Learning to Tank

[kukurumei]

Positioning seems to be most difficult to define and figure out. I can understand running right up to ifrit and turn him around, so his fire doesn't hurt the other players. But other stuff seems a lot harder to say what is best. When the room is big circle where do you go? Or if has 4 side, which side should you go to? And like Aiatar in Brayflox, no amount of tank positioning seems to work to get it to not spit poison everywhere making it hard for the DPS players. Or Chimera I see the tanks like to drag it up the snow all the way to the line, but I don't know why you need to do that?

Some of it comes with experience from other MMOs, some of it specific to the content itself, some of it is obvious with a little thought.

Brayfox Normal, the dragon spit poison on a member not the tank, so you fight him on the edge, facing the wall, and you move him in a circle on the outer walls, thus the poison will always be in the middle and never on the dragon, while giving you the max distance traveling to safe spots.

Many many tanking strategies are borrowed from other MMOs, and/or reused from earlier content.

Wall tanking, aka facing your back to the wall, is a time honored tank tactics. Oppositely center tanking is also a well used method. Almost always if it's not one it's the other, with exceptions.

[vp_cmc]

Or Chimera I see the tanks like to drag it up the snow all the way to the line, but I don't know why you need to do that?

Because if chimera stays higher than dps, it's dragon voice doesn't hit them, and group should only deal (stun\silence) with ram voice.

[muwa]

Or Chimera I see the tanks like to drag it up the snow all the way to the line, but I don't know why you need to do that?

Tanks take Chimera up the snow because its dragon voice aoe doesn't work on players on a different elevation, so ranged characters can just ignore the spell and just have to dodge the ice patches and the homing ball.

The first boss in Qarn had the same problem, you could avoid the doom spell by staying on a pillar the whole fight. They removed the pillar in patch 2.2.

[Foo01]

I finally made it up to level 30 on my GLA, but haven't unlocked the PLD yet. But I was running Haukke, and I don't know what I am doing wrong. There was this level 31 arcanist (not level synced, in fact no one was) that was constantly get more aggro. It was happening so much that I asked him to use his topaz carby so whatever peels off at least stays on the carby.

I was doing shield lob, flash, flash, fast, savage, and rage of halone, and rotate to the next mob, and repeat. This all I got, and I do this as much as I can but still some mob always peels off and goes after the arcanist. I can provoke it back and shield lob, but the next one will peel off and then I can't do much about that. We cleared haukke without wiping, but it was a real hairball when the adds showed up in the final boss. I can't aggro all of them together for any amount of time. At least the topaz carby was there to help, and it seemed to help.

Which leads to the next question, I never understood why other tanks don't like tank pets. I main a SMN and I was always told to avoid using the tank pet, as a tank I think I like them just fine. If it draws fire from the boss and its adds it is doing great.

[kukurumei]

I finally made it up to level 30 on my GLA, but haven't unlocked the PLD yet. But I was running Haukke, and I don't know what I am doing wrong. There was this level 31 arcanist (not level synced, in fact no one was) that was constantly get more aggro. It was happening so much that I asked him to use his topaz carby so whatever peels off at least stays on the carby.

I was doing shield lob, flash, flash, fast, savage, and rage of halone, and rotate to the next mob, and repeat. This all I got, and I do this as much as I can but still some mob always peels off and goes after the arcanist. I can provoke it back and shield lob, but the next one will peel off and then I can't do much about that. We cleared haukke without wiping, but it was a real hairball when the adds showed up in the final boss. I can't aggro all of them together for any amount of time. At least the topaz carby was there to help, and it seemed to help.

That's just the way it is. acn get bane which is stupidly threat induced panic, and their own fault. You won't be able to compensate for extreme threat production on multiple monsters until you get shield oath at 40.

But nothing hit very hard till around then anyway.

But the best way is to shield bash, and move back to getting hate. Never use lob except pulls or range, It's threat is too low. Almost all threat is based on damage X threat modifier. The more damage you do the better.

One advance trick if you want to learn is know that flast blade does not have a threat modifier, but savage and halone does. So you can use fast blade on your main, highest threat target, and spread you combo follow ups on other monsters to produce better and more even hate faster for those annoying AoE people.

Again once you get shield oath it is a much easier process.

[Foo01]

I just made it to level 40 and unlocked shield oath but I haven't been able to test it. Assuming shield oath helps more with aggro, why would anyone use sword oath?

Having started this process of figuring out how to do the tank role, it originally started with me player healer having figure out how to keep the undergeared tanks alive, it seems now on the flip side and I am running into the problem of the heals coming late from the healer.

What do you do when the heals feels like they are coming in late? It is not like I am losing 70% of my hp in the first 3 hit, but more like I am taking a beating for like 8 seconds from all the mobs and boss and I am at less than 40% and I don't get heals until like I am at 20%. What should I do? Run? Heal myself? Or let it wipe and maybe that will call the healers attention?

