Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

Pyros

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Btw on the subject of MGP and the car next week, this week's Fashion report is stupidly easy, you basically need 2 vendor items for a whooping 400g, Hempen Chausses and Amateur Thighboots. In case people haven't done fashion report, you just go there with gear in every slot and you either use one "gold" rating item+2-3dyes(amount varies depending on the week and wether you use perfect dyes or same color dyes like red or black dyes versus soot black specifically) or two gold rating items to get 80+ points and get 60k MGP(69k with the MGP buff from FC/squadron weekly missions). Link is to the weekly infographic you can find on reddit every fridays and generally dye info if it's not in the infographic can be found in the comments.
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gshurik

Tranny Chaser
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General rules imo for tanking in dungeons:

Trash packs: Always tank stance. There are some fringe cases for DPS stance, but generally only if you can only pull one pack or whatever, or you're vastly overgeared(dungeons that aren't item level synced at old caps for example, especially when trash didn't hurt). Rotate cooldowns, spam aoes.

Boss: Start in tank stance, secure threat(this depends on the party composition and how geared and/or retarded your DPS are, it can be nothing with smart people+ninja to having to do 2 full threat combos in tank stance at the start with retards who don't use threat moves with good gear). Then switch to DPS. Make sure to cooldown tank busters and keep some cooldowns up the rest of the time. Don't do this on certain hard hitting bosses if your gear is shit, especially in leveling dungeons, these are the worst compared to cap dungeons because of the defense formula fluctuating rapidly, or if your healer looks vastly undergeared/retarded or your DPS are eating all his attention by stepping into every fucking thing. But generally it's safe.

That's for pubs, if you play with people you know you can definitely do better, but for pubs I restrict myself to that, and I adjust based on what I see is happening around.

Also obviously due to how warrior works, do what Fennin said before you have Fel Cleave, you don't really want to "no stance" content before you have Deliverance and you don't want to sit on full rage either once you do but don't have Fel Cleave yet.


I was in a debate with someone who assured me that pulling trash without grit was the better way to play in expert roulette.

I solidly disagree, I feel like the only tank that can get away with pulling in the DPS stance is Warrior. Even then I think it's a bit dicey.

I feel like trash packs are the only situation where you truly rely on a tank stance, and it lets the healer use their AOE to pump out good damage.
 

Pyros

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I was in a debate with someone who assured me that pulling trash without grit was the better way to play in expert roulette.

I solidly disagree, I feel like the only tank that can get away with pulling in the DPS stance is Warrior. Even then I think it's a bit dicey.

I feel like trash packs are the only situation where you truly rely on a tank stance, and it lets the healer use their AOE to pump out good damage.
Yeah warriors are the only ones who can pull trash in DPS stance and hold the mobs properly against a competent DPS aoeing too, and even then I wouldn't. The issue isn't even just threat, it's the fact trash mobs is a lot of incoming damage in a constant stream, which is very different than bosses which generally just have spikes every 15-20secs. This makes it a lot more healing intensive, but healers are actually good at aoeing, probably just as good as tanks in that regard, so the tradeoff of tank DPS versus healer DPS isn't really the same at all.

Now mind you some trash don't hit really hard so you can get away with it, notably the current last dungeon Ghymlit, most trash hit like wet noodles(until the bigger robots near the end), so it can work better there, but it's kinda meh. If it's a single pack and you want to be fel cleaving a mob down that's fine imo, and you can pull a trash pack in tank stance, overpower/unleash/flash a couple of times then stance switch to DPS, that works kinda too, but again you're putting heavier strain on your pub healer, who might or might not be retarded, just so you can push slightly more damage which your healer might have been doing anyway if he wasn't so busy healing your ass.

And the time you saved is probably not worth it if you die even once every 3-4dungeons, and you most likely will if you're relying on your healer being any good.
 

