SMN - primary tank

*********2 part series due to 1000char limit on post*********
Let's think outside the box!

Any SMN out there with Titan (and friends or nice FC members) wants to try as primary tank and report back on how it goes? Would instance allow the party in without the tank class that developers designed? I know duty finder mark SMN as dps so can't do the duty finder route.

The way I see is my carby tank (on solo fight) 90% of the time kept agro. He gets it back even if he loses agro to me, albeit I take a hit or two in. But carby only has one skills that have enmity (Gouge). His AOE does not have enmity. Also because I open the attack first instead of sending carby out first.

Titan, however, has enmity for both Rock Buster and Mountain Buster. What if we send Titan first on primary target, he goes in and grab agro from first mob, other mobs target him, he does his aoe (this is all on auto-pilot). Your party targets the main mob first. Titan will keep hate on all 3 since he will spam his aoe every 15sec. He will keep hate on main with his single attack enmity as well. So healer won't get agro. Dps just need to focus on mob Titan is attacking. Now if one of the add goes after a party member, just send Titan to that target to get enmity back. But I don't think that should be necessary.

Titan will have more hp then traditional tank. My carby at lvl 34 has more than 2200+ (I don't remember the exact number but will check when I get in). Any tanks I have met, the last one being the goblin instance (whatever the name was), had less than 2000hp, even the warrior. I assume Titan will have more hp than carby seeing he is more advanced.

Any taker? I will do so on this weekend if I can find FC members who are interested in testing it out. Plus I am still at level 34. So I am giving other SMN to experiment.

Good luck experimenting with this, will likely work on trash mobs but it might be difficult on bosses reacting to fast AoE attacks you need to avoid as a tank, turning titan into a massive MP sponge. Also at 40+ both tank jobs have their tanking stances, increasing (effective) health and enmity generation, titan lacks anything like this.

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Originally Posted by nimuniverse

...Titan will have more hp then traditional tank.

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Even if this is the case, traditional tanks appear to have much more mitigation than pets. Couple this with the fact that both MAR/WAR and GLD/PLD have a multitude of tank oriented abilities and both classes really leave pets in the dust. I am definitely not saying that pets cannot successfully tank - though I am pretty sure higher level/harder content will prove to be too much for main tanking pets.

I'm sure pet off tanking will be viable under certain circumstances however, especially since it appears the pets' hp scales with VIT(basically it will always have about double your HP).

aoe can be avoided by recalling pet then resend it. But lack of dmg mitigation will be a bit hard. Here is another thought. How about 4 summoners with 4 titans. No need to heal pets. Whoever's pet about to die, just respawn it. Others will take over. Could be a fast run too with 4 dps.

Youd be way better off just taking a real tank, and using your DPS pets

Pets have inherent AoE damage reduction so I don't see the need to really avoid being all that much of an issue.

This isnt endgame by any means, but i just tanked and healed Tam Tara awhile ago, took a lot of fine control of sic him and heel. Topaz Carbuncle is OP.

i think SMN will most likely wont be able to tank main boss, but it probably will be good for add tanking..and in mog king smn kiting must be extremely fun and skill intensive!

Titan takes too much dmg compared to a normal tank in an instance, he can off tank a mob or basic add for a while but that seems to be his limit (tested in Cutters Cry)
He doesn't show up on the party bar making it really hard for the healer to target him.
Moving him out of AoE is futile as (this is so long as you aren't casting) select place then click on an area outside the AoE. Due to the often tight windows on most AoE makes it all but impossible.

On the first handful of dungeons he can hold his own, past that he really shouldn't be used.

Topaz Carbuncle tanked everything up to Toto Rak as well if not better then a normal tank, however past that it became inpractical to use him or Titan to try and tank.

Carbuncle actually tanked lv 20 Ifrit much better and required much less healing then any other tank we have used, since he pretty much could ignore the AoE damage.

You can queue for Duty Finder with a full group and it lets you ignore the roles. We ran Sunken Temple a few times yesterday with Summoner, White Mage, Bard, and Dragoon. It appeared that the Summoner was having to work overtime, mostly on making sure the pet was positioned correctly (first boss in particular), but we didn't have too much trouble.

I imagine we will try a few of the higher level ones as we can, since we have a definite lack of tanks in our guild presently.

I haven't messed enough with SMN to comment, but looking at your first post: If you post something, then edit it, you can get around the 1000 character limit. That's how you make a long post like this: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...l-tanking-tips

SE needs to give us better pet AI and the ability to command them while casting before I would even consider letting Titian become a full-time tank. He's ok for tanking single targets, but his threat is terrible on anything more than one, since his AoE is on such a long CD and has a pretty small radius.