Tank Guide
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| ⚠️ Disclaimer: | All job guides are written for the benefit of players who are new to those jobs, to help them establish a baseline of expectations for, and from those jobs. As such, these job guides may list common scenarios, it will not list exceptional scenarios. Exceptions, especially for higher-end content, are not listed, as there exists better specialized resources for optimization. | ||||||
This is a beginner's guide to tanking in both dungeons and bosses. As a tank, you establish top enemy aggression while maneuvering enemies when needed for the convenience of your teammates. While soaking hits form multiple enemies may seem intimidating, you have tools to improve your survivability, while having a simple rotation makes tanking amongst the easiest role in the game.
Offense and Enmity
Managing enmity has been streamlined since Shadowbringers, to where simply dealing damage with your tank stance active is enough to effortlessly establish enmity. The damage you deal thus directly becomes your enmity.
- Tanks are expected to deal damage. Under the same fight conditions, tanks are able to deal up to 60-70% of a DPS's damage. Properly doing your DPS rotation will directly reduce the amount of time you need to tank for, as defeated enemies cannot hurt you. This also reduces the amount of mechanics that puts you and others in danger, putting less stress on your healers.
- Your healers are also expected to do damage. If you see that they are spamming heals on you, consider suggesting that they deal damage for the same reasons you should–standing around and healing teammates who are already at max HP is not helping anyone, and is actually an active detriment to your party. If you see that your healers are doing damage, they are actively helping you.
- Tanks in four-player instances must establish enmity of all enemies. This will reduce stress for the healers, and prevent your DPS from dying and dealing no damage. While tanks must establish enmity for all enemies, this does not mean they are the only one who can pull enemies. Purposefully shirking the responsibility of establishing enmity is punishable by game masters against your account. This includes turning off your stance, purposefully staying behind your party (with the intention of not tanking), or purposely shirking your party members.
Defensives
- Gear is the most important aspect of tanking. If your item level is severely lacking, you will become harder to heal and take more damage.
- Use your defensive abilities (such as Rampart) protactively, at high health. Using defensives when you are already wounded is counter-intuitive.
- Spread out your usage of defensive cooldowns; stacking mitigation, unlike offensive cooldowns, comes with diminishing returns as it is multiplicative.
- With proper communication, use all of your invulns––cooldowns that make you unable to be KO'd––proactively; do not save these cooldowns for "emergencies".