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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Still.not 50 yet, only able to play like an hour a night so im mid 47. The skill level In dungeons seems all over the place. Because I've been tanking for... Uhhhh... 15+ years? It was pretty easy to figure out what I've needed to do. My gear is good and I just had to prioritize my cooldowns and shit. Some things I don't understand still

MMOs have been out forever, but still there's retards that single target mobs I'm not targetting. Overpower works good for keeping everything on me except solo dpsers

Healing seems all over the place. Last night our group wiped a couple times with a healer at full Mana. The person wasn't even afk.

Is the skill floor in this game lower because it's a weeb-fashion fest?
 

Pyros

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I want to say it's like wow, the solo game is so simple you don't learn much, and some people are just really fucking bad. For the DPS single targetting stuff it shouldn't be too much of an issue if you just overpower once or twice more or just change target to them too.

You'll definitely see some really fucking stupid people though. At least you won't see bad tanks if you tank, these are close to the worst, since the runs take forever, people die left and right due to the mobs ping ponging and shit and the tank himself has a good chance to die from not using cooldowns and standing in shit he shouldn't be standing in.

Had one yesterday that wasn't like the worst, but was terrible still. Only flashed once even when he was clearly going to lose aggro since he also wasn't using the spin to aoe, was somehow getting confused by the combo system and would randomly break combos(I saw him using halone twice so I started checking and his skill usage was a mystery). He'd use like 4 cooldowns at the same time for no reason(as in, he wasn't even low or at the start of the pull, say he'd use sentinel+rampart+awareness when 2mobs at 15% were left before the next pull, and he used Hallowed Ground during a boss phase switch with nothing else going on). He also used Clemency a bunch for no reason, and ended up losing aggro to the RDM(who was using both Dispersion and Lucid to reduce his threat appropriately) on virtually every pull. We still cleared but it was painful, but he was in full 380+ gear and knew the dungeon, just somehow never learned how to press buttons in a way that remotely makes any fucking sense.
 

Asmadai

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When it comes to tanking and what stance to be in, honestly the advice you've been given is solid, but I also suggest you to just feel it out and do what you feel needs be done. This game really has an odd stance on tanking (to me at least), even though that's what I do primarily. It took some adjusting when I began years back. I was always of the mindset that Tanks should worry about damage reduction/helping healers keep you alive MOST, and worry about the actual damage I do as a tank as an LAST. The way I figured, if healers had to work less hard to keep me alive, that's more DPS they can do; tanks in all games I played always had relatively shit dps, so I never really gave a shit about pumping out the damage. However, if you haven't learned yet, this game is like, the exact opposite. You are literally supposed to make it harder on your healers by making yourself do more damage. It's whats expected, basically.

Edit: Case in point. If you're PLD/DRK take a look at your tank stance - a flat 20% dmg reduction. Now, read strategies online to high-end PLD/DRK tanking - most of them will do the same thing I mentioned above, try to get you to maximize DPS stance over tank stance. Here's where you can see the mindset come to life - do most strategies out there even suggest switching to tank stance mid-fight to use it as a type of on-the-fly dmg reduction cooldown? It's a solid 20% reduction, so switching to it for a big hit when your other good defensives are down would be smart right? No, your DPS decreases by 20% for those few seconds, so they'd say BAD NO DON'T DO THAT. (?????) This is where they lose me.

Some of the tanks in this game are completely fucking obsessed with doing "MAX DPS OMG" and tell other tanks to do dumbass things like pull trash in Expert Rou in DPS stance. What does this net you? All of maybe 3 extra seconds of DPS stance? It's not going to change much. Pull them all in tank stance, throw out an AOE threat or two, THEN swap to DPS and AOE them all down with the rest of the group. This solidifies the aggro, and lets you do the extra damage to burn down the pack with everyone else.

There have been dungeons/trials/24man/etc where I've straight up stayed in Tank stance the entire time, due to noticing that the healers I had in my group were either shit, completely new players, or a combination of both.

I may be the lone man out on this, but I just tank how I see fit doing the most damage I can. Any strategy that is dependent on the dps of the tanks (lol) to get us through an encounter isn't a real fucking strategy at all, in my mind.
 
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Kriptini

Vyemm Raider
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I was in a debate with someone who assured me that pulling trash without grit was the better way to play in expert roulette.

