Tales from Duty Finder: Some make you laugh, some make you cry. Let's vent.

[Mesarthim]

*Beats head against wall* Tank mount progress on random normal raids. Both of these stories come from delta 2.0 normal.

First one is a paladin with about 55k something hp. He had issues holding aggro even in shield oath and was pointing it at the party (and periodically taking it off of me when I corrected the positioning of the boss and took aggro myself). When the first tendrils came out I took the boss to the safe spot... or I thought I did but he took it off of me and kept it right on an earthquake. Luckily it's easy for me to take it back but he kept this up the entire run.

Second run is a war offtank. There's not much to say here other than... butcher's block spamming offtank, because what is enmity right? Never shirks either. Definitely was first to leave when I called him out on it though. It's annoying but I didn't insult him. The last thing I need is the boss to spin around because someone won't watch their aggro (or forces me back into tank stance at weird intervals).

Dear duty finder: Team effort!

[MetalSnakeXI1]

*Beats head against wall* Tank mount progress on random normal raids. Both of these stories come from delta 2.0 normal.

First one is a paladin with about 55k something hp. He had issues holding aggro even in shield oath and was pointing it at the party (and periodically taking it off of me when I corrected the positioning of the boss and took aggro myself). When the first tendrils came out I took the boss to the safe spot... or I thought I did but he took it off of me and kept it right on an earthquake. Luckily it's easy for me to take it back but he kept this up the entire run.

Second run is a war offtank. There's not much to say here other than... butcher's block spamming offtank, because what is enmity right? Never shirks either. Definitely was first to leave when I called him out on it though. It's annoying but I didn't insult him. The last thing I need is the boss to spin around because someone won't watch their aggro (or forces me back into tank stance at weird intervals).

Dear duty finder: Team effort!

Team Effort seems like an alien concepts on raids specifically

More than once during O11 where I aggored omega and neither the tank nor the off tank took aggro off me(literally played a BRD tanking meta for a whole minute before i died xD) heck I popped a Refresh/Tactician(don't remember which one I used at the time) but to no avail

But it's specifically in alliance raids where I lost count of how many times our tank just won't aggro our assigned ad

[SturmChurro]

Team Effort seems like an alien concepts on raids specifically

More than once during O11 where I aggored omega and neither the tank nor the off tank took aggro off me(literally played a BRD tanking meta for a whole minute before i died xD) heck I popped a Refresh/Tactician(don't remember which one I used at the time) but to no avail

But it's specifically in alliance raids where I lost count of how many times our tank just won't aggro our assigned ad

I still can't understand how people don't know how to hold it. I am NOT a very good tank and all I have to do is a couple simple rotations, and switch to more damaging. If someone starts creeping up I do it again, or something quick inbetween to rebuild some threat. It's literally as easy as 1, 2, 3.

[Khorchi]

Unlike my last one from 3 pages earlier, this one is brief. It is also not from the DF but actually from PF.

Lvl 63 WHM in HoH.

We dive into HoH and start from Floor 1 because i'm a scrub and I've never been past floor 11.
With us is a DRK, BRD and RDM. Easy party. Gonna be fun.
Everything goes exceptionally smoothly. Right up to and including the beginning of the Floor 20 boss.
All of a sudden. Boom. I'm dead. No idea how I died, I just decided to tank the floor. I'm excellent at keeping that aggro.
As the RDM starts to Rez me, AoE. They're dead. Leaving just the Tank and the Bard with about 54% remaining.

The Tank holds for as long as she can and then she goes down with about 25% left.
The Bard then starts running, weaving, drinking potions like she is a man dying of thirst who's just discovered a water fountain. She's getting hit, but slowly depleting the health bar of the boss.
She runs out of potions. Boss is at 4%. Boss hits the Bard down to 8k HP. Tank goes to 3%. Bard goes to 6.5k HP. Bard goes to 4.5k HP. Boss goes to 2%.
We start to lose hope.
Bard is at 2.1k HP. Boss goes down to 1%.
Bard gets hit and goes down to double digits. Lets off one last flurry of attack.
Boss goes to 0%. We cheer out in celebration!

