Don't be "that DPS"

[RiisWolf]

Good answer to the "it's the tank's job to clean up after me" attitude of yet another lazy, irresponsible DPS.

I actually think these clowns should spend some time playing a tank. Certainly I wouldn't expect them to learn much. That requires responsibility, and insight, which they lack. That's why they are DPS in the first place. But at the minimum they could transfer some of the (granted, small amount due to their limitations) gained knowledge of what it's like being a tank---> over to their job as DPS.

Good answer for someone who doesn't get how teamwork works.
"Let's make DPS understand Tanks, but let's not make Tanks understand DPS. It's always DPS's fault."
You can't just flip everything on DPS just because they're not tanks.
Everyone has their own responsibilities. Sure the other can help in some way but ultimately your responsibilities are your own.

What about when a tank refuses to use AoE, doesn't mark a thing, and switches targets every 2 seconds to fast blade one thing, savage blade another, rage of halone another after that and fast blade the first one again? That's ineffective vs. a DPS who is attacking whomever the tank attacked first and to DPS who frequently AoE. Nobody's going to guess every 2 seconds, that lack of focus and leadership leads to chaos on its own. But of course lets blame DPS for what the tank did not do to easily prevent that mess. It's almost if not just as bad as saying it's DPS's fault for not being able to get their positionals while the tank is randomly and constantly spinning the mobs.
Oh wait, I bet you wanna tell the summoner to wait before taking the time it already takes to set up their DoTs, even though by the time you get to level 52 you ought to be used to lobbing from a distance and flashing when you get close by then. And don't you lie to me about how that doesn't happen. And if you've been starting pulls with provoke, then it's not them who's the problem, YOU are the problem. Provoke does nothing when nobody has threat, which means even a card or eye for eye will draw attention.
It's extremely irresponsible to not mark and expect them to attack your targets, especially when you constantly switch targets or if the first one dies, at which point is resolved by using AoEs like you should have in the first place. That doesn't mean you can't expect them to not attack the bees first and other similar targets of priority.

What about when a tank comes there underpowered? Are you really going to conform to the tank's low standards when a piercing talon does as much threat as the tank's shield lob? How is that really fair, fun, or nice to DPS to blame them for coming there even barely prepared unlike the tank?

That's among other things by the way.

Obviously I have to mention when some hardcore hubris twit gives you a hard time. But I'm not because there's more important things to worry about that those worthless twits.

Hate is the tank's responsibility. This isn't an equal effort for threat, you most of all have to have the most threat. You have the tools, the multipliers, and the options to make it happen when DPS has none of that, and healers do 1/2 threat with healing. And the only times it's the DPS's fault is if they attacked during long pulls, somehow ruin pulls before any real fighting start, pull before tank pulls, attacks the wrong targets when marked and I mean single targets, if DPS fail to beat mechanics they are responsible for, fail to evade which causes problems for all of you, die excessively which causes problems for all of you, among other things.

By the way, as a main tank player in this game. It's easy. All you have to do is strike and flash, strike and flash, strike and flash, strike and flash, strike and flash. Flash does not interrupt combos, so it is a constant stream of threat and blinds. None of this complicated fake junk that the meta might have you believe. It's not even complicated to see that having to compete with DPS who are better geared than you will be a you problem YOU have to deal with as well. Easiest solution to that is to invest in some strength until you get better gear, and a lot of those threat problems will be go away. You got the time and space to shield lob, circle of scorn and flash before any good DPS hammers them.

DPS has to deal with timers, delays in their own moves, random procs, positionals, every new wrench to their long list of chores to deal high amounts of damage, more mechanics than a Tank will EVER be responsible for, being randomly targeted by bosses most of the time, and having to depend on the tank to do their job. But no, let's just pretend DPS is so lazy and free of responsibilities.

The best part about your responsibilities as the tank is so that you can make it easier on them, NOT to be pushing YOUR responsibilities onto them. If you can't understand that, then it won't be a wonder why you struggle to be a good tank or at any job for that matter.

[Februs]

By the way, as a main tank player in this game. It's easy. All you have to do is strike and flash, strike and flash, strike and flash, strike and flash, strike and flash. Flash does not interrupt combos, so it is a constant stream of threat and blinds. None of this complicated fake junk that the meta might have you believe.

For a person who mains Tanking, you don't seem to understand how to use a Pld correctly. So I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that you just don't use Pld very often ... If ever. I wouldn't worry about it though. These days, most "main tank" players don't use Pld very often, let alone correctly.

