(PLD question) I need to understand THE raiding tank

I have seriously been giving some thought to becoming a true raiding tank. With a PLD. (I don't want to know who is the best raiding tank whether WAR,DRK or PLD I am a PLD for better or worst ).
I am above average on all content so far and have MTd for last few weeks.
The question is how do you TRUE raiding PLDs do it. Do you watch hours of videos trying to understand the fight before you even try it?
Are you completely topped off with the highest Gear before you get into serious raiding?
How did you prepare yourselves? or did it just happen.
When did you feel you became a TRUE raiding tank (PLD that is)

Good gear, willingness to put yourself out there and accept the fact you will make mistakes, correct them and do better. Research can be helpful but it's no substitute for experience.

You don't necessarily have to have THE BEST gear but you need to have a high enough ilevel and skill threshold to hold hate.

You need to have healers and a co tank you can rely on. And overall a good team dynamic.

I watch a video initially, and then we learn the fight phase by phase (I don't even watch the whole video at first, only the first phase). Then I learn the bosses rotation from my own perspective, I learn when cooldowns should be used, and how to time them effectively (like if you can pop a longer cooldown to cover two tank busters etc.) The best thing to do is also talk with your offtank (and rest of the team) if you are struggling with a particular mechanic, then discuss with them and they may be able to offer advice.

The best advice I can give is that watching a video is all well and good, but everyone is different and finding what works best for you and forming your own plan of action to clear a fight is what makes you a good raid tank (if I moved to this place instead, or if I mitigate here, the DPS can get more hits in etc.).

As for gear, it doesn't matter so much while learning the fight (unless you are going world first, then naturally you need enough gear to clear the fight as fast as possible), lack of deaths, high DPS/mitigation and raid awareness are far more important than ilvl, so long as you have the minimum required ilvl to finish the fight.

1. Watching a guide to get a quick overview. True learning begins if you raid it yourself since your group has to find the way that works best for you (like Lambdafish already wrote).
2. Your gear has to be good enough to keep hate from your dps and that you can take the hits from bosses and mechanics without getting a oneshot. For A5S should the 220 Gear do the trick.
3. The most important part is that you have to be prepared to wipe a lot during the learning phase and even after that (someone will always mess up) and keep calm, raging people are useless in every raid.

I started to tank our raids because i was sick of tanks who can't even use their cooldowns properly or hold hate. On top of it i was just tired to play NIN in raids.

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Originally Posted by Renius

I am above average on all content so far and have MTd for last few weeks.
The question is how do you TRUE raiding PLDs do it. Do you watch hours of videos trying to understand the fight before you even try it?
Are you completely topped off with the highest Gear before you get into serious raiding?
How did you prepare yourselves? or did it just happen.
When did you feel you became a TRUE raiding tank (PLD that is)

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When you start raiding, you are not only tested on what you have been doing right so far. This is attributed to the plethora of timely tank busters that you will have to learn (either memorize or pure memory muscle kicking in) and boss positioning is sometimes tricky to pull off when you are new to raiding. This is all coming down to how much experience you have.

Guides help a lot to understand the fights better but at some point however you will have to wing certain contents because there are no guides, aka day1/week1 contents. This is where your skills and knowledge is best tested. A lot if not most of the mechanics are pretty similar that you can actually roughly guess what you have to do. Again where your experience will shine. For example, when you see this giant AOE indicator on 1 person, you can kinda draw conclusion that it's a stacking mechanic which is quite common throughout the Heavensward contents. Like when you see purple-ish eye glowing on the bosses with a cast bar, you kinda know that it will do some debuffs on you if your char is still facing the boss at the end IF you pay attention to the previous contents you have been doing so far. Obviously the Savage lineup won't be as easy and straightforward.

Guides are there to help people to catch up easier since you should roughly understand how to do mechanics from seeing videos and you don't have to test out anything else. If you are looking into raiding/progression on any content as early as week 1 for the next patches, you will have to experience yourself and share strategies until guides come out from the Youtubers or early video kills come out from top raiders.

Gear is meant for people to lessen the difficulty to tackle contents. Current highest ilvl is i240, Midas 1-2 Savage were first done in i210~i220. Personally I always go in as fast as I could if I can (week1-2 progression). Bottom line: you don't absolutely need the best gear to clear any of the hardest contents. Skill > Gear by far.

Preparation comes as early as now. Nothing from the previous contents is ever wasted as you build your knowledge bits by bits to tackle future contents. It also helps build your tanking style (although in the end, you will form roughly the same style).

This game is not your traditional MMO where tanks are just your meat shields since DPS checks are present in the harder contents too. So that's also another matter you would like to look into. In that, there are useful resources you can tap for PLD.

Becoming a raid-level tank is a multi-step process that can be quite daunting at first glance. Most people find this transition from casual tanking to raid-level tanking quite difficult, but I have some tips that might help:

1) Do extreme primals. They're great practice!
2) Maximize your DPS. Late game raids right now (Alexander Midas Savage) are full of DPS checks.
3) As long as you have the minimum ilvl for the instance, you should be good to go. Of course, higher ilvl will make things a lot easier and will boost your dps.
4) Join a "newbie static". That is, join or make a static with people who haven't yet done any lategame raids but who wish to start doing so.
5) Parsers can help with raid analysis (dps, incoming damage, etc etc)
6) Gear up as fast as possible once you're raiding.

Watching guides are necessary. It's up to you as to how much you want to study up.

Hum, its not hard to be a "raid level tank", you just need to know everything about enmity spells, you need to know dps (sword oath), every cross skills, buy food and potions, make the better cd rotation on every fight.

Thats all :p

Unlike my other jobs, when I became a PLD, I take a lot of time to research my job, my role, and the fights. I then do practice runs in PF rather than joining learning groups. As a PLD, I had learned to accept a few things:

- You find certain mechanics take a bit to grasp, so don't feel down if you mess up. I can usually recover from an error.

- The DPS are your key players. If they fail, you will fail.

- People will cause you to rage. Don't let them.

A note that people haven't touched on: Most important thing about raiding is that you have to enjoy it and not take it too seriously. When joining a static you should choose people you enjoy raiding with over more skilled players because you need to gel with your group. You need to be comfortable with failure, and it will become stressful, so you need an environment where everyone likes and supports each other.

Whenever I raid I do it with my FC that has way more experience than I do so they help me learn mechanics and explain things before a fight.

They do a great job of spending 5 minutes before a pull explaining every detail but their monotonous voices leads to my mind wandering and only getting the basic, this is cone AoE, this a Circular AoE, never enough details for me explain anything yet I still charge in con gusto.

My advice is to do what makes you comfortable. If watching videos and doing homework makes you comfortable to attempt a raid, do it.
If charging in blind doesn't bother you, and more importantly your group, do it.

FFXIV is a game, just because people get butthurt over other people doesn't mean that you can't do the content as you please. Hell with the recent patch everyone in my FC is charging ahead doing the new stuff yet I'm happily taking my time finishing up Yokai and haven't even ATTEMPTED doing Niddhog normal for the 3.3 story :P

Pretty much what eveyone else has said, and as a Paladin, get comfortable tanking in Sword Oath, stay in Shield Oath long enough to ensure you wont lose aggro, and then swap to Sword, start thinking of Shield Oath as less of a ''tank stance'' and more of a Rampart with no cooldown. Although, remember that if you start losing aggro you need to swap back in to shield to start beating the aggro back down

Also don't be afraid to be humble, ask for advice from other raiders (even if they're not paladins) ask your party what you could do to make their lives easier, ask your healers when and where you could use divine Veil to help them out, etc