Questions about tanking.

[Jimmymagic]

Ok so I have some questions about tanking that are subjective to opinion but welcomed regardless.

1. When should I switch from tank stance to dps stance?
2. When pulling large mobs, is there any particular order I should target or just randomly switch between enemies?
3. On boss fights, what cool downs order should I have? Is there a penalty to having more than one gcd up at a time?
4. Why do people pull for tanks if healer can t keep up?(This doesn't happen on every dungeon but I always ask healer if they are ok with big pulls or small, yet someone starts pulling anyways when the healer specifically said small...frustrating)

[Kalise]

1) When you're comfortable that not only are you able to keep aggro without the buffer from Tank stance, but also that your healer won't struggle to keep you up if you lost your defences from Tank stance (I.e. If they're spending most of their time spamming DPS skills, you know they aren't concerned about being able to heal a little bit more damage)

2) It keep an eye on the health bars, ones taking more damage are being hit with ST skills so you'd want to focus a bit more on ensuring aggro on them. Outside of that, if enmity is not a problem, focus on the enemies that either deal a lot of damage (Such as ones that cast spells since you cannot dodge/parry spells) or have annoying abilities that force you (Or the mDPS) to have to move. Since the faster they die, the easier the pack.

3) There is a "penalty" to having multiple CD's up, specifically in the way that Damage Reduction stacks meaning you get less benefit from each source you add on. I.e. Popping say, Vengeance (30% damage reduction) and then Rampart (20% damage reduction) doesn't give you 50% damage reduction. It instead gives you about 44% damage reduction. This becomes more notable for PLD and DRK as their Tank stances also give damage reduction too. Outside of that, there are some anti-synergies with various CD's, like having Anticipation (30% more Parry chance) and Raw Intuition (Parry 100% of attacks made from the front) is redundant because you can't parry more than 100% of attacks xD

For higher tier content, you look to try and make sure to have things like Holmgang or Hallowed Ground available for the "Tankbusters" (I.e. Really high damage attacks directed towards the Tank that are done at set intervals throughout a Raid boss encounter) while using other powerful tools for when these things are on CD.

Otherwise, for the majority of casual content, just look to make sure you have a CD up when incoming damage is high. Such as when pulling big groups of trash, or when a big boss ability is coming.

4) Because people are idiots and impatient.

[Jimmymagic]

Ahh thank you for the explanation> This will definitely help.