them out by making full use of all your damage mitigation and self-healing skills.

And it can still go wrong if anyone on the team is inexperienced or under-geared. If you can't keep aggro on that many mobs, or if your healer can't keep you alive when that many are hitting you, or if your damage dealers can't kill them fast enough, any of these can lead to a wipe. So this is a pattern to use when you're confident of the skills and gear of your entire team. In random groups put together through Duty Finder, it might be better to start off with smaller pulls until you see how well the group works together, then decide whether it's worth trying to pull more at once. When it does work, though, really massive pulls can be both a lot of fun and get you through the dungeon fast.

I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet, but Guildhests can be a big help for learning a new job. They're short instructional instances designed to teach you how to handle different situations you will run into. In fact, I think the first one teaches you about enemy groups, the second one teaches you about managing adds, the third teaches you about special requirements (mechanics), so on and so forth. And remember, when you do something for the first time, let your party know. 95% of the player base are nice people and patient, and they'll explain any mechanics and/or assist you with what to do. The other 5% will give you grief or remain silent, but just ignore them.

Oh great thanks, today I'll check out those Guildhests.

I did 2 dungeons yesterday and things went a lot better with all the advice you guys provided. Thanks a lot for the help everyone :) I was able to keep hate for almost all the dungeon but I need to keep working on controlling adds while doing the boss fight, any pointers on how to keep those mobs that spawn during the boss fights?

While i'm not the best at it, this is the advice that has been given to me. Keep an eye for any spawning adds. When they appear, move over as fast as possible and whack em with whatever ranged attack you have as your tank. At that point, do a combo on them just to build up hate and then switch back to whatever mob the dps is focusing. If it's multiple adds at the same time(like the dogs in Sastasha's mini-boss), hit as many of them as you can at once with your aoe and go for the rest as soon as possible. If need be use multiple aoes before attempting to build hate on them via single target combos.

Like I said, I'm not an expert but this was advice given to me by other tanks that has worked well, at least for me. Good luck!