New tank looking for some tips to be a better tank!!

[Jpec07]

Hi! So I decided to take up a tank job just so I can be a more well rounded player. I have multiple DPS jobs and all Healer roles at 60 but I never wanted to try Tanking just because it was so intimidating.

Well I decided to pick up gladiator and see how it goes! (Also , those short que times are quite attractive)

Hi there! Welcome to the club! We have cupcakes.

Firstly , I've been trying to see if there were any Paladin guides so I can better understand my rotation and the Do's and Don'ts of tanking as a paladin.

I'm not aware of any guides that are being maintained at the moment, but PLD is pretty straightforward. I'm going to go ahead and assume you've only ever played a caster class while I do my 'splainin, so I apologize if you know any of this already!

Melee jobs have combos, if you weren't aware of that. If you look at the tooltips, you'll see "Combo Action", which shows you which abilities ought to follow one another. Generally, until you're more comfortable tanking and keeping enmity, your Rage of Halone (RoH) combo is going to be your best friend, because it generates a tonne of enmity.

As you level, you'll want to try to always keep at least one cooldown in use as often as possible. In terms of effectiveness at mitigating damage, the priority goes: Hallowed Ground (HG) > Sentinel > Bulwark + Awareness (always use together once you have them) > Rampart > Foresight > Fight or Flight + Bloodbath (there is no compelling reason to not use these together) > Foresight. Generally, in earlier dungeons, you should be okay to save your bigger cooldowns for instances where the boss will do more damage, but you'll want to be sure to use them more on trash than on bosses (as I'm sure you're aware as a healer, tanks usually take more damage from trash than they do from bosses).

Also, even if you don't have Shield Oath yet, Sword Oath is still helpful, because any damage you deal will boost your enmity, and SwO adds ~50 potency per cooldown, which can help close the gap a bit.

I had a lot of trouble dealing with multiple trash on mobs , often times having one of the monsters lose hate on me and attack one of my other team mates. Also, managing my MP when I'm constantly using flash to get back hate when the DPS are going too ham.

The other day I ran Hatali (NM) with TWO THMs D: lemme tell ya, they gave me a run for my money as I kept fighting to keep hate. Any tips on how to handle tanking with DPS that are known for ripping hate so easily ?

One of the best things I can recommend for this is to Flash frequently. Until you get Shield Oath at level 40, you'll want to start every pull with 2-3 Flashes, and then work another one in between each RoH combo. In general, that should be enough in most cases, but if you're going in NQ white gear, you might need to work a little more. What I like to do at those levels is cycle each piece of the RoH combo onto a different enemy. So I'll hit one enemy with Fast Blade (FB) and Savage Blade (SB), tab to the next target for Rage of Halone, Flash, then tab to the next target for FB-SB, and so on. It can take some getting used to, but tabbing targets like that to spread your enmity is one of the best tricks you can learn (especially in your level 60 roulette as a freshly-capped tank, it will help you hold hate off that iLvl 240 SMN that you got).

Keep in mind, too, that Provoke is not like WoW's taunt; it only puts you just on top of the enmity list, so you need to follow it up with something like Flash or Shied Lob to re-establish your enmity lead. I've found that usually if a mob gets away, I can just use Shield Lob, so I can save Provoke for the rare instance when that doesn't work.

The other thing you can do is mark your targets, but that only works for single target DPS, and not for jobs that have at least halfway decent AoE.

Also , finally. Are macros super important for a tank ?? I play on PS4 and have no clue how to use macros so I'm wondering if it's something I should try to learn how to use??

In general, no. There are abilities that you always want to use together, but especially on a PS4, you should have more than enough slots for every action you have access to.

The only exception would be a marking macro of some kind, to help the DPS and healer know which targets you intend to prioritize, but I'm not sure how readily available that would be on PS4.

Thank you in advance for any tips and help!! DDD

You are most certainly welcome! Hope we've been able to help! Don't hesitate to ask more questions!