In case you're interested though, Flash spamming is not how to tank mobs on Pld. Flash spamming is how you face-roll derp tank on Pld. You'll hold aggro like this, sure, but you are far from optimizing your roll. Flash should be cycled in accordance to the number of mobs being tanked and coordinated with the use of CoS, not just added willy-nilly between each attack. Given that party dps is the responsibility of the entire party, tanking using additional and unnecessary Flashes (which deals a whopping 0 dmg) is actively working against the party. It doesn't interrupt your combo, that's true, but it delays the combo for approximately 2.5 seconds (depending on personal skill speed). That's 2.5 seconds in which the Pld could be applying a DoT (Goring Blade) or reducing incoming Dmg (RoH, which also has the added benefit of having a much higher enmity generation than Flash). The Blind debuff is also wasted, because spamming Flash overlaps the timer of Blind, and Blind is resisted after 3 applications. There's more to it than this, but the short hand is that using additional Flashes past the minimum required is a waste of enmity, dps, and mitigation ... Of course, this would not matter to someone who thinks that the current Tank meta is "complicated fake junk," so I guess I'll just leave it there.

That aside, I do find it strange that you seem to have such difficulty with monitoring enmity, especially for someone who supposedly mains a Tank. Last I checked, the enmity meter is view-able to every player who is in combat, regardless of them being a tank or not. So, I'm not sure where all this guess work is coming in for you. I mean, the enmity bar is even colour coded for ease of use and convenience, and it's not like swapping targets is all that difficult. Pressing Tab or cycling on a D-pad seems pretty straight forward and doesn't throttle back a player's Dps at all. Given that maximizing party Dps is the sole responsibility of the Dps (something you seem to be advocating strongly), I would have thought that knowing how to cycle targets fluidly for proper DoT and Buff/Debuff applications would have been an essential skill for a Dps player. At the very least they might want to avoid accidentally turning a mob by stealing enmity and losing out on those positional potency bonuses you mentioned. I did not realize that it was so much harder for them to manage that ...

[RiisWolf]

snip

I'm not playing this game with you sweetie. What you fail to understand leads to the constant fallacies and preconceived notions you keep assuming. I don't need to spoon feed you when to stop, moderate, other obvious details, or silly things like optimizing your job when you can't make it function at a basic level. When you can't it work, then its not the time to optimize. If you want to be on top of a parser then stop, this is not the topic to be advocating your silly savage top PLD DPS junk. And don't lie to me about it's not about parsers, you're the one here pushing for avoiding flash solely for it doing no damage and delaying the time it takes to strike only ONE thing with RoH which already takes 5 seconds to get to, and the DR on its secondary effect doesn't change that. It does nobody good when you have no control. And yes the whole fake junk is the meta. All they care about is damage to meet parsers on an overtuned savage that has nothing to do with leveling or the vast majority of the game. If you want to deal damage 24/7 to a group of enemies, then play as warrior or dark knight. It's absurd that someone would be so bent on doing damage races as a PLD when it is in fact the very thing paladin most of all do not excel at and then to push it on others when they can't make the threat work. If you wanna force players to conform to you're refusal to direct and/or AoE threat, then have fun dragging the party down with your negligence.

So more real talk. You either cause threat to them all fast or DPS and/or healers will simply takes control no matter what they do. It's as simple as that. If you can't do that then you got almost no business blaming DPS or healers for anything you refuse to do. Again some of us will always AoE, in fact I'm pretty sure all of us except BLMs have AoEs to use in our normal routine vs anything so neglecting to apply threat on all enemies at the same time is especially bad. You do know that right? Switching targets constantly is bad on DPS because some need their DoTs on the current target for their moves to function, resistance debuffs don't affect any other than the one they were applied to, having to move more for positionals, and you'll be further away from using your execute type moves. Naturally this excludes the times you must switch for target of priority such as bees, totem poles, or boss adds that must die. But course I have to say it for you in- however vain- hopes that get the message, which you won't.

Can't wait to see what part of this you fail to read again.

Also don't confuse party responsibilities with individual responsibilities.

[HoodRat]

I'm confused. Are you saying that since pld doesn't have the best dps, then all plds should just do as little dps as possible?

[RiisWolf]

I'm confused. Are you saying that since pld doesn't have the best dps, then all plds should just do as little dps as possible?

No. It's not healthy to do absolutely no damage. It's not healthy to obsess over doing more damage while ignoring the weaknesses the job has that prevents you from doing as much as others.

[Februs]

Some imagined gibberish

Did you even read my response?

I never mentioned parsers, savage level content, or maximizing Pld Dps. I never mentioned being hell-bent on doing some Dps race as a Pld, and I never said that I ignore AoE enmity in favour of Dps. Nor did I ever once say that someone should ignore enmity for the sake of increasing Dps. What I did say, was that spamming Flash between each strike of a Pld combo is not how you optimize your tanking. I'm not really sure how you confused the word "Tanking" with "Dps," but I can assure you that they are not the same thing.

