help out this new guy

[Edward420allday]

Thank you all. This is all good stuff, if there is anything else please keep it coming. Also where can I see this aggro lead. Maybe a little more info about emnity.

[Viridiana]

The first thing I read about this game was to still with one class and level that up, now everything that I am hearing completely contradicts that. Outside of paladin is there anything else I need to work towards to be effective tank?

You need to strike a balance. That is, you want to be focusing on one class overall, but. . .everything past level 30 assumes that you're playing on a Job (PLD, in your case). To unlock the job, you have to have done all the GLA quests and leveled Conjurer up to 15. A new quest will open up in the GLA guild leading you to the PLD quest line. There are a few other skills you can access as a PLD that you'd need to level Marauder for or get your CNJ further up to 34, but they're rather low-priority. Basically, treat getting 15 CNJ and unlocking PLD as a side-quest in any other game.

[Bixby]

Thank you all. This is all good stuff, if there is anything else please keep it coming. Also where can I see this aggro lead. Maybe a little more info about emnity.

Enmity in general in this game is fairly simple. Every action has an enmity modifier, usually just 1xDamage. Certain skills are higher, like 3xDamage for Savage Blade, 5xDamage for Rage of Halone. Most healing is 0.5 x amount healed. So that's how you keep enmity as a tank; you're doing less damage per hit, but using your high-enmity skills means every point of damage is worth much more. The tables are a few patches out of date, so don't take these numbers as gospel, but this page is good to look at to get a general idea of things. The multipliers (3x, 5x, etc.) on GLA/PLD abilities are still correct.

When you're targeting an enemy, there is a white bar under the class/job symbol for everyone in your party. That white bar represents their enmity on the mob you're targeting. A full bar means the mob is attacking that person, which should always be you. 2nd place will have the next fullest bar, and so on, and how full those bars are compared to yours tells you how far ahead you are in enmity. The top enmity also has an A to the left of their party slot, and the rest of the party has numbers. 2 for 2nd place and so on. Note that this display is only for your current hard-target. It does not update correctly for soft-targets (when you press left or right on the D-Pad and the targeting circle moves to a new mob, but you don't hit Confirm to fully switch to that target). If you want to check your enmity lead on each mob one by one, you'll need to hard-target each of them.

You'll also have a list of all mobs that you have any enmity on whatsoever on your screen. You can click on this list to target them (or L1+up/down on a game pad to scroll through them). They have colored dots next to their names. A small green circle means you are nowhere near to being top enmity. A yellow triangle means you have some notable degree of enmity. An orange dot means you're about to pull top enmity. A red square means you have top enmity. As a tank, you want every enemy to have a red square next to their name. If any of those dots are not red, it means someone else is getting attacked, and you need to fix it NAO.

About Provoke: When used, it gives you the same enmity against that mob as the person with top enmity, +1. That's all it does. That means that if all you do is Provoke, and the person you provoked off of does anything at all, they're going to get enmity again. This includes existing DoTs or HoTs ticking. If you Provoke something, you need to hit it again immediately, preferably with a high-enmity skill like Shield Lob or Rage of Halone. It also means that Provoking something that you already have top enmity on is utterly pointless, as is Provoking something that hasn't been engaged yet (except that Provoke has a longer range that Shield Lob, so there are a few circumstances where you can pull with Provoke more safely than Lob; just be aware you're going to need to Lob and so on once it's in range).

Also, if you can scrounge up a cheap USB keyboard for your PS3, the whole communication thing will be much less maddening.

Oh, and a mistake I see a lot of new GLA/PLDs making is thinking the visual effect of Flash indicates its range. Flash does not have a very large range. Practice with it until you know how close you need to be. If you see floating text come up with Flash for a given enemy, you've got it. If not, it's out of range. If you're practicing solo, it's really easy to tell, since they'll start hitting you. ;P

[Velo_Vandore]

Hey man I feel for you. Your advice here seems to generally be to research your class so you don't piss off other players. Sound advice but...

If players can't accommodate, support and adapt to imperfect players it reflects badly on their own skill / diversity and personality in general (in my opinion). In an MMO I personally am always grateful to each player for sharing their time to play with me, despite their skill level, so long as they can show me mutual respect. If someone is impatient or intolerant to the mistakes of others, why should they use the duty finder where they may meet those players and then be ungrateful, rude and disrespectful to them. This is very ignorant in my opinion, but it seems to be considered justified by most people.

It gets my goat! Here's my own rant posted yesterday on basically the same topic: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...EDRUNS-SO-MUCH!

[Mergadeth]

The first thing I read about this game was to still with one class and level that up, now everything that I am hearing completely contradicts that

Not necessarily. What they are trying to say is pick one class as your main first. While leveling your main you will find it beneficial and sometimes imperative to dip into other classes to acquire certain skills that you can then use on your main to make it better.

[Edward420allday]

Thank you this was an awesome explanation and very helpful. Very appreciative.

[Sessurea]

Tank is a harsh class to play sub-par/without decent understanding. DPS never seem to get picked on when they mess up, but ppl have almost zero tolerance for tanks, its unfair.

I say stick with your paladin man, learn it as well as u can and overcome this challenge. you can do it!

[Rex]

...Edward420allday... wow, clever name >_> not

Sorry for your troubles friend, best thing to do is make some friends in game who can really show you the ropes. Guides are good and all, but raw experience is best. And yes, it's important to go and level those other classes to get some cross class abilities. For instance, Bloodbath from Marauder is a good one.

[Sagittarian]

Tank is a harsh class to play sub-par/without decent understanding. DPS never seem to get picked on when they mess up, but ppl have almost zero tolerance for tanks, its unfair.

I say stick with your paladin man, learn it as well as u can and overcome this challenge. you can do it!

^^ that.
I think everything else has been mentioned. Maybe check out the tank section of the forum too.

[SolusekRo]

Tank is a harsh class to play sub-par/without decent understanding. DPS never seem to get picked on when they mess up, but ppl have almost zero tolerance for tanks, its unfair.

I say stick with your paladin man, learn it as well as u can and overcome this challenge. you can do it!

Not exactly, was in Ifrit HM and was kicked because the monk shot off the LB incorrectly but everyone thought it was me. Dps gets hate but in later lvls
(Played as Dragoon)