devs can u hear me

[Johncue]

I used to think "roll as a tank" was a weak suggestion until I tried it! I was intimidated to try tanking for the first time. Now that I've tried it I really like it! What really helped me was doing instances as a DPS first and learning the mechanics of the dungeons. There are a lot of pro's and con's. The pro's are short queue times, setting your own pace for the instance, getting up close and personal with the enemies, and did I mention shorter queue times! The con's ........you need a thick skin. Because you are out in front any mistakes tend to be obvious to everyone and sometimes the "advice" can be a little rough. If the battle goes south you will be blamed! I try to learn from the comments, even the rude ones!As far as leveling your DPS character there is already good advice in this thread!Especially to do the daily roulettes and your Hunting Log. Dungeons,dungeons, the exp adds up fast and you will learn your class/job better than grinding out fates. Also always use food for a 3% exp boost and if possible have your FC use "heat of the battle" perk for another 5% exp bonus.

[Umo]

I find healing in this game super boring but tanking is fun.

I guess you're one of those healers standing still while waiting for tossing a cure? Healing could be as boring as you want it to be.

[DMooseJ]

I used to think "roll as a tank" was a weak suggestion until I tried it! I was intimidated to try tanking for the first time. Now that I've tried it I really like it! What really helped me was doing instances as a DPS first and learning the mechanics of the dungeons. There are a lot of pro's and con's. The pro's are short queue times, setting your own pace for the instance, getting up close and personal with the enemies, and did I mention shorter queue times! The con's ........you need a thick skin. Because you are out in front any mistakes tend to be obvious to everyone and sometimes the "advice" can be a little rough. If the battle goes south you will be blamed! I try to learn from the comments, even the rude ones!As far as leveling your DPS character there is already good advice in this thread!Especially to do the daily roulettes and your Hunting Log. Dungeons,dungeons, the exp adds up fast and you will learn your class/job better than grinding out fates. Also always use food for a 3% exp boost and if possible have your FC use "heat of the battle" perk for another 5% exp bonus.

I gear toward the tank side of things and in FFXIV, it's much easier a job than it was in WoW. Pull off a few OPs/Flashes at the start and then throw in another one or two depending on how long the fight goes (or after each combo if you've got one of those accursed Bane-using Summoners making me actually have to put in effort, the asshats) and you're good to go. Just need to know the fights and there are plenty of youtube dungeon guides that'll tell you exactly what to do if you don't know the fight.

I'd say the problems I do have, and I usually don't have many, are:

1. People totally ignoring the numbered order of things.
2. People insisting on pulling first instead of me to 'speed things up' even if I'm pulling pretty immediately after each fight and
3. The one time I had a bard (isn't it always a bard?) start pulling stuff on his own and in groups, then call the healer and DPS crappy when they couldn't handle it quickly enough. This was in a DF group so if he wanted a speed run, he should've made his own group or at least floated the idea at the start of the dungeon. Then when I very politely asked him to stop, he got super pissy about it.

99% of the time when I do encounter these problems, which aren't common but not exactly rare, they'll stop them if I politely ask them to stop. I've only ever had that one problem in the many many runs I've tanked here over the months and you're just going to occasionally have that person who, if they are ever even slightly disagreed with or asked to alter their playstyle even once, will go absolutely nuts on you no matter how respectful you are.

Aside from that, I never got any of the horror stories I typically hear about being regularly blamed for failures. Maybe it's because I'm a consistently decent tank or I'm always open to reasonable suggestions, but the vast majority of times everybody's very polite to me in the DF groups I've tanked.

[SarcasmMisser]

At the start of 2.0 when everyone was leveling anarchist

Woah that sounds like an awesome job but probably not very good in teams.