Shortage of Tank .......

[moody]

Since I run healer main and am working on tank (Glad at 26 so far) I figured I'd stop in to note that people are jerks to all classes. As a healer I saw plenty of angry tanks assault DPS and Healers for their own shortcomings. I also saw (even more) DPS assault tanks for the same.

As a tank I don't get nearly as much abuse from healers as I expected. Probably because I start off letting people know this isn't my main class and invite critique. However, I get a massive amount of rude commentary from DPS again when they ignore the numbered and marked order or pull additional groups from other places via bad tab rotation.

Playing tank is making me a better healer because I have a better grasp on how alpha strikes effect tanks, how annoying it is to have your interrupt on GCD (Seriously, wtf?) and how frustrating it is to see a snoozing mob wake up because of a pugilist and head straight for the THM. As a result, I take aggro and head to the tank now (on non-AoE centric mobs) so they can easy flash the aggro back. I place my fairies more carefully to make sure the tank gets regen benefits as often as possible, etc etc.

Side note: I'm really enjoying tanking so far. I do a dungeon 3-4 times until I feel it's understood, then grind to the next dungeon and do the same.

[Azoryl]

Every role has it idiots.

I level a BLM to 50... and while most tanks were good, I did have a couple bad ones.

I am leveling PLD now - funny story with that was I was in MAW at the first boss, I told the 2 BLM to have one of them LB. Someone replied "What is LB?" I was in shock. I told them BLM LB does AE damage. So on the 2nd boss, I told them to LB when the 3 little guys spawn. No LB. Finally on the last boss, I told them to LB on the 2nd set of adds. No LB. After we killed the boss, I politely told them, "Learn what LB is, and put it on your bars".

As a WHM, I haven't had a bad experience... except the time I forgot to click off cleric stance at the start of the dungeon and wondered why my heals were just not keeping the tank in a good range. The tank said afterwards" If your going to spam you might want to take off Cleric Stance" . I was so embarrassed. I felt like a complete noob.

[HiirNoivl]

The minute I join a pick up someone in FC needs me ... soz.

[Ryutamashiisan]

I also pretty much refuse to tank basically anything non FC related, unless im just helping people out with ifrit/garuda/titan in DF because of peoples horrible attitudes. I have no qualms about my ability to tank however, i also have 0 incentive to play with kind of a-holes that i routinely see flooding everything else I do and all the shouts. I can almost guarantee if the community wasn't so terrible there'd be ALOT more tanks around. As tank you should expect to be the first point of attack from from monsters, not monsters and your own party as well.

[HiirNoivl]

Not to mention that sometimes even tanks get bored of tanking. Tank = FC DF = SMN :3

[Sybreed]

So far I haven't run into any d-bags that cry about my tanking, but on the flip side I have seen the damage FATES have done to this game. I tanked in WoW for 7 years, and let me tell you, some of the DPSers in this game make the average Night Elf Hunter named Legoluzz in WoW look like a tactical genius with lightning reflexes. I've seriously never so consistently grouped with dpsers in an mmo that seemed so ignorant of their role. Stack on top of this the ubiquitous issues with this games wretched netcode causing people to get hit by AoEs even when they're well out of the red, and you have a situation where tanking and healing is stressful as all hell in content that is largely mechanically brain dead simple (everything is absolute snoozefest facereoll till Qarn on up).

[DarkB]

Well Maybe if tanking wasnt 1 2 3 spam with couple more abilities, people would actually enjoy the job.

[BoomerOU]

I rolled a tank to beat the dps queues. Geared my DRG with instant pld queues, and now my pld is getting some gear love to progress in available content.

I highly recommend this (unless my tank queues stop being instant, in which case ... STOP IT)

[Kiaris]

The reason there is a tank shortage is because they took to long to Fix warrior, it still wont be fixed until December, so alot see it as.. Play a PLD, or re roll.

I know a decent amount of people who leveled a WAR and dumped it for something else that wasn't PLD.

[Vindrax]

I actually just dinged 50 on my PLD yesterday and a couple of things I noticed.

I did all of the story dungeons for the first time as a tank, in each instance I politely would say "first time here" and not once out of the many dungeons that I did, did anyone insult me or give me a hard time about it. Usually after doing so another player or two would come out and say "yes me too" and everyone was polite about it. When getting to a boss that I had never done before, I would ask "is there anything special I need to know?" This helped minimize silly mistakes and only one time in all those levels did one person give me a hard time for not knowing a fight. Lastly, I really enjoy the dungeon experience in comparison to FATE's so I ran a good number of them. On the more challenging dungeons such as AV, I would take it upon myself to explain fights and ask if people were new and needed advice, this solved countless headaches.

I see a lot of complaining in this thread about other people not knowing how to do their roles properly. If someone is attacking out of order when you clearly have the mobs numbered, maybe explain the numbering to them because it's possible they don't know. If someone keeps waking up sleeping mobs with AoE and it's making the fights unecessarily more difficult, explain the sleep mechanic and maybe put a chain marker over their head. Lastly, if you're struggling to hold threat and everyone is following the right attack order, it might be a problem in your own personal gearing. From 1-50 as PLD there was never a point where I felt like I was struggling to keep threat from DPS aside from one stone vigil run where our SCH healer was constantly throwing out banes (but actually I enjoyed that as I felt more challenged by the run but it increased our clear speed).

The tank is the most important party member to have geared. It means less healing for the healer and smaller damage spikes and also makes it much easier to hold threat. If you're constantly losing threat while leveling, check to make sure your party is following a logical kill order and if you're still struggling, check to make sure your gear isn't 10 levels out of date.