Fresh 60 Help.

[Seipheris]

Hi there,

Still fairly new to this game, and i'm about to get my Paladin to 60, looking for any advice as to how to get set up for the raids efficiently.

I have a history with MMO's: Dark Age of Camelot, WoW for 6 years, Aion, Vindictus and a few other randoms. With that being said, i'm taking all advice on end game tanking.

Early thanks to all those who reply!

[Garotte14]

Pld is quite simple in endgame. You have 3 combos and two stances. Try to keep Goring Blade up, use Royal Authority whenever possible and use RoH when you need the enmity. If you and your healers can manage Sword Oath, then that's better DPS, but this tricky because if you are in a raid group with really good dps, you will lose hate in SwO without RoH.

As a tank, it is common to be the raid leader for call outs and things of that nature, but not at all required. Just depends on the group.

Honestly, it's just a matter of learning the fights so you know when to use your cooldowns. There's not really much difference in endgame for tanks. The only thing real tank mechanic that's not used in leveling is tank swaps. Everything else is pretty much the same. Do as much DPS as you can while rotating your defensive CDs for big damage hits.

[Seipheris]

snip

Thanks for the quick reply, good to know i'm already on the right path for rotations, just have to learn when to combo in Royal Authority at 60.

Any recommendations on how to farm gear to stay relevant as a tank?

[Februs]

Thanks for the quick reply, good to know i'm already on the right path for rotations, just have to learn when to combo in Royal Authority at 60.

This widely depends on the circumstances and your gear level. If you're still under-geared, then enmity can be a challenge for Pld, because they have the lowest threat gen out of the three tanks. Once you are geared up, however, you'll find that you can take some more liberties with your combos. They typical opener for a Pld (for bosses) is usually something like this:

(in Shield Oath) Shield Lob > Fight or Flight > Circle of Scorn > Fast Blade > Savage Blade > Rage of Halone > Fast Blade > Riot Blade > Goring Blade > etc

From here, what you do depends on what you need. If you have a sufficient lead on enmity, then you can transfer into Royal Authority combos right away. If not, then you can follow it up with one more RoH combo. When you have a lead on enmity, you'll typically start to rotate 2 RA combos for every 1 GB combo without the need of any additional RoH combos. The only exception is when you know a Tank Buster is coming your way. You may want to apply an extra RoH for the sake of mitigation, but it's usually unnecessary in most casual content, so long as you are using adequate cooldowns.

Any recommendations on how to farm gear to stay relevant as a tank?

The easiest way to gear up is to farm tomestones (end game currencies) and purchase gear. Right now, Lore is the highest level of tomestone available, but it is capped at 2000 a week; so, you can only gear up a little bit at a time. In the meantime, Esoterics can get you at least partially geared (roughly item level 200). You can also gear a little faster if you supplement your tomestone gear with Raid gear. while your collecting Esoteric gear, you can use the Alexander drops to fill in the blanks. Once you start replacing your esoterics gear with Lore gear, you can go into Midas (stage 2 of the Alexander raid) and do the same. It still takes a bit of time, though.

The best thing you can do right now is prep for the grind by unlocking all of your roulettes, because they are the fastest way to farm tomes.

[SoloNightlock]

Do expert roullette daily and collect those tomestones ^^

[Ragnorak]

Meld STR into those Midan accessories! (Fending of course)

Collect those gears for weapon if you aren't doing a relic

Cap lore everyweek

[Jpec07]

Hi there and welcome to Eorzea!

Garrotte's advice is sound, so it boils down to knowing the encounters, keeping your DoTs up, and knowing what cooldowns go best where.

As far as gearing goes, you'll want to start off by building out your Esoteric set, and filling in the blanks with dungeon drops. Allagan Tomestones are a form of currency you get from endgame content (you probably already have some Poetics from the 2.x content). Holding hate is going to be your biggest challenge at first, so you'll probably want to buy items in the following order to help with that: sword > belt > shield > chest/pants > head/gloves/boots > jewelry. It's also always better to upgrade your lowest-iLvl pieces, within that order. Obviously though, if you get a dungeon drop that's a big upgrade, you should take it, and consider using your Tomestones to replace other pieces (generally, you'll want to follow the order I posted unless the gear you get is i180 or better).

