Common mistakes new tanks make

[Zfz]

Tanks! Please don't let this happen to your healer!



Nothing pisses off a healer more than seeing you focused on the boss and ignoring adds, forcing the healer to tank all the adds while still having to heal you.

And nothing pisses off a healer even more, when the healer asks you to tank and adds, and you answer that you can't because otherwise the boss would go to the healer, too, and it's the damage dealer's responsibility to kill the adds.

If any new tanks can't find the problem in this screenshot, please reply and I'll happily go into a long explanation for you.

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I'm up to my daily limit so here are the replies to posts below:

@Reinheart: After asking him to tank the adds, twice, he replies "hello, so you think you can do it?" or something close to those lines. That reply was the last straw so I told him my main Lv.44 PLD's name and left group

@RhazeCain: yes, there's always exceptions to the rule.

@sybase: no, not in this game because we don't have the 10%/30% aggro threshold, and healing enmity seems a lot higher than other MMOs. You can see from the picture that one of the adds is down to a sliver of health yet is still chewing on me. Something like that more often than not will not work in this game unless the healer stops healing. And in a situation like this, the healer can do nothing but spam self heals. Remember it's not 1 add on the healer. This is 6 adds, and you can see the string of red numbers there. That's the kind of damage and frequency of damage I was taking.

And look at the screenshot, it's a small enclosure, so the tank should have been picking them up.

Now for some background. In this fight, sets of three adds spawn at regular intervals. These adds spawn behind the boss, and they would have to make their way through the tank, to even get to me. Note "set of 3", but the picture has 6 adds. That's because the DPS could only manage to bring 2 adds down to low health before the next set spawned. So the DPS was at fault, too. In fact, they used Sleep on the adds. So lack of knowledge on the encounter is also one cause.

But all that is not the point. The point is there are adds that spawned. As a tank, you should always pick them up. Especially when you don't know the mechanics. Adds are more often meant to be picked up by the tank than not. Some adds are weak and don't need to be picked up, and then there are some that should not be picked up, but these are rare.