The bard solo'd the Floor 20 HoH Boss from 25%.

So... A huge shoutout to the bard herself. Missy from *Siren.
You will forever remain in the folklore of Heaven on High with the other 3 girls who just needed that clear. <3

[Heliantheae]

All this tank talk makes me happy that it's not just me. I keep getting Labyrinth or World of Darkness. And everytime there's a DRK with Grit. Sometimes Darkside too. Again, I hate aggro wars so I turn on Sword. And I still somehow almost rip hate. So I've got to ask, is spamming Fast Blade>Riot Blade good DPS over Rage of Halone combo?

And I have a specific story too, I was in Labyrinth. A WAR and DRK were both in their tank stance. First couple of rooms, the adds were all over the place. Both of them, in their tank stance, couldn't hold trash mobs. Still in Sword, I grabbed some adds and held them no problem just using Flash and Spin Slash. Rest of the run went smooth-ish. We somehow wiped on Behemoth. I don't know how, I was holding Iron Giant away from everyone and they still managed to break all the rocks.

Another fun tank raid story, I was in O12n where I healed myself more than the healers did. I even got more Vercure's thrown my way than actual heals. Through no real fault of one healer, she was having a hell of a time keeping the other healer and tank alive. I must've gotten lucky when I heal that because everytime my co-healer knows what's up.

[MetalSnakeXI1]

I still can't understand how people don't know how to hold it. I am NOT a very good tank and all I have to do is a couple simple rotations, and switch to more damaging. If someone starts creeping up I do it again, or something quick inbetween to rebuild some threat. It's literally as easy as 1, 2, 3.

It's either one of two things:

A/Tanks that have their tank stance up but don't do aggro combos

or B/MTs that either don't pop their tank stance or turn it off mid battle.

And it gets worse when the OT doesn't try to use his aggro combo to be the second enmity target on the list thus resulting in situations where when the MT dies your team gets mowed down before the OT remembers "Oh shit I gotta provoke"

I won't boast about my tanking cuz I'm a very average Dark Knight myself but seriously holding aggro isn't hard and a tank who can't manage their aggro will be in for a rude awakening when they get to high end content like EX primals and savage raids

[SturmChurro]

It's either one of two things:

A/Tanks that have their tank stance up but don't do aggro combos

or B/MTs that either don't pop their tank stance or turn it off mid battle.

And it gets worse when the OT doesn't try to use his aggro combo to be the second enmity target on the list thus resulting in situations where when the MT dies your team gets mowed down before the OT remembers "Oh shit I gotta provoke"

I won't boast about my tanking cuz I'm a very average Dark Knight myself but seriously holding aggro isn't hard and a tank who can't manage their aggro will be in for a rude awakening when they get to high end content like EX primals and savage raids

I'm too scared to do difficult content with tank. I'm more worried about doing the mechanics than holding aggro!

[MoroMurasaki]

It's either one of two things:

A/Tanks that have their tank stance up but don't do aggro combos

or B/MTs that either don't pop their tank stance or turn it off mid battle.

And it gets worse when the OT doesn't try to use his aggro combo to be the second enmity target on the list thus resulting in situations where when the MT dies your team gets mowed down before the OT remembers "Oh shit I gotta provoke"

I won't boast about my tanking cuz I'm a very average Dark Knight myself but seriously holding aggro isn't hard and a tank who can't manage their aggro will be in for a rude awakening when they get to high end content like EX primals and savage raids

But you shouldn't really be doing aggro combos or being in tank stance :thinking:

Holding enmity on the tank is the entire party's job. In something like a dungeon with trash pulls yes you may need to pop into tank stance and use your aoe enmity generator but in any single target situation there is literally no need.