Securing enmity is always the Tanks first priority. Mitigation is second, and Dps is third. Spamming additional Flashes is not the correct way to handle all of your responsibilities, because you're only looking after one of the three responsibilities you have.

Firstly, the utility of RoH is in it's mitigation, not damage. If I was interested in dmg then I would have specified the Royal Authority combo, which has a much higher potency. For every target hit with RoH, you are spreading a strength down debuff. The faster you can spread that debuff out, the less physical dmg you take. That's pretty straight forward.

Further, both Savage Blade and RoH gain significantly more enmity than Flash. Meaning you are far less likely to lose enmity on a target hit by SB or RoH than you are on one that has only been hit by Flash. Better yet, Pld's have a +1 to their combo with Shield Swipe, which also grants enmity and pacifies a target and can be used at the same time as Flash. That's additional damage mitigated and enmity gained over simply using Flash which is one of the weakest enmity gains a Pld has, right next to Shield Lob.

Now, does any of this mean you should ignore Flash? Absolutely not. Flash should be utilized as soon as possible, before you start using your RoH combo. However, this does not mean that you should be spamming flash between each strike of your combo either. It should be used judiciously, and, again, this has nothing to do with damage. It has everything to do with mitigation.

Blind lasts 12 seconds. The earliest that the second cast of Flash should be used is in-between the first and second hits of your second RoH combo, to take full advantage of that timer and mitigate as much dmg as possible. IF you have to apply an extra Flash early because someone is getting near to stealing enmity from you (which is easy to see if you know how to use the enmity meter in the party list), then by all means go for it. Bad things happen. You gotta deal with them.

That said, this should not be happening if you're using your RoH combo correctly and utilizing a buffed CoS at the start of the pull. The timer on CoS ensures that it will be up shortly after your second cast of Flash. AoE enmity should not a problem unless you're doing something else wrong ... like neglecting the enmity potency of your RoH combo, for example.

So more real talk. You either cause threat to them all fast or DPS and/or healers will simply takes control no matter what they do. It's as simple as that.

Why is this a one or the other equation for you? You seem to think that AoE enmity, single target enmity, and dps are all mutually exclusive things. They're not. CoS generates enmity, is an AoE, and does Dps. If you want to take full advantage of your mitigation, then you have to use you Flash and your enmity combo/Shield Swipe to secure enmity. This is also why a lot of (good) Pld's tend to rotate targets when using their RoH combo. Firstly, it's to spread out the RoH debuff (because applying it to the same target twice is pointless), and secondly it's to ensure they keep enmity on Flashed targets.

Flash only provides the absolute minimum of enmity on a target. Multiple Flashes are barely any better. Flash + RoH/Savage Blade/Shield Swipe, on the other hand, means that the target is not going anywhere regardless of how hard the Dps hit or how much over-curing the healer does.

I also didn't say anything about having the Dps "constantly" switching targets. I believe the switching targets comment for Dps for the last 2 pages of this thread was directly in reference to keeping a combo bonus without stealing enmity. Again, if you weren't so busy imagining things for me to say instead of actually reading what I wrote you might have caught that.

No one is asking the Dps to switch targets every two seconds to spread out their enmity. That's the Tank's job (unless you prefer the Flash spam method. Then it's no one's job). The only thing that was ever even suggested was for the Dps to actually pay attention to their enmity meter on occasion and rotate to a new target if they notice they're about to steal hate. This shouldn't be that difficult since casters tend to swap targets early to secure their cast time anyway (this was also something pointed out earlier, if you had cared to follow the discussion before you started making one up in your head). Further, swapping targets is not even necessary if they aren't at risk for stealing hate. So, really, they'd only have to pay attention to the enmity meter if the tank seems to be having trouble.

Can't wait to see what part of this you fail to read again.

Also don't confuse party responsibilities with individual responsibilities.

I thought that this part was cute, considering that 90% of what you wrote was based off of false accusations that you made up all on your own, rather than things I actually wrote. It's also amusing that you specify party responsibilities and individual responsibilities when you seem to have no idea what either of those things mean. You can respond if you want to, but if you continue making things up, asserting false accusations, or flat out imagining a different conversation than the one the rest of us are having here, don't expect a response back.

[Mijali]

Gonna throw my 2 cents out here real quick, as a lvl 60 BRD who is currently doing lvl 50 dungeons for the anima weapon, with an ilvl of 154, I try to be really cautious of my aggro. I wait a few seconds, I shoot off less attacks, less AOEs, etc, to try and keep from drawing hate. No matter how cautious I am, though, I almost always draw a target or two from a mob, especially if I have to play a song.

