Tank dodging

Wondering if it actually works, most times when i tank i pull 2 - 3 packs of monsters, hit rampart, spam aoe's while running around inside the huge pile of mobs, avoiding aoes. Im wondering, is it possible to dodge monster attacks by moving around them, since they have such a slow turn rate? And when im low health or i feel the healer can't keep up, i start fleeing from the pack so less monsters hit me, something i found works.

I noticed alot of less experienced tanks standing in one spot, getting hammered by monsters and the healers being unable to keep up. Being contantly on the move have helped me alot while tanking.

I wouldn't say it's possible to dodge them completely. You might be able to delay their attacks with them having to turn for a second towards you. As far as fleeing from them, enemies with phys attack have to chase you to get within melee range so it delays them a bit but you won't dodge them all the time.

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Originally Posted by MitsukiKimura

I wouldn't say it's possible to dodge them completely. You might be able to delay their attacks with them having to turn for a second towards you. As far as fleeing from them, enemies with phys attack have to chase you to get within melee range so it delays them a bit but you won't dodge them all the time.

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Ah yes, delaying may be a better word for it than dodging, lol.

Depends on mob speed and model size. If you manage to sprint circles around the mob pack it could be they never get a hit during your sprint duration. But not all mobs behave like that.
Some people do it even with one mob and just spin it closely around or within the hitbox and won't get attacked much.

I would only use it as a strat if you don't have any cooldowns left and are barely staying alive while your healer pumps out everything. Your dps aoe and melee have easier timer to hit everything if its stacked, so you running around in circles has a detrimental effect on clearspeed, it just makes you get hit less.

Healers should never have any problem healing you if you rotate your def Cooldowns right.
Also excesive movements make it often harder for a lot of jobs to land their aoe skills, thats why you should as little as possible when you tank a pack.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

Healers should never have any problem healing you if you rotate your def Cooldowns right.
Also excesive movements make it often harder for a lot of jobs to land their aoe skills, thats why you should as little as possible when you tank a pack.

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Myeah, its not like im running around in huge circles pulling the mobs around, i just run closely around the pack or through them. Sometimes a half circle to just make the monsters turn. Also if there a ninja or something similiar aoe i try to pull all the monsters into the circle, so dps do have a perfectly placed stack of mobs to deal with. DPS wise, most dps should target the center monster to make a hit on all of them. Something i did trough experience leveling summoner and other casters. Got tons of experience leveling tank, healer, dps to 80 so i know what each and everyone needs for a perfect dungeon run xD

As for healers not managing, im talking about massive pulls not just single packs. I noticed scholar and astro seems to have a bit of trouble with giant packs while WHM can holy stun them.

Single or 2 monsters i stand in one spot and don't move, i just turn them around, So dps can hit them with hardhitting single target combos. I only had a complaint once from some monk, he was using single target combos on a big pack of mobs.... e__e

SCH have Sacred Soul and Fey Union. The problem with running through the mobs is that it doesn't account for server ticks and that the game calculates the damage you take before it applies it.

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Originally Posted by Windwalker

Myeah, its not like im running around in huge circles pulling the mobs around, i just run closely around the pack or through them

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If you run closely the autoattack delay wont be huge, so its not really beneficial. But at that point you will probably have to look out for stuff like doton, salted earth if you are drk, healing areas like sacred soil and refugium, earthly star etc. Keeping the mobs in those areas if they wiggle around too much cause they have big models is a bit annoying, but yeah that is why tanks don't stand still all the time. It is usually not because they intend to take less dmg.

Usually the rule for tanks is: You don't move if you don't have to (mechanics, dodging AOEs).

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Originally Posted by Pepsi_Plunge

Usually the rule for tanks is: You don't move if you don't have to (mechanics, dodging AOEs).

