Quote Originally Posted by Renius View Post
I am above average on all content so far and have MTd for last few weeks.
The question is how do you TRUE raiding PLDs do it. Do you watch hours of videos trying to understand the fight before you even try it?
Are you completely topped off with the highest Gear before you get into serious raiding?
How did you prepare yourselves? or did it just happen.
When did you feel you became a TRUE raiding tank (PLD that is)
When you start raiding, you are not only tested on what you have been doing right so far. This is attributed to the plethora of timely tank busters that you will have to learn (either memorize or pure memory muscle kicking in) and boss positioning is sometimes tricky to pull off when you are new to raiding. This is all coming down to how much experience you have.

Guides help a lot to understand the fights better but at some point however you will have to wing certain contents because there are no guides, aka day1/week1 contents. This is where your skills and knowledge is best tested. A lot if not most of the mechanics are pretty similar that you can actually roughly guess what you have to do. Again where your experience will shine. For example, when you see this giant AOE indicator on 1 person, you can kinda draw conclusion that it's a stacking mechanic which is quite common throughout the Heavensward contents. Like when you see purple-ish eye glowing on the bosses with a cast bar, you kinda know that it will do some debuffs on you if your char is still facing the boss at the end IF you pay attention to the previous contents you have been doing so far. Obviously the Savage lineup won't be as easy and straightforward.

Guides are there to help people to catch up easier since you should roughly understand how to do mechanics from seeing videos and you don't have to test out anything else. If you are looking into raiding/progression on any content as early as week 1 for the next patches, you will have to experience yourself and share strategies until guides come out from the Youtubers or early video kills come out from top raiders.

Gear is meant for people to lessen the difficulty to tackle contents. Current highest ilvl is i240, Midas 1-2 Savage were first done in i210~i220. Personally I always go in as fast as I could if I can (week1-2 progression). Bottom line: you don't absolutely need the best gear to clear any of the hardest contents. Skill > Gear by far.

Preparation comes as early as now. Nothing from the previous contents is ever wasted as you build your knowledge bits by bits to tackle future contents. It also helps build your tanking style (although in the end, you will form roughly the same style).

This game is not your traditional MMO where tanks are just your meat shields since DPS checks are present in the harder contents too. So that's also another matter you would like to look into. In that, there are useful resources you can tap for PLD.