What makes a great tank?

[Naotsugu]

1. Raid Awareness: the ability to notice any and all changes happening during the raid at all times.
2. Knowledge of Role: Understanding the full extent of the operations you are able to do at any given moment in a raid.
3. Communication: Being able to convey and discuss your thought's with respect to the raid, including the ability to convey priority information to the raid.
4. Personal Responsibility: Save all stressful thinking for after the raid and actively identify and resolve errors that you had made after every raid.
5. Have Fun: Do not enter a raid feeling tired / stressed / pressed for time / etc. Either go in blank or go in excited. Maintain a positive attitude for the whole 90 minutes despite what happens in those 90 minutes.

Tons of ways to do this, but given around 2 months playing for 15 hours a week I think you could be a world class tank. Or at the very least the tank everyone wants to play with.

[Oberin]

Okay well I am a BRAND NEW tank. And I appreciate learning. From the perspective of a tank; here's what annoys me.

1) Running ahead. That happened a lot on a run I did last night. This guy kept running ahead while I was getting ready, and getting a swarm of enemies on him. Then everyone else runs out and suddenly we're all spread out with different enemies at different areas. So; I have to pick. And guess what, I'm picking the healer. The rest of y'all are on your own! (I was very tempted to just sit back and let this guy have all the fun if he wanted).

2) HEAL! A couple times I noticed healers who if someone else would take a hit, it's because I was waiting for the cooldown for flash. So they take a hit or two, but then I flash and the enemy is back on me. Except the healer freaks out and heals that other person, and I've already got enemies on me. Boom, I'm dead, the whole room dies; gee, what happened?

[Oberin]

I'm definitely a crummy, newbie tank. But I think a good party overall is what helps. Actually, I had a guy who was a Pugilist on the last run and he was so awesome! He was experienced so he was throwing down markers, giving me pointers on where to be and everyone else pointers on where to be, etc. We got through quick and effectively.


I think party success also depends on knowing everyones play style. Not everyone wants to grind through it as fast as you possible can by dividing up enemies and equipping the right stuff to get through 0.08% faster by doing 0.02% more damage. It gets hard to keep up and then we end up tripping over ourselves. If you're a high level person syncing down to a low level dungeon; keep in mind us newbies would like to do it right and learn while we go along; not have to try and chase you down because you're running through it like a madman trying to set a record for time.

[Thistledown]

@Oberin
I feel your pain. However as a healer, it is my priority to heal weaklings before the tanks, who can take a bit more beatdown before I need to heal them. Dps? They don't stand a chance.

Of course it doesn't apply to extremely hard hitting mobs like 3 Aevis in Stone Vigil but I want you to understand why a healer might want to heal a dps before the tank. We trust you to be tough.

By the way if you need to wait for Flash cd and a mob's already wrecking the dps the problem's either dps getting overzealous and pulling, or you just needing to Flash a couple more times straight after pulling.

Or just Provoke > Shield Lob/Tomahawk it once you get that. Provoke is off-gcd so you can use it while waiting for Flash cd.