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This is my opinion on the subject, mostly. This is because sometimes attacks that hit the tank are aoe (usually tank busters) and if you face the mobs towards another player during it, it hits you both. So if you do this, you might kill somebody. Be careful of that. Also note, that warrior has a skill, Vengeance, that on melee hits you receive from mobs, returns an attack of 55 potency to said mobs. So I wouldnt pop it and run away. Itd be counter productive. Most importantly. If you run, some jobs (monks especially) wont be able to do their job properly because of positional attacks. If you cant survive without running and hoping, you probably shouldnt have pulled that much.

As anyone doing positionals on a spinning mob would tell you, the delay you see is almost purely a visual one, rather than actually delaying enemy attacks at all, and attempting consistent positionals against constantly tank-spun mobs is the basis for one of the first few layers of hell, if not deeper.

Please don't do this. It's really annoying to get cleaved by mobs/ having to dodge extra aoes because the tank can't stop spinning everything.

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Originally Posted by Windwalker

Myeah, its not like im running around in huge circles pulling the mobs around, i just run closely around the pack or through them. Sometimes a half circle to just make the monsters turn. Also if there a ninja or something similiar aoe i try to pull all the monsters into the circle, so dps do have a perfectly placed stack of mobs to deal with. DPS wise, most dps should target the center monster to make a hit on all of them. Something i did trough experience leveling summoner and other casters. Got tons of experience leveling tank, healer, dps to 80 so i know what each and everyone needs for a perfect dungeon run xD

As for healers not managing, im talking about massive pulls not just single packs. I noticed scholar and astro seems to have a bit of trouble with giant packs while WHM can holy stun them.

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WHM can just throw tetra/benediction/solace(GCD though)/assize(:/all these nifty instants) during all of that holying. AST stacks the regens and then hope the DPS burn everything down before the tank CD's and AST tools run out. SCH is a different story altogether..

Anyway, auto-attacks from mobs don't care about line of sight it seems. Attacks that aren't telegraphed but require you be in the front, these only get delayed. However, Diresaur type mobs(think Stone Vigil Hard Mode last boss(es), these attacks can be dodged.

All in all, speaking from a healer perspective, by all means go into Barry Sanders mode on those mobs.

Just dodge AoEs, Use CDs if needed and follow instance specific mechanics - nothing more, Spinning unnecessarily will annoy your Healer.
And there is always the risk of a disoriented AOE telegraph landing on the DPS.

You can't dodge autoattacks by moving behind the mob. Autoattacks work almost identical for player and npc/ai so you can test how it works on a target dummy. Start autoattacking, then turn your back to the target. You will still autoattack it. Same for mobs.

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Originally Posted by Windwalker

Wondering if it actually works, most times when i tank i pull 2 - 3 packs of monsters, hit rampart, spam aoe's while running around inside the huge pile of mobs, avoiding aoes. Im wondering, is it possible to dodge monster attacks by moving around them, since they have such a slow turn rate? And when im low health or i feel the healer can't keep up, i start fleeing from the pack so less monsters hit me, something i found works.

I noticed alot of less experienced tanks standing in one spot, getting hammered by monsters and the healers being unable to keep up. Being contantly on the move have helped me alot while tanking.

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This is bad tanking. Auto-attacks can't be dodged. Maybe you delay it a fraction of a second for negligible DPS reduction. In return you are denying any positionals your DPS may want to do and making it more difficult for your healer if they click to target, which many do. At the same time you have more than enough mitigation if your gear is on par. Plus you run the risk of cleaving your DPS, one cleave and all gains you made are gone. You can also end up reducing your team DPS by forcing your DPS to dodge more.

Move for the telegraphs, not for the auto attacks. Between arms length, rampart, your 30% reduction cooldown, and AoE reprisal you have a ton of mitigation before you even get into tank specific tools.

NINs and BLMs love it when you sprint off.

:)

Such methods cause longer fights due to losing DPS, thus you would actually lose health/mitigation as it's going on longer than necessary. As someone above mentioned, circling will not actually prevent them hitting you unless mobs are so stacked up and/or have overly large hit-boxes that they have to push each other around to reach you first -- and even then, you won't dodge much and would be infinitely better off just keeping them as stable as humanly possible.