I solidly disagree, I feel like the only tank that can get away with pulling in the DPS stance is Warrior. Even then I think it's a bit dicey.

I feel like trash packs are the only situation where you truly rely on a tank stance, and it lets the healer use their AOE to pump out good damage.

DRK has a really solid trash pull rotation IMO.

Start with Grit and Blood Price on, use Unleash until you have all the mobs gathered and positioned, then turn off Grit, activate TBN and spam Abyssal Drain, when you get low on MP pop Blood Weapon and Quietus and that will pretty much refill your entire MP bar. Keep spamming Abyssal Drain, you should be able to get 1 more Quietus refill before Blood Weapon falls off, and the pack will be shortly dead after that and you can repeat the process.
 

Kriptini

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iEdt: Case in point. If you're PLD/DRK take a look at your tank stance - a flat 20% dmg reduction. Now, read strategies online to high-end PLD/DRK tanking - most of them will do the same thing I mentioned above, try to get you to maximize DPS stance over tank stance. Here's where you can see the mindset come to life - do most strategies out there even suggest switching to tank stance mid-fight to use it as a type of on-the-fly dmg reduction cooldown? It's a solid 20% reduction, so switching to it for a big hit when your other good defensives are down would be smart right? No, your DPS decreases by 20% for those few seconds, so they'd say BAD NO DON'T DO THAT. (?????) This is where they lose me.

Grit is on the GCD which is why I absolutely hate clicking it for mitigation. I usually prefer to use TBN + another CD since that's basically the same thing, though I will click Grit on during emergencies.

I Iay be the lone man out on this, but I just tank how I see fit doing the most damage I can. Any strategy that is dependent on the dps of the tanks (lol) to get us through an encounter isn't a real fucking strategy at all, in my mind.

I try to push DPS as a tank because it's just so boring otherwise. (PLD is the most boring class in the game while Cover is on CD). And for cutting edge savage/ultimate content, tank DPS is really important. Even some Savage fights really needed tank DPS in order to clear enrage (Shinryu sticks out the most).
 

Ehrgeix

Trakanon Raider
182
127
When it comes to tanking and what stance to be in, honestly the advice you've been given is solid, but I also suggest you to just feel it out and do what you feel needs be done. This game really has an odd stance on tanking (to me at least), even though that's what I do primarily. It took some adjusting when I began years back. I was always of the mindset that Tanks should worry about damage reduction/helping healers keep you alive MOST, and worry about the actual damage I do as a tank as an LAST. The way I figured, if healers had to work less hard to keep me alive, that's more DPS they can do; tanks in all games I played always had relatively shit dps, so I never really gave a shit about pumping out the damage. However, if you haven't learned yet, this game is like, the exact opposite. You are literally supposed to make it harder on your healers by making yourself do more damage. It's whats expected, basically.

Edit: Case in point. If you're PLD/DRK take a look at your tank stance - a flat 20% dmg reduction. Now, read strategies online to high-end PLD/DRK tanking - most of them will do the same thing I mentioned above, try to get you to maximize DPS stance over tank stance. Here's where you can see the mindset come to life - do most strategies out there even suggest switching to tank stance mid-fight to use it as a type of on-the-fly dmg reduction cooldown? It's a solid 20% reduction, so switching to it for a big hit when your other good defensives are down would be smart right? No, your DPS decreases by 20% for those few seconds, so they'd say BAD NO DON'T DO THAT. (?????) This is where they lose me.

Some of the tanks in this game are completely fucking obsessed with doing "MAX DPS OMG" and tell other tanks to do dumbass things like pull trash in Expert Rou in DPS stance. What does this net you? All of maybe 3 extra seconds of DPS stance? It's not going to change much. Pull them all in tank stance, throw out an AOE threat or two, THEN swap to DPS and AOE them all down with the rest of the group. This solidifies the aggro, and lets you do the extra damage to burn down the pack with everyone else.

There have been dungeons/trials/24man/etc where I've straight up stayed in Tank stance the entire time, due to noticing that the healers I had in my group were either shit, completely new players, or a combination of both.