I know as a healer doing DPS, I've sometimes made some tanks feel very uncomfortable because I have let their HP drop, so I suppose that might explain what I am encountering. So should I ask the healer to focus more on heals? Or is the healer worried about aggro from healing and holding off on the heals?

[Dreufo]

I was going to toss in that using Provoke right before Savage Blade and after Fast Blade works really well to retain enmity.

Also if you think of maintaining Blind through Flash that help others even if they pull aggro.

[Arakatos]

I was going to toss in that using Provoke right before Savage Blade and after Fast Blade works really well to retain enmity.

Also if you think of maintaining Blind through Flash that help others even if they pull aggro. .

The purpose of provoke is not to retain enmity. This is one of the key things to learn as a tank as you level and tank more content. All provoke does is give you +1 enmity relative to the player with the highest enmity which includes yourself. So shield lobbing a mob before anyone aggros has the same effect as provoking. Provoking inbetween combos actually decreases your aggro because when you do so, you are actually resetting the enmity table back to +1 from the highest enmity player, who is yourself. Therefore provoke should be reserved for the mob who got away and is b-lining your healer or when tank swapping for harder content.

I just made it to level 40 and unlocked shield oath but I haven't been able to test it. Assuming shield oath helps more with aggro, why would anyone use sword oath?

-snip-

I know as a healer doing DPS, I've sometimes made some tanks feel very uncomfortable because I have let their HP drop, so I suppose that might explain what I am encountering. So should I ask the healer to focus more on heals? Or is the healer worried about aggro from healing and holding off on the heals?

Some contents require tank swapping so using Sword Oath does more DPS and draws less aggro until you need to swap again.

Trust your healer, pop a CD and fight on regardless of your HP. Review only if wipe, most likely the healer will learn to top you off better since whatever he/she was doing was not working. Bad healers will of course blame you, for varying reasons but I assume you aren't over pulling, DPS isn't taking dmg for no reason and you are dodging then it's the healer who needs to wake up.

[Cigaran]

Well the archer in my group was level synced. So is it really ok, to let that mob go to them and not worry about it? Would they be able to handle it and not die?

BTW, since I got a level 34 CNJ/WHM it makes sense that I go GLA then PLD. But is there skills I should try to get from the marauder?

Speaking as a BRD, if you can't pace your DPS in order to let a new Tank learn their role then that's ALL on the BRD. I've ran an ilvl85 set up through Sastasha with a GLD that was running it for the first time. I pulled off of them once and that was due to me not paying attention. Had I wanted to, yes I could have easily burned it down without issue.

Far too many get in to the "Me, me, ME!!!" mindset and forget that you're playing as a group and are supposed to be working together not trying to see who has the biggest e-peen.

What do you do when the heals feels like they are coming in late? It is not like I am losing 70% of my hp in the first 3 hit, but more like I am taking a beating for like 8 seconds from all the mobs and boss and I am at less than 40% and I don't get heals until like I am at 20%. What should I do? Run? Heal myself? Or let it wipe and maybe that will call the healers attention?

I know as a healer doing DPS, I've sometimes made some tanks feel very uncomfortable because I have let their HP drop, so I suppose that might explain what I am encountering. So should I ask the healer to focus more on heals? Or is the healer worried about aggro from healing and holding off on the heals?

When I'm running WHM, I know I have a tendency to keep an eye on what buffs the Tank has up. If I know they're going full on defense, odds are I'll toss Stoneskin and Regen at them and then start helping deal damage. When I see they need healing, I'll start back in. A lot of that is me learning the flow of how best to work a WHM while not just standing back and spamming Cure over and over. Another thing I will do is keep an eye out for the Free Cure proc. If I see that, and I know the Tank isn't fighting something that is likely to kill him in a second or two, I'll let their health drop down a bit more than normal and then drop Cure II when the proc timer is almost up.

As for being worried about healing aggro, my comment about pacing comes in to play here again. You can monitor where you're at as far as Emnity goes. When I notice I'm starting to get in danger of pulling off the Tank, I'll throttle my healing unless doing so will result in a death.

[Dreufo]

The purpose of provoke is not to retain enmity. This is one of the key things to learn as a tank as you level and tank more content. All provoke does is give you +1 enmity relative to the player with the highest enmity which includes yourself. So shield lobbing a mob before anyone aggros has the same effect as provoking. Provoking inbetween combos actually decreases your aggro because when you do so, you are actually resetting the enmity table back to +1 from the highest enmity player, who is yourself. Therefore provoke should be reserved for the mob who got away and is b-lining your healer or when tank swapping for harder content.

Hm, ok I guess I'm getting mixed advice. As you already noted I'm a newer tank and although I do most things right I'm trying to improve my holding ability. The last guy suggested that Provoke increases the Enmity of the next attack that increases enmity so naturally a Savage Combo with Provoke made sense.