Quote Originally Posted by tdb View Post
Having a lot of enemies using AoE on me can still degrade my performance. My focus shifts to avoiding the AoEs and attacking goes on autopilot. That means I'll mostly use the two basic AoE attacks and forget more fancy attacks with cooldowns. I'm pretty good at avoiding the AoEs though, so as long as the healer and dps are up to the task of keeping me alive and eliminating the enemies it's fine.
I get what you're saying here but that's kind of a moot point in XIV as a tank - as long as you get off an AoE combo or two (even if there are gaps between your GCDs) and start with a CD you'll be totally fine. You don't really need 100% uptime on a trash pack for things to be going well since there are three other people there who aren't being targeted by so many AoE who will kill the stuff for you.

The enmity changes in ShB have made tanking so easy you actually can just focus on your AoE dodging a lot and you're still doing just fine. And it's still better than doing single pulls since the dps loss of a tank not keeping perfect uptime is a lot less than what you lose from single pulling.

You'll only get comfy with that dodging by doing it for a while too. Holminster still makes me cringe with the AoE on the ground in the pulls between the first and second bosses because they blend in so well. Everyone is just out there trying to do their best (or they should be at least >_>) so try to stay relaxed and know that the majority of parties isn't gonna freak over you getting clipped by an AoE or even a total wipe.

Better to try and fail than to never try at all!