Tanking While Undergeared

[Ehayte]

I am in a mix of Darklight (Belt, Wrist) AF (Boots, Legs) AK (Chest, Helm, Hands, Ring) and player made (Rest of the accessories) with the Ifrit Weapon.

I won't get into the details of the group that triggered this question, as it is kind of petty and would border on tl;dr status, but suffice it to say, I accidentally offended a Relic+1 BLM and he started actively trying to steal aggro from me on mob #1 of every encounter (or so I suspect). No one died or even took more than a couple hits in the whole run. Afterwards the WHM sent me a tell and told me that he hated me and my "kind". /shrug I will take that all with a grain of salt and try to learn.

I realize Ifrit + a mix of AK/Darklight isn't the best gear, especially if I'm up against a fully DL + Relic+1 dps. I will take the comments of the other group members with a grain of salt and learn what I can from them, but does anyone have any advice on:

1 - What I can do differently in these situations to preserve my reputation and appease people like this.
2 - What are some of the most enmity-effective combinations that you all use when grouped with people who out-gear you by 20-30 ilvls?

[Judge_Xero]

stuffs

For running dungeons and stuff like that what you can do is tell the party "Mob marked as ?" (whatever you want to mark it as) is for the DD's."

Just make sure to mark a weak mob for the DD's to fight over while you gather hate on the rest. Then you can casually just mark the next mob in order. If they pull it off you, it's not a big deal because A:it'll be mostly dead and B: if you mark the next weakest mob then noone's going to die. In most cases you're just there to soak up the damage from the big guys, or anyone with a potent AOE.

1 - Most people are just looking for direction. There's no point trying to tank everything and having to run around looking like a goofball. Give them a target and tank the rest.

2 - Enmity wont be an issue because you wont be fighting against others for ownership of their marked mob. You also wont be holding back any of those high level players from burning the mob down fast.

Hope that helps. Good luck

[Resolute]

It sounds like you were doing AK or some other dungeon for Tomes? If that is the case, your gear is perfectly fine for those instances... I don't know if you said anything really rude that offended them, but if all their hate was coming because they were better geared than you, then they are idiots. They can't expect everyone to go into those dungeons fully geared, as you have to go to those dungeons to get geared in the first place. You are not undergeared for those instances. If anything, they are overgeared.

[Ehayte]

Couple responses:

For Judge - I do mark, I use a macro that marks the mob as X and puts an "Assist Me" message in party chat. I usually mark a caster or a mob that isn't going to move or a high priority mob first. From previous MMOs I am assuming that I am failing if I don't have every single mob on me at all times. Now, in high level dungeons I would expect to be failing 10-15% of the time. Is that not how its been working in high level dungeons? (i.e. is it a little sloppy and the best I can hope to do is hold a majority of the hate to take hits?)


Resolute - I am running AK for tombs. I was not intentionally rude, and I did apologize for offending the guy, but he basically made a comment that we should have just ignored the gnats on the wall. My comment back was that I didn't think our DPS was high enough to do that, as it was lower than the other AK runs I had done. He got steamed and accused me of losing aggro on 80% of mobs (not true), and I offered my apologies as I did not want to get into it with this guy, as there was no point. I asked if I could do anything better as a tank, they all ignored me and the WHM said, "talk less - play more". P.S. we finished the instance in about 40 minutes (AK) - not my best time but that is a reasonably quick clip for a PUG.

I play MMOs as social games... so I kind of like to talk and meet people and work together to get better. So I guess our play styles/mind-sets were just very different, haha.

[Amas]

Resolute - I am running AK for tombs. I was not intentionally rude, and I did apologize for offending the guy, but he basically made a comment that we should have just ignored the gnats on the wall. My comment back was that I didn't think our DPS was high enough to do that, as it was lower than the other AK runs I had done. He got steamed and accused me of losing aggro on 80% of mobs (not true), and I offered my apologies as I did not want to get into it with this guy, as there was no point. I asked if I could do anything better as a tank, they all ignored me and the WHM said, "talk less - play more". P.S. we finished the instance in about 40 minutes (AK) - not my best time but that is a reasonably quick clip for a PUG.

