What to expect when playing the Tank role and what other players expect from you!

[neoreturn]

What players expect from me as a tank .

1. I pull entire zone including bosses if possible , and not die , not need heals , do decent dps and hold agro to everything while stunning mobs and silencing them .
2. I also will let DPS pull mobs and take agro off them before they take a single pixel of damage.
3. The healer will DPS and never have to heal me .
4. Every run will be a new world record speed run .
5. In Coil no one will ever die , if they die its tanks fault .
6. Even on content no one even the tank has not done , nor anyone in the world , you must know fight regardless.

Yep probably missed a lot more but that sums it up I guess

7. You also need have best gear, otherwise you are undergeard. If anything happened,all your fault.

[Techro]

All raging aside, things expected:

From Tank:
1) Mark targets; hold aggro - This makes your party understand that you are leading and that you can lead by holding aggro.
2) Be mobile - if you pull more than 1 enemy, rotate onto different mobs, so that everything is on equal ground for threat. use AOE enmity abilities often. Flash/Overpower.
3) healers generate a lot of enmity but once you have rotated a few times on mobs its hard to pull off of you.

From DPS:
1) follow the mark.
2) follow the mark.
3) follow..

From Healer:
1) do not cast a heal on me while i'm grabbing threat.
2) do not cast a heal on me while im grabbing threat and then throw aero on all the mobs
3) do not cast regen on me and then big heal while im at 70%.

[RhazeCain]

Some sarcastic ones, some well-intentioned ones so far. Here's my go at a realistic one:

From Tank:
- Mark target, if relevant
- Lead, don't wait (if some reason why not, explain)
- Hold enough agro to overcome common actions of groupmates. Applies for all targets engaged unless otherwise stated.
- Dodge relevant AE abilities

From DPS:
- Follow a rational target order
- Dodge relevant AE abilities
- Don't agro new foes

From Healer:
- Say if you're going AFK
- Heal at a reasonable rate
- Dodge relevant AE abilities
- Don't cast beneficial effects that cause newly agroed foes to immediately target you (before tank can corral them)
- Don't agro new foes


Some people have already mentioned marking and following a kill order. This is OK of course, but it's a very basic strategy which can be improved upon sometimes. For example SMN may DoT multiple targets to maximize damage. MNK can Rockbreaker. Etc. Or there are places where the plan is to use AE attacks - not much point having a kill order then. As a tank I will often mark only the 1st out of a pack. Single target DPS can focus that one (and I'll make sure enough agro is there), and by the time it's dead the remainder will have enough tank agro that it doesn't matter what order.

[Gandora]

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And yet the two of you forgot a really important one in the DPS section, which most DPS tend to ignore &/or forget depending convinience, and which is:

-Don't start attacking while tank is pulling.

I see this one nearly everyday and get called incompetent tank upon that lol.

[FJerome]

-- Do not cast things such as "Stoneskin" when I start runing to aggro the mobs around.

The flip-side to that is - Tanks, please don't run off and pull aggro if I haven't finished buffing you. Especially not if I'm in the middle of the actual cast, that's going to end well for neither of us.

[TaneshimaPopura]

From myself the Tank:
-Don't need to mark target cause you can try to grab it and you won't
-AK runs under 22 minutes.
-Swapping to offensive role when damage isn't intensive.
-Dodge every single avoidable skill be it red indicators or moving behind mobs to stunning/silencing them.

From DPS:
-Do your job and DPS as hard as you can, make my life miserable.

From Healer:
-I want to see every GCD used. Be it for heal or for DPS
-For learn to Cleric Stance dance.