Advice for Newbie Tank on Pulls

[Degaulace]

With some practice, you'll find the good pace for you. Don't hesitate to communicate, look at healer and dps stuffs to try to determine your agro-keeping capabilities and your survivability, maybe look at other healer jobs mastered by the healer, it can give you some clues about his/her way of healing...
And good luck!

[Galactimus]

On patch day: I pull small and get hit by every mechanic and mob ability on purpose. I tell the party this ahead of time. Now I know what mobs are capable of.

After patch day: I pull as many mobs as possible to see what my current gear level is capable of. Most of the time you can go all the way. Sometimes there's a wipe. But death in this game is a necessary step towards long-term supremacy and mastery of big pulls.

What I find that helps most is making a macro for your party and hitting it before the biggest pulls of the dungeon
"/p Big Pull (Hallowed, Sprint, LB, etc ♪)" <se.3>


Which let's the party know:
1. I'm going to be using 20 seconds of Sprint to round up all the mobs so I can outrun enemy auto-attacks along the way. Therefore you may also want to use Sprint to keep up with me.

2. I'm going to be opening with 10 seconds of Hallowed Ground, therefore you don't need to stress about healing me right away, and you can save Holy Spam Stuns for after it wears off. (Usually I Hallowed --> Sentinel --> Rampart + Convalescence + Requiescat + Clemency + Sheltron --> Bulwark + Awareness + Shield Bash every mob once --> Passage of Arms if there's still too much alive.)

3. You may want to Mage LB or Ranged LB these trash mobs so that they die before the Healer and Tank's cooldowns run out.

[Rathael]

So I started to learn how to tank, leveled mostly through POTD. Then I practiced through Squadron Missions, then I did roulettes with a friend. I have the basics of dungeon tanking down, my issue now is pulls.

I've seen some dungeons where a tank will pull a large amount of mobs and live 95% of the time. I find that a bit intimidating so I always just pull one set of mobs and keep it small. Though I worry the others in my group will become irritated at that, I just sorta want to go at a safe pace. What are your advice on very big pulls vs small pulls?

Screw the public. You are the tank. You're the badass that signed up to be the role that fewest people want to do. Without you, your group would be waiting another 20 minutes for someone else as badass as you. Therefore... you go at the pace you want. People need to learn to respect how fast a tank wants to go and be patient, especially for a player who is learning to tank.

In more detail... you have to control the pace yourself because you are the one able to gauge your damage taken and the ability of your healer. As a tank, you know how much damage you take in given dungeons with given pulls. Nobody else knows how much damage you're going to take. With some experience, you will get a feel for how good healers are after a few pulls. If they are really good and you know you're taking pitiful damage, go get yourself some more adds.

I usually make liberal use of cooldowns and stagger them. I try not to have more than one damage reducing cooldown up at a time (unless it's Dark Mind and a physical reducer). I pull as many as I feel comfortable with, knowing that I have Convalescence, Rampart or Shadow Wall available and use one of them. If the damage is more than I expect, I will put up a second cooldown if necessary.

The worst situation you can be in is when you know you and your healer are not prepared for a large pull because of gear or the healer's speed/ability, but some jackass is screaming "pull more" because he wants big numbers on his screen. Fortunately this does not happen too often. Most people respect the speed their tank wants to go, and are just happy to have a tank at all after waiting 15+ minutes in queue.