This was probably your mistake (and not even really a mistake). A lot of Relic/Relic+1 players are extremely bad but don't know it. They assume they're the bees' knees because they have relics and react poorly to any comments that so much as imply they're anything less than God's gift to DPS.

That being said, I don't think there's ever any reason to bother killing the bees unless your healer is a total derptard. If your DPS pace is low, it gives you more time on the wall to kill it before you run out of space. If your DPS pace is high, it's not worth wasting the time on the bees. You basically have one entire side to yourself, so you have all the space you need to keep them clustered near the wall and near the edge so that the rest of the party can plug away without having to worry about AOEs.

[Delorean]

what can you do? you can get over it and keep doing what you were doing

it never ceases to amaze me that players give tanks so much shit and then turn around and complain about their queue times though

[Soulburn32]

if you don't have the demon wall down to below 30% i don't see how ignoring the bees is a legit strategy and that has nothing to do with you.

You need both dps and the healer to all be pushing dps to get to that point and then a LB to finish it.

Even if you go aggro real quick on the bee's your lost dps isn't going to make or break it at that point.

TL: DR ignore 90% of the dps you run into as they are a dime a dozen and the vast majority of them don't know they actually suck at the game

[Zeila]

TL: DR ignore 90% of the dps you run into as they are a dime a dozen and the vast majority of them don't know they actually suck at the game

QFT/10char

[Benjamen]

Yeh man, seriously don't worry about it, my last 2 AK runs had a relic DD then a relic+1 DD on last 1. The 1st 1 was a Bard who was shooting stuff as I pull stuff back (Patrols/Gragoiles/Succubus) But I think he knew he would pull hate hard, he was doing it on purpose. He didnt give me rubbish, from the 1st mob he got it off me right away then I said something in a jokey way like "Man I'ma need a relic to hold these." But he did it all the way up to the boss and even did it on the last boss, IDK but yeh also started coating off the other DD saying they were weak (like seriously , dafudge man) which ticked us all off, rest of the PT knew the deal. 2nd run just now was with a BLM+1, he definetly knew what was going on but we were having jokes about it lol felt bad for the healer though, I was able to hold em all but somewhere inbetween he would take the mob marked 2, thats how I knew he knew ;P Edit: OH, he was also deliberatly getting ahead of me so he'd aggro the mobs lol luckily yes I got em back everytime uless of course, u know lol but yeh dont worry bout it, sad to say but Relics should stay with at least a Relic tank (FC or shout) not Duty Finder unless of course they know whats going on lol

[juniglee]

I can relate to your problem. I just turned 50 last Saturday, and my current gearset is:
AF (Helm, Chest, Legs)
DL (Belt, Ring 1, Earrings, Neck, Wrist)
AK (Ring 2, Boots, Gloves)
Ifrit Blade

If the DPS gives you a chance to pull with Shield Lob, Flash, and then Circle of Scorn for the initial enmity, the next thing I do is to use the PLD enmity combo (Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Rage of Halone) on Mob #1. Now you have two things you can do:
1. If there's no Relic +1 user, perhaps only up to Garuda or Titan, what I do is to use Fast Blade -> Savage Blade on Mob #1, then Rage of Halone on Mob #2. Repeat again with Mob #3. Pretty much that, no Flash.
2. If there is a Relic +1 user, after the enmity combo on Mob #1, use Flash. Then repeat the enmity combo on Mob #1 again. Their DPS should be high enough that it dies by this time. Just repeat for the rest.

The only reason I do what I do above is to at least try and help out with damage output, as well as Savage Blade generating some enmity if used as part of a combo.

Also, wanting to kill bees does not imply a lack of confidence on the Relic +1 DPS'ers - it's not wrong for wanting a run to go safely and smoothly. You could argue that if their DPS was indeed high anyway, they'd be able to down both bees, and the boss anyway.