I may be the lone man out on this, but I just tank how I see fit doing the most damage I can. Any strategy that is dependent on the dps of the tanks (lol) to get us through an encounter isn't a real fucking strategy at all, in my mind.

This is complicated and there are definitely people doing it wrong on both sides -- tank stance is really good in prog, if your healers are bad, if anything goes wrong, if you're undergeared, etc.

That said, in savage content or ex primals, when you have bis gear (or close to), there's almost no reason to have to use tank stance outside your opener because damage in is just so low and tankbusters are so infrequent that your healers heal almost everything with oGCDs, pet skills, etc. You're likely mitigating each buster by 30-50% with cooldowns, and you get a lot of incidental healing from AEs and Scholar pet. You mostly just get to slam DPS here and it's not griefing your team -- using 2 GCDs to hit shield oath then sword oath to take 8k less damage from a buster just doesn't matter when that's 1 cast of Embrace from Scholar pet, or 2-3 ticks of regen. Note that another key difference between this kind of farm and prog is that at this point you have a solid understanding of when busters are and have CDs up at appropriate points always.

Ultimate fights and savage prog (at normal prog ilvls, not starting with weeks of tome gear) are the most interesting points I think, because:

A) Tank DPS absolutely does matter here, before clearing ucob we had a 1% wipe, we wiped on 12s with 200k~ health left week 3 of 4.4, etc. This has been the case as long as I remember too, we cleared Neo Exdeath in a group at the last Almagest enrage 80% into the castbar etc.

B) Tank mitigation also matters! And it's prog, so people make mistakes and you can cover that as a tank.

So this comes down to a lot more 'it depends, use judgement' kind of stuff.

There's also similar related issues re: healers / using GCD heals.
 

Asmadai

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And for cutting edge savage/ultimate content, tank DPS is really important. Even some Savage fights really needed tank DPS in order to clear enrage (Shinryu sticks out the most).

Well fuck them for coding encounters this way in that case lolol. I prefer the tried and true," oh we missed that enrage cause of DPS? THEN DO MORE DAMAGE, DPS CLASSES" approach. :p But yeah you're right, if it's coded to require a certain level of tank dps assuming all other dps classes are performing at optimal efficiency, then yeah nothing else can be done.
 

Malkav

French Madman
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It's the main reason I'm not playing tank in this game even though I usually at least dable into the job in other MMOs.

I despise the whole DPS meta around it.
 

Asmadai

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It's still one of those things though, like I get what both of you are saying when it comes to prog content like Ultimate/Savage etc, and how important tank dps clearly in some of these fights; and yeah, when it comes to enrage timers there's nothing you can do but do as much dps as possible in a limited time but...

Like, take this hypothetical situation just to illustrate the point I'm trying to make. This isn't something i'd do, or ever hope to see done, but for math's sake here.

Take a simple primal encounter - now, normal situation: you have 2 tanks both doing as much dps as possible, 4 dps, 2 healers, doing the same. Now a different situation: 1 tank staying in tank stance the entire fight thus doing 20% less damage than before, 1 tank doing as much dps as possible, 4 dps, 2 healers, doing the same.

From a mathematical perspective, given that the tank in tank stance is requiring less healing, thus allowing 2 healers to do more dps, and given that we have 4 dps doing substantially more dps than even the 1 tank who is still in dps stance, how long is it realistically gonna take the 1 tank/4 dps/2 healer to make up that 20% deficit in lost dps from the 1 tank staying in tank stance the entire time?

I haven't crunched any real numbers on this, but just knowing what numbers that dps classes already pull over average tank dps...I can't see this taking more than a few seconds, honestly. I mean of course if you compare just the raw numbers on total dps done by the tank by staying in one stance the entire time vs. the other, there's going to be a wide ass gap. But with 7 other people there to sort of pick it up, it can't be that hard to make up for the loss. We did that shit all the damn time back in the day in other games.

This is of course, as I said ignoring the whole tight enrage timer aspect, where those few seconds of make-up time couldn't exist. And yes, this would probably be infinitely boring to tank in tank stance all the time like this, but humor me.
 