I grabbed DRK and played as lvl 30 for a little while and tanking is not a simple task, but neither is DPSing, and neither is healing (lvl 13 conj, lots of juggling involved). They're all a balancing act, and if the team is working together, whether or not the DPS or Healer draws some hate isn't really an issue, as long as the tank can re-grab it and they aren't doing it on purpose (ie: don't pull extra mobs, let the tank go into a room first, etc). It's only ever a problem if the tank looses ALL of the mob, which almost never happens unless I'm in very low level stuff.

[Kabooa]

I grabbed DRK and played as lvl 30 for a little while and tanking is not a simple task.

Baseline tanking, especially on Warrior or Dark Knight, is really simple.

It's combining Strength accessories with giant pulls where you have to be on top of your game or else you will die with no one else to blame.

Basic 3-4 pulls? Spam aoe twice, do a combo on the focus target. DPS splitting? Do the second hit on the lower dps target, finisher on the higher. Do an aoe now and then to keep it off the healer.

[Malicewolf]

I'm not playing this game with you sweetie. What you fail to understand leads to the constant fallacies and preconceived notions you keep assuming. I don't need to spoon feed you when to stop, moderate, other obvious details, or silly things like optimizing your job when you can't make it function at a basic level. When you can't it work, then its not the time to optimize. If you want to be on top of a parser then stop, this is not the topic to be advocating your silly savage top PLD DPS junk. And don't lie to me about it's not about parsers, you're the one here pushing for avoiding flash solely for it doing no damage and delaying the time it takes to strike only ONE thing with RoH which already takes 5 seconds to get to, and the DR on its secondary effect doesn't change that. It does nobody good when you have no control. And yes the whole fake junk is the meta. All they care about is damage to meet parsers on an overtuned savage that has nothing to do with leveling or the vast majority of the game. If you want to deal damage 24/7 to a group of enemies, then play as warrior or dark knight. It's absurd that someone would be so bent on doing damage races as a PLD when it is in fact the very thing paladin most of all do not excel at and then to push it on others when they can't make the threat work. If you wanna force players to conform to you're refusal to direct and/or AoE threat, then have fun dragging the party down with your negligence.

So more real talk. You either cause threat to them all fast or DPS and/or healers will simply takes control no matter what they do. It's as simple as that. If you can't do that then you got almost no business blaming DPS or healers for anything you refuse to do. Again some of us will always AoE, in fact I'm pretty sure all of us except BLMs have AoEs to use in our normal routine vs anything so neglecting to apply threat on all enemies at the same time is especially bad. You do know that right? Switching targets constantly is bad on DPS because some need their DoTs on the current target for their moves to function, resistance debuffs don't affect any other than the one they were applied to, having to move more for positionals, and you'll be further away from using your execute type moves. Naturally this excludes the times you must switch for target of priority such as bees, totem poles, or boss adds that must die. But course I have to say it for you in- however vain- hopes that get the message, which you won't.

Can't wait to see what part of this you fail to read again.

Also don't confuse party responsibilities with individual responsibilities.

Wow, I've never seen more incorrect statements about PLD in my life... But not surprised it's coming from a WAR. As someone who mains a PLD, Februs is 100% totally right. And you Riis, are almost 100% incorrect. To spam flash between EVERY attack is simply bad tanking. It's not simply about maximizing damage or making parsing numbers. You are simply wasting time and mitigation. Even in large mobs, I do not use even half the amount of flashes you would. Do you also simply spam Overpower until you're out of TP then blame the DPS for not killing the mob fast enough? Because that is essentially the equivalent argument for WAR tanking based on how you think a PLD should tank.

As Februs stated, blind is resisted after 3 flashes. If you are pulling a huge mob like you are talking about, a CoS with FoF and a flash or 2 would hold aggro. After that, you should be rotating your enmity combo to gain a LEAD on hate on the mob targets as needed. After that, it's about effective management. Throwing out another flash if your DPS are big AoE hitters. I mean, jeez, while you're at it, why don't you just stop attacking all together and flash all day long. Maybe throw in a riot blade for some MP since you're wasting it so much.

Normally I wouldn't be so salty, but everything said just made me shiver. We're talking about competent PLD tanking. Not incompetent tanking that "could pass". That's the kind of stuff you see in sastasha man. Not end game.

[Almalexia]

Do you also simply spam Overpower until you're out of TP then blame the DPS for not killing the mob fast enough?

This is usually a good metric. If you're tapped out on the first pull and everything is only down to 50% HP, it's going to be one of those dungeons.

Maybe the DPS are afraid they'll take hate.