Tanking FXIVFollow

Hello fellow tanks and aspiring tanks. First off I just wanted to say I have played Mmorpgs for about 13 years now. EQ, FFXI, WOW, and I played in Open Beta for FFXIV


<17 Glad / 22 Physical> I have tanked in almost every class Sqenix has ever created. My time on the open beta as a gladiator was unique. I found a way around the lag issues, which I realize are mostly server stress testing and a bit of buggy gameplay and animation framerate sync issues. Im not here to defend Sqenix, even tho I do like the majority of their products. Im here to address the tanking issues proposed by this thread as I see it.
First off I too noticed a huge difference after equiping a shield, as to be expected. No one, at this juncture, can truely tell the full scope of any job. We shall discover that in the weeks to come, and I for one am excited . I am biased to tanking jobs, as aforementioned, and glad is no exception. After playing wow for almost 5 years, the last thing I want to feel like in my gaming experiance, is being bound to a set in stone "rotation". I like the fact that their are variables that I have to content with.


Its a magical feeling when you have a great tank out in front of you, keeping things under control, and making everyones gaming experiance that much more enjoyable. I plan to be that tank. I like the fact that I have to work to get to that point both in the experiance and skill departments. You will always have players that make it to the nosebleed section of a game with out being able to perform. If you had your heart set on Gladiator, and the Beta killed your hopes and dreams, I hate it for you. It actually confirmed mine, and I cant wait to get back in the real game and press Guard a few times.


As I mentioned I reached 17 Gladiator 22 Physical. By this point, Guard and Phalanx were a natural part of my gameplay style, and I barely noticed using them. What I did notice, based off of still yet being experianced enough to remeber, was failing to use them. But never was this fail to use the ability detrimental to my characters battle. I chose a few other abilities to compliment solo and duo gameplay styles. I will post a few macros I used, these are personal prefference and take them or leave them.


So, in closing, take the class for what it is at this point. Sqenix has allready announce that there is enmity and aggro issues and they are working to balance it. The more experiance you have playing the class, the more the abilities will come natural to you. Try counting shadows for 9 years then come see me about Guard :)



I made it to Sentinel Rank 8. This seemed to significantly lower the amount that Mobs were hiting me for. I used a 2/6/2 point allotment. Every 8 points I gave 2 str 4 Vit 2 Dex, and I had about 1300 HP at beta close. Mobs were hitting me for about 30-40 with Guard up, and 100-110 without it up. I fought Dodos around camp drybone for three days straight to hone my skills. My gear was crap starting gear, and a vendor shield with a bronze dagger I found in a bazzar. I started a fresh glad to toggle points in other areas to see what the effects would be and made it to lvl 10 glad. Every point went into VIT, and I rarely missed, and hit for pretty simular numbers as my other gladiator. I dont know if that means anything, as the character was low, but what I do know is I can dump more points into Vit before lvl 20 than I had on my other character.

<post edited> Macro's removed. This wasnt a macro thread for commenting on macros so I removed it.

Edited, Sep 21st 2010 3:28pm by GladiusMaximus

Tangent time!

Well, not all that much of a tangent, but a story about complex macros from ffxi!

My first job in ffxi was thief, years and years ago when people still leveled in crawlers nest and kuftal in the early 50s. Being on my first job and being frightfully noob I had a macro for sneak attack, trick attack, and viperbite, all in one go.

I got invited to a party in kuftal that was camped in the "Amemet" room. Which as some of you may know is on the path that Guivre likes to run through. During the course of our party guivre popped and an alliance of people showed up to kill him. Throughout the fight my SATAVB macro would not work. not once. The actions would all be so delayed that I would SA... hit... ta... hit... then vb. it was horribly unreliable. I felt like the worst thief ever. We tried everything, eventually settling on the tactic that once I got tp i would back out of melee range in that small zone where TP moves still worked and wait for the other dd to open the chain then fire off my macro, almost simultaneously... it worked but it was horribly inefficient.

After the party, still feeling like the worst thief ever, my friend and I went off to experiment. Eventually we discovered that three seperate macros, one for each action, was far and away the best way to go. Ever since then I've avoided macros that are bogged down with actions.

/tangent

On that note, given the delay in my class change macros and how long they take to activate fully... I'd be wary of macros that try to do too many things.

learning to run each action individually in the long run will give you greater flexibility for situations of lag, misses, or unexpected/unforseen events.

About your 2/4/2 point allotment; is Mind not a viable stat for tanking?

i'd be curious to see your macros