New player and Went PLD.

[BoazJochin]

I am a new player and I went PLD. I am wanting to learn how to tank properly.

So what is the best way. right now I am lvl 31 and hoping to get to 35 soon.

[Ampheni]

At your level:
Flash...a lot of Flash....and Rage of Halone combo.
and use your defensive cooldowns...

At level 46:
Flash then....TOTAL ECLIPSE AHAHAHAHAHAA
and more defensive cooldowns...

At level 46 onwards:
You should be able to figure it out yourself by now
and use even more defensive cooldowns...

[Ragology]

I use flash once for each enemy present in a pack and then rotate my rage of halone combo. That holds stuff most of the time. Get used to using your defense cooldowns so you'll have an idea how long they last and how long it takes for them to be ready again.

[cheolsu]

it's a long road. it goes like this: 1. keep aggro, 2. mitigate damage, 3. position mobs/know the dungeon.

1. If you're in a low level dungeon where you don't have shield oath, don't fret if you lose aggro. There isn't much you can do against a red mage spamming scatter and at that level, the dps can take some hits. For anything else, make sure you're in shield oath and use flash. Add your enmity combo. You won't have any problem keeping aggro.

2. Now that you have all the aggro, you may take so much damage that you drop like a rock. Use your cooldowns. A tank that saves cooldowns for an emergency usually causes those emergencies. Try to rotate your cooldowns so you're smoothing out your damage intake. Use Rampart (role skill). Use Bulwark. Use Sentinel. Use Convalesce (role), and Reprisal (role).

3. On top of just doing your job as tank (keeping threat and mitigating), you're required to do one more thing as tank: know the dungeon. People expect you to know where you're going and to know what you're doing with the enemies and bosses. Watch out for patrols in ARR dungeons. That primarily what makes places like Aurum Vale, Stone Vigil, and Dzmael Darkhold to hard to tank. There you are minding your business and a wandering aevis comes over and wrecks your group. Don't face telegraphs at the group. You face the telegraph from the last boss morbol at the healer, then the healer gets all the debuffs... and you wipe.

Extra credit. Bring items! Bring potions to heal yourself, antidotes to cure your own poison, and spine drop to cure paralysis (i see lots of healers get paralyzed from the chimera boss at the end of cutters cry, then they can't heal). you can items on other players, so long as you're in melee range (but not potions).

[PK_THUNER]

Learn how to manage your agro first. Learn how much agro each ability an generate. If I flash here twice I can do other thing for x amount of time before I need to flash again or halone.

Then learn how to position yourself the mob or boss in a way that your party can heal or dps comfortably.

Then work on being more effective and maximizing your dps while tanking.

[PK_THUNER]

Oh another tip is to see which monsters health is droping faster. That means someone is doing single target dps. If they are good you will lose agro if you keep flashing so you need to use halone combo on that one. The worst thing for new tanks is for 2 good dps doing single target dmg on 2 separate monsters.