This is at once both good and bad advice. Your job, like anyone else's, is to speed up the run. You have sacrificed raw potency, including the tremendous potencies of curative magics, to do that—through added mitigation and enmity. As a tank, you shouldn't be thinking narrowly about who does what, but rather what the team can accomplish in particular windows, based on their toolkits, and how short you can make the run as a result. Never play games of pride around some preconception of your "role". Your role is your toolkit—no more, no less. Sadly, figuring out what to best do with that toolkit, given the varying behaviors of your surrounding members, requires an incredible amount of game (and almost sociotypical) knowledge. As a tank, you are in by far the best position to make calls of pace and pull size. You waste time at any point you stop to talk about this and in most cases where you might let the DPS pull. Because face pulling does have very real value, you want to be the first thing enemies see. It will compensate in the situations where you're unable gather all at once without diverting from the quickest path to the gather destination (or, say, without sacrificing valuable MP, TP, or a bit of uptime better spent after the gather). That's not to say that DPS or healers can't, or absolutely shouldn't, pull, but if or when they do, they'd best be thinking in terms of ease of gather and facilitation of uptime, same as you would. A healer might Regen both you and theirselves, and hang just far enough behind you to gather mobs through your Flash or Unleash, or run ahead with a Swiftcast Holy at the ready to hold everything at bay while you easily supply your enmity and their Regen and Asylum (placed in the GCD gap) tick them back to full.
As for pulling in the sense of ripping hate, try not to let it happen whenever there's no advantage for the team. (Easier said than done, I know.) See who's hitting what. If they're single-target direct-damaging separate enemies, mark, and insist, so long as it doesn't take so long typing these things out as to contradict the only point you'll have—that "it's faster" this way. Such times will include pulling for the next AoE while a mobile DPS finishes off the last enemy, now on them, when a Monk needs uptime for their Greased Lightning mechanic, and probably some ten other things that will escape me until I'm tanking for their relevant compositions.
Edit:
tl;dr: Think like a strategist. Role is your toolkit. You're generally the pack leader; the responsibilities ought to bury whatever pride you'd feel in that position. I'd also suggest you try out a couple different DPS when time allows and try to perfect your gameplay on those. Tanking starts to make a lot more sense, especially when you're DPS are fighting in a logical manner, once you know who you're tanking for.
Also, hopefully the Overpower and Skull Sunder enmity buffs will have helped.



Reply With Quote

