Question about Tanking in FF14

[Kosmos992k]

Of course, I also main a melee class, so I come from the perspective of consistently peeling bosses off of VIT tanks and less geared tanks in general.

If you are an experienced DPS player, then you should know to throttle your initial burst of damage, and manage your target selection. If you as a fully leveled and geared DPS cannot throttle your DPS to allow a newbie tank to do their job, then you are not helping them learn the game. It doesn't matter whether they have a STR build or a VIT build in the leveling dungeons, if you don't throttle your output, or give them a chance to build a lead, you'll be able to rip hate from them.

In non-end game content, the STR tank meta from End-game doesn't really have a place or belong. There is all sorts of theory craft about the use of STR not least of which is the argument that the best mitigation is killing things more quickly. That's not actually true, but people think it is because if stuff dies quicker, then ultimately the tank takes less cumulative damage and the healer has to do less cumulative healing. However, that's not functional mitigation.

If you're facing a pack of 4 enemies that can do high damage with their base attacks, you need damage mitigation and more HP to survive the encounter. Being able to kill all 4 in one fewer GCD (turn) because you're running an STR build doesn't help if you die within two turns because you have all your optional build points in STR and therefore don't have enough HP to survive long enough for the healer to recover. With less HP, the incoming damage is more threatening to you forcing the healer to spend more time and attention on healing you. Remember that this is advice for a new player, not a level sync'd player with gear options coming out of their ears.

Again from the perspective of a new player; in Brayflox story mode for example, there are several quite hard hitting enemies, the same is true for Haukke Manor and of course manage other leveling dungeons thereafter. A tank geared appropriately to their level doesn't have enough mitigation to survive a large pull or even a normal pull without constant attention from the healer. The more VIT and therefore HP a tank has at that stage the greater the cushion is for the healer to recover from the initial bursts of damage the tank will take. A STR tank build with level appropriate gear will be cut down quite quickly unless the DPS are strong enough to make everything dead fast.

Make sure to rotate your enmity combo between the mobs to keep aggro. The enmity metre is on the party list icons, full bar is full aggro. So make sure you keep your enmity up on all targets.

Breaking into tanking you can number the targets to tell the DPS to attack 1, 2, 3 etc. You still must keep aggro on all targets or you will have mobs running after Arcanists/SMNs(AOE DOT damage) and your healers with heal aggro.

Bard/Archer can also rip hate via their AoE, and some of the Melee classes can do the same if they ignore target priority (or are highly geared level sync'd players who do not throttle their initial damage burst). Numbering targets is a good thing to do, but don't be surprised if many DPS players ignore the markers.

I play Paladin, so this is from the gladiator/paladin point of view; Rotate your hate combo as suggested. I tend to do a 1,2 on target 1, then 3 on target 2, then 1,2, on target 1 and 3 on target 3, and toss in extra Flashes to keep things topped up. Opening with 2 flashes is a good idea. Don't use provoke to pull unless you have to pull at extreme range, otherwise you waste the skill and it has a significant delay.

The reason I suggest breaking up the hate rotation 1,2, and then 3 on a separate target instead of rotating each attack to a new target is that the hate multipliers are least strong on the first two moves, so for a significant amount of aggro, you really need moves 1 & 2 on the same target, then 3 on another target. Move 3 is strong enough that you don't need to immediately follow with 1 & 2 on that same target

It there are 3 targets, called A, B and C, I'd suggest something like;

shield lob/tomahawk target A, flash, flash
1 & 2 target A
3 target B
Flash
1&2 target A
3 target C
1&2 on target B
3 target A (unless it's dead, then switch to C)

And so on. You keep the combo going for max hate multipliers, but by keeping moves 1&2 together you generate more than a trivial amount of aggro. The first move in the combo has nothing but the base hate multiplier, and is therefore pretty weak. The second move has a higher hate multiplier in conjunction with the first move, so 1&2 together are significantly better than either 1 or 2 on their own.