From Healer to Tank

[Citizen_Thom]

This past week, I finally decided to start leveling a tank class, GLD to be exact, and never realized how difficult it was. Alerting the people in my party with me on my first tanking Guildheist that I was a new tank and may not do a good job was smart, because sure enough, I had no trouble letting the enemies run straight to the healer.

As a SCH main and WHM secondary, I now know the pain of trying to keep aggro off of the healer and DPS. It's certainly not that easy at low levels, and I have a new found respect for tanks out there.

Hopefully it gets easier as I level up more!

I had SCH at 50... have i79 equipment. I'm always up for healing... but, a lot of the end game content is easier to learn as a tank, because you can off tank... and by the time you have the equipment, you'll be a very solid main tank from seeing it done by others. You don't get that chance to learn as a healer in end game. And while you get quicker queues than DPS as a healer, you don't get 1 minute queues like tanks do. So I leveled my PLD from 37 to 50 in a few weekends.

I expect you already have stoneskin from Scholar. I found that having stoneskin as a subskill let me assist healers when boss fights grew a bit hairy. Start off with a couple of flashes, and try to rotate between mobs, provoke, shield bash, shield lob, and cover (for melee dps) all help you accumulate hate. Sometimes, when a whm runs low on mp, I'll toss in stoneskins on the entire party while they recharge. Other than that, just do your best to remember what you saw as a healer and apply it to your tanking... the only thing I had to learn was positioning in the end.