tanks not using cooldowns?

[Jpec07]

I've seen this frustratingly often in DF. I suspect a lot of it is because of tanks who come to FFXIV from games like WoW, where your mitigation is handed to you just for doing your rotation, and your cooldowns are to be saved for times when you're taking more damage, like a boss fight. This also matches the attitude wherein such tanks are my open to correction (which was a huge thing in WoW).

Unless it's the end of a pull, a tank should always be using their cooldowns. The big ones are generally spaced out enough to where you can usually use them at the head of every trash pull to great effect. More of our mitigation comes from our cooldowns than any other source, so tanks in this game need to get in the habit of using them more, and more frequently.

Or... You can just heal... My cooldowns are for when you go stupid and I'm getting dangerously low on HP and you're still DPSing the mob instead of doing your job and healing me. If this game wasn't so obsessed with the DPS that tanks and healers do, then we'd be more willing to cycle our cooldowns to make your job easier. But the problem is that half the healers don't heal. My cooldowns are for emergencies / HUGE hits from bosses, not so that you can dps an add. Sorry, bad healers ruined it for everyone.

Wrong! This isn't WoW; the majority of your cooldowns aren't "OH SHIT" buttons. Your cooldowns are there to help you mitigate damage, so you take less and require less healing, so the healers can spend more time on the rest of the party and/or DPSing, because a healer in cleric stance is going to severely outclass a tank's DPS. If you're not cycling your cooldowns and using them effectively, you have no one to blame but yourself for slow runs, high damage, complaining healers, deaths, and wipes.