Once you get to certain iLvls, you'll be able to bolster your tomestone/gear input with Alexander Midas and Void Ark. Both of these are worth running, because Void Ark will get you farthings (for upgrading i200 Eso gear to i210), matter (used for buying Grade V materia in Idyllshire), and a swanky i200 set (with low parry!). Midas also drops currencies that you can trade for i220 gear. Gordias generally isn't worth running at this point, as you'll get enough Tomestones through other activities to surpass the i190 gear pretty quickly.

There are certain cooldowns you should always, always, always use together for maximum effectiveness: Bloodbath with Fight or Flight (BB-FoF), and Awareness with Bulwark. These are both "white damage" cooldowns, and should be used when you're taking steady, small incoming damage. Others in this category include Foresight, Rampart, and Convalescence* (for Convalescence, you'll want to macro it to let healers know it's coming, so they can plan around it - it can also be helpful as an "OHSHI-" button for when you realize your HP has dipped lower than you meant it to).

Sentinel, Sheltron, and Hallowed Ground are best saved for tankbusters, or for situations where you know you're about to take a ton of damage (read: huge pulls during speed runs - though really, while Sheltron is best for tankbusters, it can be good to mitigate the odd extra hit against trash).

I usually pop BB-FoF right before Goring Blade (GB), and immediately hit Circle of Scorn (CoS) afterwards on pull. This way, if I'm diligent and attentive, I can refresh the GB DoT with the FoF boost and also get in another CoS right before it expires.

You'll want to be attentive to your group composition in dungeon runs. Unless you see a decently-geared SMN or MNK, a well-geared SCH, BRD, MCH, or BLM, or some combination that has 2/3 of those jobs in the other roles, daisy-chaining small pulls is going to get you through the dungeon faster than if you chain-pulled everything to the next gate.

For Materia, you'll want to use Ariyala's FFXIV tool to help you see what you can meld (some materia won't work due to item stat budgets), but your stat priority is going to be Vit > Str > Parry Acc (to current cap) > Crit > Det > SkS. Parry isn't generally liked by most tanks, because it lacks an offensive component and is perceived to have poor scaling. While mathematically in a group context, none of the other stats quite compare to Parry's ability to mitigate damage point for point, it is only really valuable for the tank who currently has hate, and even then only if it's a fight with high physical damage, and where the challenging aspect of the encounter is healers struggling to keep the tank alive (from what I'm given to understand, this usually isn't the case in Savage content, and is almost never the case in more casual content). You'll get more mitigation from the Defense and Magic Defense attributes on a given piece of gear than from the parry it may or may not have. Paladins also get less value from Parry, because the combat table rolls for block before it rolls for parry (which is something only we have to deal with).

The other thing to note is how the combat table rolls for damage: Miss/Dodge > Crit > Block > Parry. The enemy's miss chance is rolled before their Crit change, is rolled before your chance to block, is rolled before your chance to parry. Both block and parry are only rolled if the damage is non-magical (and it's worth noting that "magical" in this sense doesn't always mean "cast by a mage" - it's unclear, and we're still trying to map out what does and does not count).

If you've never done a dungeon before, before queueing for it, I highly recommend (1) watching a guide (MTQCapture and Mr Happy are usually really good), and (2) alerting your party that it's your first run of that instance when you get in, so they can help you out.

Please let us know if you have any questions!

[Violette]

Learn to get comfortable tanking in Sword Oath

[Jpec07]

Learn to get comfortable tanking in Sword Oath

This is actually optional now, save maybe in Savage progression, if you're undergeared. The game has been designed to make Sword Oath more difficult to tank in, and Shield Oath easier.

[Violette]

This is actually optional now, save maybe in Savage progression, if you're undergeared. The game has been designed to make Sword Oath more difficult to tank in, and Shield Oath easier.

"Still fairly new to this game, and i'm about to get my Paladin to 60, looking for any advice as to how to get set up for the raids efficiently."


Also......sword oath tanking gets better w/ gear.....so why would you stop doing it if you can do it with lesser gear?