I met a tank today while levelling my MNK who made a point of doing 'staggered pulls'. He'd pull a pack, wait until it's all at 5-10% then sprint off for the next, which is actually aggravating as it is much slower than just pulling the packs together and frequently forces the DPS and Healers to sacrifice what they're doing to follow for no actual benefit other than lost heals/DPS. In addition, the guy would barely ever stay still, so I would have to constantly gobble through True North to ensure at least most of my damage was positionally correct, as opposed to ALL of it if they just stood still. In short, longer fights = more health lost due to tanking longer = does not make up for the 0.1% you'd save by maybe moving out of an auto-attack once in a blue moon.

Grab everything and rotate your mitigation. Everyone will thank you for it. Run around like a pleb? Nobody is going to like having you tank for them.

You cant dodge auto attacks by spinning around monsters. If you are in range you will get hit. However they cant hit you if they are to far away. Like sprinting during a mass pull the guys in the back obviously cant hit you until they catch up, but most monsters run at or faster than players so it's a sprint only option.

The only caveat is very specific attacks that lock on to a location while casting like 10 ton swing cleaves from minataurs or those upright dragon creatures that 'charge up' their attack moves and you just dodge them. But for the most part, autos will always hit unless you move away, not around. And charged moves go off (you cant run away from a tabk buster even though you bolt away while its frozen casting)

The 'slow' turn from monsters is just an animation. It's still hitting you regardless of the visual.

I don't understand the complains about positionals, like all aoes have no positionals, they hit a large area and should be spammed on big pulls. None of the jobs i played use positionals with aoe's and in most cases im more than thankful for the tank to pull them togheter, spinning them around doesn't matter since healers/casters/ranged should keep their distance and melee dps should have no trouble using arms lengh and bloodbath.

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Originally Posted by Windwalker

I don't understand ...

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Some pulls have priority targets that need to be single-targeted and taken down separately from the group, so the dps wouldn't be AoEing in those situations. A somewhat rare situation but it does occur.

Another thing that is of consideration is that you often have enemies that do AoEs targeted at the tank and if you are moving around, where those AoEs will affect is less predictable and could result in your party getting hit by or having to unnecessarily run away from an AoE because you spun the mob and now the whole party is in the middle of a large cone AoE.

The most common consideration though is that in large pulls you want to keep the mob group packed in together as tightly as possible to help make sure that they will all be within the range of the AoEs your party is pumping out. The more you move or run around, the more the mobs will shift and move around which can result in them moving just out of range of the AoE's.

Basically it's best practice as a tank to try to minimize the amount of movement and adjustment that the party has to make. If you are running around, the mob pack will also be moving and this forces your party to move and adjust.
Also, as it has already been pointed out. Running around doesn't stop auto-attacks from hitting you, so it provides basically no benefit to do and only creates extra burden on your party by making them have to adjust for your unnecessary movements.

If you are really dying and the healer isn't keeping you up then as a last resort you can run around and it will increase the time it takes for a mob to move to you and auto you. But this is pretty much last ditch efforts and if you are a PLD you are better off just using Clemancy. But always run around the healer and not away from them, if theres a Doton up you can also kite around that or use arms length to further decrease the rate you are getting autoed.

there is a tank with dodge element already in the game...

mighty guard + toad oil from Blue mage XD.

and it does not work.....

Do bosses have infinite range on autos? In older MMOs you could kite with movement speed gear to avoid autos.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Do bosses have infinite range on autos? In older MMOs you could kite with movement speed gear to avoid autos.

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There is a limit to the range they can auto, but it's far enough away every melee will be chomping at the bit to kick any tank from an instance if they tried it every chance they could, most likely be the same for casters in bigger arenas.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Do bosses have infinite range on autos? In older MMOs you could kite with movement speed gear to avoid autos.

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It's not a matter of "can you?" but rather "should you?". Are there any pros of kiting as a tank? Not really. Are there any cons of kiting as a tank? Numerous.

Just to quote the Twintania NN daily shout:

"Friendly reminder for tanks to use sprint during dungeon pulls. It's your best form of mitigation."