Healing an axe tank. Really need advice.

[Tourist]

I'm about to boycott 2h axe tanks. Very few are anything but a mana sponge. I'm assume they are supposed to be a good tanking class because I see them so much more than the sword and board tanks.

I can run a dungeon healing a "standard" tank and it's nice. Deaths are extremely rare and life is good.

If i run the same dungeon healing a 2h axe tank, then I'm almost always oom on a boss fight. I pot early so I can have at least one more pot before I'm completely oom and we all die. If i stop spamming cure on the tank to heal a dps, the tank is usually down to 1/3 or less of his health when i get back to him and then it's to use Cure II to bring him back. If i have to move toward the dps to heal them, then the tank will usually die before i can get his health back up. I find that sometimes, i just have to let the dps die so i can keep spamming heals on the mana sponge.

I'm very much curious about why this style of tanking is so popular and I really need advice on this issue.

[Judge_Xero]

L2P......jk

It depends on what content you are playing. What level content are you at? Warrior tanks don't get many defensive CDs until much later so if they aren't making good use of Bloodbath early on there isn't much else they have. In level 50 content they need to know how to anticipate a hit to use Inner Beast. Maybe the people you run with aren't even using Defiance?

[Tourist]

i've run lvl 35 dungeons on down to the earliest ones using the random finder. I don't know anything about tanking here, so i don't know when they get what skills, I also don't understand why we can't use all of our toolkit in the lower dungeons; scaled down of course.

[Caraway]

In order of gained MRD cooldowns there is Foresight(2), Bloodbath(8), Mercy Stroke(26), Thrill of Battle(34).

If they're a Warrior they only have Gladiator and Pugilist cross-class so that limits them to Featherfoot(4), Second Wind(8), Convalescence(10).... And a few others I don't have yet because my cross-class aren't high enough (I know there's an increased healing one and a reduced incoming criticals one).

That said, early level Marauder is all about your cross-class and making sure your equipment is up to date. Marauders are really Tank/DPS hybrid with a whole lot of HP growth. If their gear isn't all tank and up to date, and they're not taking advantages of the cross-class cooldowns available they're not bringing everything they can to the table. And once they're 30 there's no reason to not be a Warrior in group situations, Defiance is just that strong.

Like Xero said, the Warrior also has to know when to pre-emptively drop Inner Beast (where as before it was reactive as a noticeable self-heal) to mitigate incoming damage. This can be tough in leveling dungeons when the tank doesn't know the boss' patterns.

As for healing one? Yeah, they do take more HPS than a Gladiator/Paladin does, but it shouldn't be to the point that it sends you out of mana. I don't think I've ever had a Conjuror/White Mage run out on me before.

[AldoVonAlexandros]

u need better gear too

[Tourist]

When i heal a tank with a shield, i only run below half mana on boss fights, but never dangerously low. Healing an axe tank i can go oom on a trash fight with 3 mobs if the dps isn't good enough to finish the fight very quickly.

[Delorean]

are you using a crappy weapon?

because one time i healed tam tara deepcroft with a level 1 staff and it was pretty hard :|

[Urthdigger]

I've never had a problem healing marauders. I think you're just running into terrible ones. Check their gear next time that happens and see if it's either massively out of date, or if they're wearing DPS gear instead of tank gear (tank gear usually has +parry on it, and equal values for both Defense and Magic Defense)

[Teleniel]

Before anything else... it's not 'axe tank' it's either Marauder, or Warrior.
Next you need to ask yourself is this content Leveling / post-50 / RAID... since each of these works very differently as to how you have to approach it

Healing is as much about your weapon / gear as it is about the tanks. If they are too poorly geared they take too much and the incoming spike damage of trash packs will kill them. If you are too poorly geared (weapon out of date) you will not be able to maintain healing throughput for a fight (skill wise this also has to do with are you over-healing regularly). Use the time you have between battles when you have high mana regen to cast damage shields on party members to save you mana when you need it, and make sure you're using Shroud for MP or enmity whichever is more dangerous in the fight.

[Rivest]

Before anything else... it's not 'axe tank' it's either Marauder, or Warrior.
Next you need to ask yourself is this content Leveling / post-50 / RAID... since each of these works very differently as to how you have to approach it

Healing is as much about your weapon / gear as it is about the tanks. If they are too poorly geared they take too much and the incoming spike damage of trash packs will kill them. If you are too poorly geared (weapon out of date) you will not be able to maintain healing throughput for a fight (skill wise this also has to do with are you over-healing regularly). Use the time you have between battles when you have high mana regen to cast damage shields on party members to save you mana when you need it, and make sure you're using Shroud for MP or enmity whichever is more dangerous in the fight.

He or she is probably using Axe tank, instead of typing ''Marouder or Warrior Tank' to shorten it.
To be honest, I don't see anything wrong with using Axe tank, after all it's a Tank with an axe.

I do notice that a lot of MRD/WAR forget to use their defensive cooldowns and it can get stressfull for CNJ/WHM.
What Urthdigger stated is right too, a lot of Warrior spec STR instead of VIT and wear DPS gear instead of tank gear.