If you aren't woefully undergeared compared to your dps as a WAR you can literally hold off of everyone with Defiance (Unchained) Tomohawk (Equilibrium, Deliverance) and into Storm's Eye. If you have a BRD and no NIN maybe one aggro combo since they don't have diversion.

I understand this isn't a tale from the duty finder but I just wanted to explain away the misinformation.

[Limonia]

Here is another example of why so many heal-only healers are bad:

I was doing Castrum Abania as a WAR because I want the axe that never drops from there, and help my boyfriend level some DPS classes. I rarely play WAR (I only have the Byakko axe), and I generally don't tank all that often. So I might be way too careful as a tank. I usually do trash pulls in tank stance and only change to dps stance for bosses after I've gotten enough aggro.

This lvl 70 WHM made me tank almost everything in Deliverance though.

In the beginning I noticed he spammed Cure on me. So I thought if he has only one button and my HP are always full, I'll just dps more and switched to Deliverance.
In the middle of the next pull he suddenly decides that pressing Cure all the time was boring. I got so low that I used Holmgang. Lucky for me he found that Benediction button. He also found his Regen button sometimes during the run.
Somehow, from there on, his heals came somewhat inconsistently. Especially if someone got hit by something. It seemed like if someone got damage, he needed like 5 seconds to think about what to do. Then he just pressed Cure or Medica II + Medica if someone else lost some health. So when everything was fine he spammed Cure on me and whenever some more damage got out he seemed to hesitate which of his like 4 different buttons he wanted to press.

When we got to those first tank things that you have to burn down before an add comes out he doesn't dps at all. In the second room with those he casted one Aero III on the second tank, which had like 2% HP left. Literally the WORST dps spell he could have casted there. That was all the dps we ever got from him.

I did the big pull on the bridge and he even casted one Asylum there. Wow. I used Defiance there though because I trusted Steel Cyclone more than his Cure spam.

But no Assize ever, no Divine Benison, no Tetragrammaton, no Lucid Dreaming. Nothing of that. His only buttons were Cure, Medica, Medica II, sometimes Regen and Cure II, Protect, 1 Benediction, 1 Asylum, 1 Aero III. Ok, I admit, that are 9 buttons and not 4. But 3 of them he pressed only once during the run and Protect doesn't really count.

WHM was his only class at 70, with SCH/SMN and BLM at 60 and AST at 53, so he should know how healers work. His gear was about 360-390. Of course he was French only.

[Aosha]

-
A/Tanks that have their tank stance up but don't do aggro combos

or B/MTs that either don't pop their tank stance or turn it off mid battle. -

In an average savage raid I'll do 1, maybe 2 enmity combos, and that's if someone (usually Bard, since no pre-emptive enmity management) starts really creeping up. In Savage Chaos I've never once been in Shield Oath. My DRK co-tank stays in Grit for a bit at the start just to get an enmity lead, and then never enters it again. On Midgy we do occasionally need Tank stances later in the fight, but there it's just for the extra mitigation, not enmity. Shirk during tank swaps is all we need to hold our lead, as long as the rest of the party is being even semi-intelligent with their enmity management. Which they luckily are, things would be kinda difficult for a static otherwise. (And to be fair, we do have a Ninja to provide Shadewalkers, so we do have that advantage.)

But I will acknowledge, that the same may not hold true if running these things with PUGs. If the tanks don't have their Shirkage well coordinated, or if a DPS is not dropping enmity properly, it can all fall apart very easily. Hence why I will still do a bit more enmity stuff in something like my weekly O12N than I otherwise would like to. If a tank is not sure about the enmity management of the whole team, they should play it safe and do a bit of unnecessary enmity...
Tanks dropping enmity in raids is usually either due to DPS not managing their enmity properly, or the tanks just being generally bad (and a good tank can still work around the former), not so much a lack of tank stance.