Fennin

Golden Knight of the Realm
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In theory your point is correct, but only if there was enough damage to heal. The vast majority of the bosses in the game do not require consistent GCD healing on the tanks, there just isn't a lot of melee damage going out. So the number of GCD's healers save generally doesn't make up for a loss of 25% damage from a single tank. For example take savage chaos from alphascape. Take an average clear time of 8 minutes, and an average pld/drk dps of 5k. Chaos has 19.8m hp, which would require roughly 41,250 dps to clear in 8 minutes. DRK and PLD lose about 25% damage being in tank stance for an entire fight. So instead of 5k they do 3,750. The group now does about, 40,000 dps, for a clear time of roughly 8:15 seconds. If we go even further then that and look at damage mitigated by direct attacks on a tank (not including aoe), it'll be about 360k damage taken without tank stance, and for argument sake we will give the entire 20% mitigation from shield oath. 288,000 damage taken over 8 minutes equals about 150hps saved.

So being generous in an 8 minute fight you are trading 1,250 dps, for 100-150 hps. Obviously not an exact number but it is pretty close to a 10:1 trade off for being in tank stance. Because cooldowns are multiplicative it is even less than that in practice. Any tank buster taken with an immunity negates the usefulness of tank stance completely, and any tank buster taken with proper CD usage makes it roughly 10-12% mitigation and not the full 20%. So you are only fully mitigating melee attacks that don't come often enough to warrant the loss of dps. If there was more direct damage to tanks that required healers to heal more often single target, then the value of tank stance would increase. For example tank stance value increases the more mobbs you have beating on you (dungeons trash pulls).
 
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Harkon

Vyemm Raider
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The only time the whole DPS VS Tank stance really matters is savage content or speed running with a group you trust to do their jobs.



Pub content no one is going to give a shit whether your in tank or dps stance. If shits easy go into DPS, if shits hitting hard and/or you don't trust your pickup healer and dps to use their buttons properly stay in tank.

Personally for pub content, I always default to tank and only switch out once I get a feel for how the group is doing. (Like if they actually are pushing their buttons and not watching netflix on their other monitor while playing.)

People love to quote their fancy numbers then forget that vast majority of the player base does not optimize for shit, barely half ass their rotations (if at all), and play distracted watching youtube or texting.

So don't worry about it till you start wanting to push the harder fights with a premade group of people, and once you do that then you will see some anal retentive shit start to come out lol.
 
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khorum

Murder Apologist
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People love to quote their fancy numbers then forget that vast majority of the player base does not optimize for shit, barely half ass their rotations (if at all), and play distracted watching youtube or texting.
Partly because aside from Aurum or maybe Ghimlyt Dark the rest of the 5-mans can be facerolled through with unoptimized gear, half-ass rotations, and whilst shitposting on forums.
 

Pyros

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Ghymlit is really really easy though. The trash does no damage and the bosses are fairly simple. Honestly the arborium or whatever dungeon that's also in expert is much harder imo, trash hurts a fair bit and the boss have mechanics that seem to confuse idiots really bad or people just don't bother doing the mechanics at risk of wiping(slime shit on last boss). Mind you, the dungeon is easy as fuck still, just I'd say Ghymlit is probably the easiest of the 3 current expert.

Pretty much every 4man dungeon is designed to be easy enough to do with whoever though. There's only a handful of fights in the 50dungeons that I'd consider more challenging than usual(for example Diablos has really weird mechanics that will trip most people although you can DPS/heal through it if people aren't terrible).
 

Noodleface

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Sorry for the tank derail but this is good stuff. Like I've said I've been tanking more than half my life so I have a pretty good tank sense. I also tanked mythic raiding in wow at the highest level so I know about the survivability/dps balance. The thing with FFXIV is I've ONLY tanked, so I can't take any knowledge from tanks in my groups and seeing how they handle it. I think I've got a pretty good idea now.
 

khorum

Murder Apologist
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4-man's aren't the best standard to base your tanking experience from tbh. Even ex trials are pretty faceroll until the level 70 ones.

FFXIV isn't any different from other MMOs, the real game really starts at the max level.