FFXIV Tanking Guide For New Tanks
So you want to tank in FFXIV, but are not sure where to start, hopefully, this FFXIV Tanking Guide can give you a rough start and get you ready for your first dungeon or piece of content as a tank:
Contents:
What tank should I play in FFXIV
What is the role of a tank
Understanding tanking
Gear and Materia
Summary
What Tank should I play in FFXIV:
It honestly isn’t a huge deal, there are 4 tanks in the game, warrior, paladin, gunbreaker and dark knight and each with its strengths and weaknesses. This FFXIV Tanking guide will breakdown each one and how they play:
Paladin – Wields a sword and shield, mixing a melee and magic rotation. Can throw their shield to draw in mobs and bring mighty wings to protect their party.
Warrior – The true chad, wields a giant axe and charges in like a barbarian with rage, power and a surprising amount of healing.
Gunbreaker – A unique tank, also described as 3 DPS in a trench coat. Wields a gunblade and has one of the most engaging DPS rotations with its cartridge system.
Dark Knight – A very edgy boi, wielding a 2h sword, using dark energy in between their attacks, also able to summon a dark copy of made of pure emo energy.t.
Each tank feels significantly different to play but has a similar tanking toolkit that will make you viable to all parties. Right now, it feels like Warrior is crazy, it puts out nutty damage and can heal for more than the paladin, so would be the easy choice, whereas dark knight has a reputation for being a little squishy right now. But I wouldn’t let that put you off. Plus once you learn to tank on one job, you’ll pick up the others super easy, there are so many crossover skills.
What is my role as a tank?
Coming from WoW, I was expecting tanking to be crazy hard, but in FFXIV it is refreshingly easy to pick up. Your main role and the reason that it can be intimidating for a lot of people, is you are the leader, the frontman, the figurehead of the party
Taunt The Mobs: You take all the damage, your main job is turning on your tank stance and hitting everything so they target you and hit you rather than anyone else.
Leader: as mentioned above, if all the mobs should be hitting you, your second job as a tank in FFXIV is to be the leader. Be the first person the mobs see, charge into battle first. This can be intimidating, so my advice would be to start by tanking a very linear dungeon, or one you are familiar with.
Damage: Tanks deal a lot of damage, more than the healers usually and in difficult fights, it’s up to you to make up your share of the damage. Once the mobs are attacking you, just go wild, AoEs in dungeons, big single-target damage on bosses, just hit things as hard as possible.
Boss Positioning: Coming from WoW, I used to run the boss around in circles, spin around, and play like a DPS. But as a tank, hit the boss, and just face it away from the party in most content. This will make sure any cleave attacks are on you and not the party and it helps DPS use any positions that require them to be behind the boss.
Work with your healer: if you’re constantly nearly dying, maybe pull fewer groups, just one pack at a time, some people are still learning to heal. If you find yourself constantly at full health, maybe pull multiple groups of mobs, round up 5-10 mobs, pop a defensive and clear the dungeon super fast
Tank Mechanics: Your final job as a tank is tank mechanics. I’ll mention them in more detail below, but in some fights, there are specific mechanics just for tanks. This can be a tank buster, which is big damage on the tanks, so you need to use a defensive before it hits, or something like a tank swap, where you need to swap the boss to the other tank.
Understanding Tanking:
You will hear a lot of phrases and words that relate specifically to tanking, so I wanted to break it down here for any new players, either new to FFXIV, new to MMORPGs or just new to tanking:
Aggro/Enmity/Threat: This is a statistic in the game that is measured in each fight, hitting the boss or using certain abilities will build enmity and the boss will target the person with the highest enmity.
Tank Stance: Every tank has a skill that they need to turn on at the start of the fight, which means they should always have the highest enmity. (Grit, Defiance, Iron Will or Royal Guard) depending on the tank.
Defensives/Mitigation: As a tank you rely heavily on your healer to keep you alive, but you should also be using defensives that mitigate and lower the damage you or your party receive. You should use these once you pull a large pack of mobs, before big boss attacks or just when your health is getting low. Try not to spam them all at once or you might leave yourself with no defensives left when you need them.
Invulnerability: Each tank has 1 ability that prevents death. This is an incredible life save for you as a tank, if your health drops low and you’re about to die pop your invuln until your healer gets you back up to high health, if a super hard mechanic is coming in, and invuln will usually keep you alive. (Hallowed Ground, Holmgang, Living Dead, superbolide) Be careful with superbolide on gunbreaker as this drops you instantly to 1hp before making you invulnerable, unlike the others that just prevent you from going below 1hp
Gear and Materia:
Gear and material are so important as a tank, they can change a near-death hit into something that can easily be mitigated or healed. As a tank, if you die, it can lead to chaos so it’s really important to keep your gear as optimal as possible.
If you’re looking to press into challenging content I highly recommend the balance discord, they do all the research for you and tell you what to aim for, including openers and rotations for peak performance. Rather than cover it all again our FFXIV tanking guide, check it out directly here:
Summary:
So that’s it really for our FFXIV Tanking guide, pick a class you like the look of and that feels fun, turn on your tank stance, be confident and lead the group, pull as much as you and your healer are comfortable and use healing/defensives where you can.
My advice would queue into a low-level dungeon, you will have barely any skills and it’ll be good practice for leading. Once you build confidence start doing harder content where you have more buttons to press, eventually, you’ll be ready for extremes or harder content.
If you enjoy this type of content, please let me know. This was just a guide for new or beginner tanks, so doesn’t include any intense savage level tips, but please feel free to drop any other tips in the comments.