does kiting work?

[Jeeqbit]

I've mained tanks for 6 years and in my experience, kiting works but should only be used if absolutely necessary (you've exhausted all other methods of saving yourself and still your healer can't keep up, is undergeared or disconnected). You should trust your healer in most cases.

It works because most mobs are melee (they have to be in melee range to auto-attack you). So by simply taking a few steps back they all get "cannot execute action" errors and that saves you a ton of damage for 2.5 seconds, giving the healer an extra 2.5 seconds to cast their heal on you.

In most cases, all that is really needed is a few steps back, not a full kite, because that is all the extra time your healer needs to cast a heal. In my experience this scenario is very rare but is most common in dungeons with level ranges 51-59, 61-69 and 71-79. These are leveling dungeons which sync your gear so much that all of the mitigation you have does not change that your health falls fast and your healer sometimes needs an extra few seconds to cast a heal. There are also a lot of level 50 dungeons with no walls, so if you pull wall-to-wall and the healer is really new, kiting can be the difference between living and dying. In some cases that kiting may give you chance to apply lots of mitigation because it takes the game some time to register it, especially invulns.

2.5 seconds is enough time for them to cast cure, so if you need more than a few steps back to give your healer the extra 2.5 seconds, then something is probably wrong such as the healer being undergeared (lower health than the DPS), not caught up to you (shaded name in party list) or disconnected (red disconnect icon).

Only taking a few steps back or kiting in a circle with sprint is the best way you can prevent it from affecting melee DPS, because they can position themselves either in the middle of or at the outside of the circle and DPS, but you should have in mind how kiting is going to impact the DPS and annoy them and it is another reason to only use it when absolutely necessary.

I recommend using item level 510 (high-quality) food. This gives you an extra 10% health which makes dungeons that were once hard on tanks a lot easier to handle, because food used to gives us smaller amounts such as 4%.