well i finally figured out why tanks suck so much....Follow

apparently its not them.... its the class they play... I lvled MRD to 39 with zero problems... start a fight off with flash and 3 overpowers (probably overkill) and unless ppl did something extremely stupid or where deliberately trying too... I kept hate just fine.


now Im lvling gld to 30.... run into group of mobs.. hit flash.... then use my enmity combo on the first one... within two seconds the other mobs are attacking someone else... aside from the mob im directly fighting keeping hate on anything else is completely difficult and a chore... its flash doesnt even generate enmity it only gets attention... so if im fighting a group of 5 mobs I have to open with flash and enmity combo each mob twice go lock in hate? even if so thats a total of 10 combos... the pt is supposed to wait there and do nothing until I do that to lock in hate? unless im missing something Im starting to see why lower lvl tanks suck... its not the player (usually) its their class that eiher sucks or requires way more work than it should.... sooo am i missing something?

I've only leveled tank classes to about where you are, so I don't have advanced insights for you. But I do have some low level ones.

Flash is not meant to be your primary threat generator. What it's good for, besides as a follow-up to Shield Lob, is keeping unattacked mobs interested in you so that the healer's generated enmity doesn't go higher than yours once the curing starts. It also doesn't wake mobs, so it's perfect if your party is able to sleep the ones you aren't focusing on, since you can still hold hate with Flash as they're snoozing.

Otherwise, as a Paladin, you have to rely on your hate generating combo to do most of the heavy lifting. As a low level Paladin, it's a good idea to mark targets since it's tough to hold hate if you have thaumaturges and archers spamming AoE on everything at once, but even that is not impossible.

The secret is your combo doesn't require you to focus on one target at once.

You can use the initial Fast Blade on Mob A, Savage Blade on Mob B, and Rage of Halone on Mob C. Just because you mark targets for DPS to kill doesn't mean you have to focus along with them. Your role is to keep all the damage directed at yourself, so do whatever it takes to accomplish that.

You can see at a glance if threat is slipping on any mob; if they aren't all red squares, you have a problem. But you can also see how much threat meter each party member has on the left hand side of the party window for each mob you target. If you see someone other than you with close to a full meter, focus your enmity attacks on that mob to cool it down. And don't forget to tab around at the other targets now and then to see that you're holding threat okay on the things you're not focusing on.

And if it gets real bad where your combos aren't winning an errant mob back, there's always Provoke as a last resort.

Uh, no. Not at level 30.

Flash is worth around that much with an endgame level weapon due to the influence of WDMG in the calculation of threat. A shield lob at level 30 isn't going to do 900 damage when the lob itself isn't even going to hit triple digit damage numbers.

@OT Paladin/Gladiator just requires more Flash spam as a tank prior to Shield Oath at 40. It isn't as easy mode in comparison to Warrior when it comes to locking AoE threat. The class isn't to blame, you are.

His point is that Flash actually does generate enmity, as opposed to what Duo said in his OP (that it generates no enmity and simply "gets the mobs attention", whatever that means).

Flash and Shield Lob don't have to do 500 - 900 damage worth of enmity at level 30 since DDs are also not doing end game level damage yet. Flash and Shield Lob generate enmity that scale with your gear? Perfect! That essentially what's happening with the enmity of DDs too.

4 mob pull as a PLD level 30. Mark up to 3 targets. Shield lob, Flash, Flash, Fast blade, Savage blade, Rage, Flash. Now the first target should be dead. Singal target combo the second target. Flash, Fast blade second target, Savage blade number 3, Rage number 4 flash. repeat until all are dead. You will never lose hate unless someone is really dumb or the healer dose not heal you at all and you die!! Tanking in this game is easy mode. This even works with 2 BLM going all out aoe or 2 SMN speading dots around like pros.

Would've been nice to see more dynamics in the abilities or spells.

A few examples:

1) An ability on a somewhat long cooldown that allowed a single target ability to become an AoE

2) An ability that sacrifices the damage component of the next ability you used, but increased that ability's enmity modifier

3) A persistent ability or spell that increases the enmity effect of an AoE ability for all affected mobs except the mob that the ability targeted

I'm sure that people are probably sick of the 'WoW does it this way' arguments, but they got it right. If you remove the difficulty from tanks ability to maintain enmity then you can shift that difficulty to other parts of the encounters. I prefer the style of active(or reactive) mitigation. It makes you feel like what you're doing matters more and you're not just slowing your group down while they wait on you to get out your bread and butter threat combo.

Provoke doesn't work like it did in XI. In XI, it gave a set amount of enmity. In XIV, it puts you at the top of the hate list, just above whoever had hate before you used Provoke. So if no one has hate on a mob except for you, then you wouldn't want to use Provoke on it.

It's a tool that's you're better off saving until you see a mob head for another party member. You would then use Provoke on it to get back to the top of the hate list. But that other player that was at the top is probably continuing to do actions to generate enmity, so you'll want to follow up Provoke with something else, like Shield Lob.

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Edited, Feb 17th 2014 5:44am by supermegazeke