How to play gladiator efficiently?

[Raldo]

I agree with many others' comments, though I'll add a few more, since it's unclear what specific problem people have with you.

• Don't stand in the "bad".
Many hard-hitting moves are telegraphed by an orange indicator on the ground. You should try to avoid those. Hopefully that's obvious, but I'll mention it just to be safe.

• Don't move a lot while you're tanking.
Several people mentioned "face things away from the group", but it's equally important to mention "please try to rotate/move the monsters as little as possible". Obviously, you'll still need to dodge the bad stuff mentioned above, but always try to return to your original position. Other jobs have moves that work better when striking monsters from the back or sides, and it's difficult to hit those directions if they monsters are spinning/moving.

• Dungeon speed.
I suspect this may be the actual reason people might complain about you. People hate it when dungeons run slower than needed.
Since you're doing low-level dungeons, people may be bitching if you're pulling small groups of monsters. Once you've leveled past a dungeon and you've gotten used to the dungeon layout, it becomes obvious that certain groups of monsters are so weak that you could easily pull multiple groups at a time (the first two groups of monsters in Sastasha are a good example). So many people have run all these dungeons so much that it seems obvious to them, but for newer players it's definitely not obvious at all.

With that said, there isn't really anything you can do about this until you are comfortable with each dungeon.

At least 80% of the time, the monsters are aggroing ME and NOT THEM. Yet despite my efforts, other players get mad.

What am I missing here? Like I said, I'm already using flash. Exactly how many times do I need to spam FLASH in order to COMPLETELY SECURE aggro?

"80% of the time" is not NEARLY sufficient to be a tank; you should be aiming for ~99%. Also, this may seem contradictory, but they may be complaining if you're flashing too much. Once you have a decent enmity lead, you should be actually hitting the monsters, not just flashing endlessly. This will be gear dependent, but you should only need to flash 1~3 times to get solid threat.

Also worth mentioning that flash trumps shield lob; you shouldn't be using shield lob if you're in melee range.

[MoroMurasaki]

I admit I just skimmed through here but I didn't see any mention of your actual level, OP. If you're at or above 30 you should make sure to complete any class quests you have to unlock Paladin. There is literally no reason not to, playing a class above 30 without your upgraded job stone equipped is only hurting you.

I know you mentioned "low level dungeons" but I don't know exactly what that entails. You should be a Paladin before you do Brayflox's Longstop at level 32.

At that point you will get Shield Oath which makes generating enmity to keep everything hitting you much easier.

[Rhus]

No level mention but you did say a player told you to use shield oath, that tells em you're high enough to have that as a skill (you'd never be told to use it in sastasha fr example) but you still say you're a gladiator... that would be an issue.could that be he issue? Hard to say

[MoroMurasaki]

No level mention but you did say a player told you to use shield oath, that tells em you're high enough to have that as a skill (you'd never be told to use it in sastasha fr example) but you still say you're a gladiator... that would be an issue.could that be he issue? Hard to say

I have seen tanks bothered to put on a tank stance as early as Halatali. Sometimes players are just misinformed. Think of how often RDMs in level 60 content are asked to raise - some people just don't know anything beyond their own class sadly.

[HyoMinPark]

No level mention but you did say a player told you to use shield oath, that tells em you're high enough to have that as a skill (you'd never be told to use it in sastasha fr example) but you still say you're a gladiator... that would be an issue.could that be he issue? Hard to say

He said “low-level”, and since he’s talking about gladiator, I’m assuming that’s probably sub-level 30 content. Shield Oath is PLD only, and can only be used at level 30 or higher. That being said, you would be surprised the amount of people who ask gladiators or marauders or dark knights under level 30 to put a stance on when they cannot.

[Hasrat]

Kinda sounds like you'd understand this already, but we've all seen it come up once or twice, so maybe worth saying: Flash isn't a long range spell.

Like I said, I'm going with the assumption that you seem to sorta know pretty well how to catch aggro and all, but, yeah. Eventually we all get stuck with the tank that uses Flash way too early for it to actually hit anything. But if you're holding onto everything, then you're probably not one of those.

As much as any of those knobs complain, guaranteed we've all seen worse.

[Shurrikhan]

What makes you happy as a DPS or healer? Can you envision how that looks in play?

Okay, now you just have to reverse-engineer it from the tank's set of tools.

Seriously, though, that really is it. You'll generally learn more about proper tanking from healing and DPSing than tanking by itself, and in some cases more about healing from tanking, etc.

Pull as many packs as you can reasonably AoE down; Sprint before you aggro the first mob in a set of packs for double duration on the Sprint; don't scoot mobs out of your ally's AoEs or lines of sight; don't take so much damage upon gather that your SCH can't Bane; keep the mobs as tightly packed as possible; spin them minimally; in a pinch during a gather, feed your Monk a stunned mob for the GL upkeep if you already wasted his Sprint; etc., etc.

In short, avoid the stuff that annoyed you when trying to play well on a DPS or healer. Take advice from others in case you were abnormally hard to annoy so that you can meet more refined or optimized tactical tastes.

[Vurtney]

Did you actually equip the PLD soul crystal to switch to PLD which you should get at level 30? I'm looking at your main class atm and it's a Pugilist at level 61 when it should be a Monk. Meaning your main class isn't equipped with Monk crystal either.

[BillyKaplan]

I'm looking at your main class atm

It's not an indication from the game but just a random option chosen on the forums.

[Vurtney]

It's not an indication from the game but just a random option chosen on the forums.

So it seems. If he understands the advanced job function he should have figured it out by now.