Dark Knight

[Ecks007]

No it's not, had to burst your bubble there.

Flash spam and riot blade combo, can hold any number of mobs in low level dungeons easily.

Thing is, you don't flash spam. That wastes MP like nobodies business at the early levels. One flash is enough for initial aggro retention then you Riot Blade combo bouncing it back and forth so that you maintain equal aggro on all mobs, you can flash again after a bit to solidify your aoe aggro but really once is enough if you know how to juggle your hate building sword combo. Any flash used after is in case of emergencies. Or if more mobs end up getting pulled that you intended.

Also, I've been in low level roulette many a time where the tanks just didn't understand how their skills worked. Gladiator doesn't play like most primary tanks in other MMOs do. (ie you can continually use your single target and aoe aggro taunts to keep aggro on you and that's really all you have to do in most other games) You can't just flash spam, not a with a good party. It doesn't grab as much aggro and if you are just using it and not doing your combos properly aggro is going to just get ripped right off of you by the dps or healer pretty quickly. And again, you'll run out of MP really fast.

I've seen many a bad beginning tank, thinking they need to spam flash, then they run out of mp and the healer rips hate off them because they are just healing like normal and they have no more mp for flash. Flash spam is just bad in general at the lower levels. I can't comment yet on how it works at the higher levels and endgame, but I'll find out easily enough after 2.4 (gonna level up my tanks more and take advantage of the mass ninja ques).

I did experience some good tanks as well, but I'd say the bad ones or mediocre ones outwieghed the good when I leveled up my Summoner, Black Mage, White Mage, Monk and Dragoon. I primarily did dungeons so I kind of know what I'm talking about, at least from my experience. I also have a real good friend who I leveled up my first job with (Summoner) who mains Paladin and I took mental notes on the things he was doing, plus he would explain stuff as we did dungeons together. I learned a lot about Gld/Pld tanking by watching him. He's definitely one of the best tanks I know.

So, when I started leveling up Gladiator and Marauder to the point where I could run dungeons on them players in my party that had obviously been with bad tanks before would be amazed that I'd keep aggro on 3-4/5 mobs at the same time without aggro coming off and another player being attacked (this was also with trigger happy archers). I'm not trying to toot my own horn, it's just this is what happened. It's what I've experienced. But I can't lie, it is a pretty nice feeling when you're congratulated for tanking well. There are many people that don't know how to play Gladiator and Marauder and tank well at the early levels. Hell there are people that are level 50 with i90+ gear and still can't tank worth a darn.

[Zantitrach]

Thing is, you don't flash spam.

....
You can't just flash spam, not a with a good party. It doesn't grab as much aggro and if you are just using it and not doing your combos properly aggro is going to just get ripped right off of you by the dps or healer pretty quickly. And again, you'll run out of MP really fast.

I've seen many a bad beginning tank, thinking they need to spam flash, then they run out of mp and the healer rips hate off them because they are just healing like normal and they have no more mp for flash. Flash spam is just bad in general at the lower levels.

I'ma stop you right there, spamming flash is indeed OP at lower levels. Up until... 40-ish you can just spam flash and then spend all your GCD combo'n Riot Blade to get your MP back just fine. The only thing this doesn't really apply to is bosses.

[WellGramarye]

I'ma stop you right there, spamming flash is indeed OP at lower levels. Up until... Forever you can just spam flash and then spend all your GCD combo'n Riot Blade to get your MP back just fine. The only thing this doesn't really apply to is bosses.

Fixed that for you. Unless your group massively out gears you, and I mean full I40 ahead of you, flash is still pretty king.

[Zantitrach]

Fixed that for you. Unless your group massively out gears you, and I mean full I40 ahead of you, flash is still pretty king.

Yeah, but I ran into that a lot when I was leveling PLD after 40. Lol

[Ecks007]

I'ma stop you right there, spamming flash is indeed OP at lower levels. Up until... 40-ish you can just spam flash and then spend all your GCD combo'n Riot Blade to get your MP back just fine. The only thing this doesn't really apply to is bosses.

Fixed that for you. Unless your group massively out gears you, and I mean full I40 ahead of you, flash is still pretty king.

Hmm, well I suppose then you can flash spam? I don't personally suggest it though, as I can tank and maintain hate just fine without having to burn my MP so quickly.

I have seen tanks that just use flash and easily have aggro ripped from them by White Mages and Bards.. so I dunno. I mean, they obviously weren't using their Riot Blade combo correctly and were purely relying on flash.

You say that this works, but I have seen otherwise on many occasions. So I am going to trust my experiences because it has proven to be correct.

[WellGramarye]

snip

I run nearly every dungeon with a geared BLM (who has a wonderful flare/double flare/triple flare rotation,) and sometimes a geared WHM and not so geared BRD (though who does impeccable song rotations [Ballad between pulls, Requiem during fights] due to being in the same room as me.) At any level you have enough MP to Flash about 7-8 times (depending on mp refresh tic) from full MP. On any group of 3 or more mobs during pull -> Shield Toss High priority mob -> FoF -> Flash -> Scorn -> Flash x 6 -> Rotate Riot Blade and Flash some more. You will lose hate if a couple of things are happening:

1.) People attack/agro the mob before you and pull it out of your Flash/Scorn range (this happens a lot with Bards who try to dps while you pull or mages who use Regen during pulls. In this case, there is nothing you can do except try to regain hate with provoke and other abilities.

2.) Your party massively out gears you. Again this is talking I40 + difference. Flash emnity is based on your weapon base damage. If their damage > your damage by a large margin then it will be hard to keep hate period. In this case, the solution is to farm better gear.

3.) The fight is taking forever. Yes eventually you WILL lose hate over a period of like 4-5 minutes, but if the fight is taking this long then your party is massively under geared for the content. Even same geared as drop parties should be able to burn through a normal pull in decent enough time (Eg: i80 party in a dungeon that drops i80 gear.) IF the fight takes forever then the healer has to heal more, thus creeping up on the emnity list. There are a few things going wrong here if this is happening. The healer isn't helping to dps, the dps have bad gear or rotations, the tank isn't using proper cooldown rotations. This is mostly a failure of the entire party.

[Sapphic]

Thing is, you don't flash spam. That wastes MP like nobodies business at the early levels.

That's why you use riot blade, obviously....

I also never got into the Fate zerg parties in 2.0. Agree with the bad tanks though XD Many times ended up having to tank 90% of the dungeon as MNK or SMN with Titan on low level roulette when Ive ran them with those jobs. Generally I join as PLD or WAR. Also I've succesfully tanked practically everything in game, have a turn 9 geared PLD.

More often than not I tank lvl 50 dungs using my 110 MNK accs instead of tank ones using sword oath with good healers, too many times out DPS the DPSers too :P

[Lee-Akira]

I'm okay with dark knight being a tank, as long as the job has the move set from final fantasy tactics, and only sacrifices hp to increase defense capabilities, sacrificing hp to deal damage, is not very tank-ey in a game where having that extra hp is useful in tough battles.