does kiting work?

[Anhra]

I will say as someone who plays healers and dps and rarely tanks, having a tank who insists on on kiting in any situation that isn't an emergency that's about to become a wipe might and has a few times in the past caused me to rage quit. There have been situations in the past when I've been healing where the tank starts to panic and takes a risky situation that, as the healer, I could have saved and ends up causing a wipe because they ran out of range or line-of-sighted me. I don't play tanks much, but imo kiting isn't something I'd be attempting until you have a better handle on other aspects of tanking in FFXIV.

To be fair, positioning yourself correctly as Healer is what seperates a good Healer from a bad one, so depending on the situation, it also could have been your own fault, since you also have rescue for situations like these (which also helps in kiting btw, especially if you want to buy time with a dps having to tank because tank died for some reason).

As for the matter how "good" kiting looks like, its a bit hard to explain for me, so please bear with it,

When you aggro one Monster, lets say the average melee auto attack type, you will notice that evertime it tries to attack you, it will move towards you and suddenly pause and then execute the attack.
In order to attack, it has a window of roughly 1sec for having to stand still to trigger the initial auto attack (there is a "cast" window of arround half a second or even less for the execution, by the way this game is designed) and it needs most of the time a full GCD in order to attack again. If your character now moves a small distance, of arround 2-3 character model circles (the one which you see on the ground, usually in blue when you target yourself), the "cast" of the execution will be interrupted and the monster is forced to move towards your chararacter again.

It is a bit difficult to pull off, but it does work and can even be repeated. Keep in mind however, that this DOES NOT WORK on Monsters which attack at range or cast spells.

For Ranged Monsters, you have to abuse LoS (line of sight) in a similar fashion as i described the melee part. That means using corners and walls to your advantage to nullify both casts and attacks, which forces the Monster to run towards you the shortest amount of distance towards the aggro'd target, even if it means going into melee range. If you run into another wall or corner, you can repeat the process.

Thats the gist on how kiting works in this game, as mentioned before, it is mainly used on 1vs1 scenarios aganist strong normal monsters usually found in deep dungeons, but you CAN use it on multiple targets as well, you have to kite for this a bit further a distance as mentioned earlier, and it wont interrupt every AA, but a number of them usually do get prevented which can give Healers some breathing room, especially during Living Dead from DRK.