Introduction to Tanking (2024)

Last updated on Oct 14, 2022 at 02:00by nikroulah1 comment

This page contains the landing page for all ourour Tank resources related to Final Fantasy XIV.

Tanks in Final Fantasy XIV are responsible for keeping aggro on the enemy,bearing the brunt of the damage from auto-attacks and tankbusters, while usingtheir mitigation abilities to reduce damage taken by themselves and the restof the party.

Another core responsibility of tanks is to be contributing as much damage asthey can to the enemy. High-end encounters are balanced around everyone in theparty, including tanks and healers, contributing to beating the enrage timer.As such, using offensive abilities and following a correct rotation is just asimportant as keeping aggro and boss positioning.

There are currently four Tank Jobs available to play in Endwalker:Warrior, Paladin, Dark Knight, and Gunbreaker.

The Warrior rotation uses combos to build up gauge to spend on heavy-hittingattacks and has a large burst window every minute, with several guaranteedcritical-direct-hits. Warrior is also the tank with the best sustain, with a widearray of powerful self-healing abilities, along with the most powerful dungeonmitigation ability in the game, Bloodwhetting, which allows itto easily complete dungeons even without any support from the healer. It isone of the easier tanks to pick up, with a straightforward and forgivingrotation.

Paladin has a powerful self-buff and a strong ranged burst, as well as afree-flowing filler phase. On the defensive side, Paladin has strong personalcooldowns as well as an extra raid mitigation compared to the other tanks. Italso has access to unique (albeit niche) utility in the form of a spammabletargeted heal ( Clemency) and Cover. Therotation is also simple to execute and forgiving if you mess up.

Dark Knight has two resources to manage (Mana and Blood) and have a lot ofoff-global abilities, which make for busy burst windows. At the veryhighest level, Dark Knight is able to play around raid buffs by pooling bothresource gauges and spending them all within buff windows, making it verypowerful in a coordinated setting. The defensive side can feel a littlelackluster, but Dark Knight excels in encounters with heavy tank magic damageand has one of the more powerful of the tank short cooldowns, The Blackest Night.

The Gunbreaker rotation revolves around maximizing its personal buff window, No Mercy, spending its Cartridge gauge on powerfulabilities like Double Down and the Gnashing Fang combo. Gunbreaker burst windows are verybusy, with a lot of off-global abilities. Defensively, Gunbreaker is fairlysolid, with a good selection of personal mitigation abilities. The rotation isquite simple from a high level, but can require some pre-planning on where topop mitigation abilities, since many weave windows are taken by its slew ofdamaging abilities.

Tanks have a relatively easy time sharing gear between all four jobs. DarkKnight and Warrior can naturally use 2.40, 2.45, or 2.50 GCD, whereas Paladinand Gunbreaker can operate fine at most GCDs. Thus, every tank can use thesame best-in-slot gear and melds.

Since Tanks are for the most part melee jobs, a large part of gameplay andoptimization is figuring out how to stick to the boss like glue; if you arenot in range to hit the boss, you will not be doing any damage. Keeping meleeuptime, therefore, is an essential part of playing a tank. When dodging awayfrom an enemy for a mechanic, ideally try to do the disengage between two GCDabilities for minimal loss. Your ranged GCD (i.e., Shield Lob, Tomahawk, Unmend, Lightning Shot) should onlybe used as a last resort if there are no other ways to keep your GCD rolling.

Every tank has a number of common tools:

• Rampart
• 30% damage reduction for 15 seconds (name varies by job)
• A short cooldown, with a short duration and a short cooldown (i.e., Bloodwhetting, Holy Sheltron, The Blackest Night, Heart of Corundum)
• An invulnerability, which somehow prevents the tank from dying for 10seconds
• Reprisal
• One raid mitigation ability (Paladin has two)

Some good rules of thumb for planning mitigation is to use one of Rampart oryour 30% cooldown, plus your short cooldown, for tankbusters. Use Reprisalprimarily on raid damage. Plan on using your invuln where it will save themost healing resources, often when it "mitigates" the most damage. Useself-healing, and any mitigation that will not be used soon for tankbusters, asneeded or on auto-attacks.

Guide to Mitigation and Math COMING SOON!

Here are a couple of quick tips that will have you tanking dungeons like a proin no time!

The Big Three:

1. Remember to turn your tank stance on — you can not keep aggro without it.
2. Use your AoE combo. It does more damage than your single-target combos ongroups of enemies and pulls aggro quickly on everything.
3. Use mitigation on trash mobs, not bosses! Do not use everything at once; try tokeep something up at all times. Your invuln is your (healer's)friend.

Other tips:

• Arm's Length is mitigation! The 20% slow in the tooltip means 20%slower attacks, which means 20% less damage taken.
• Pull big; as long as you make sure to AoE every pack once or twice as yourun by, there is no risk of losing aggro. Even if you do on one or two mobs,it is trivial to pick it back up after you stop. As long as you proactivelyuse mitigation, almost every healer will be able to keep up. If you end upwiping despite using mitigation well, consider pulling smaller.
• Seriously, use mitigation on trash, not bosses. Dungeon bosses do verylittle damage and trash pulls can hurt.
• Try not to overlap bigger cooldowns like Rampart, your 30%, and Arm's Length,so that you will always have something available.
• Reprisal has a short cooldown, use it every pack.
• Use your short cooldown liberally.
• Use Sprint early and often; ideally use it out of combat so you get 10 extraseconds on the duration.
• If a pack has ranged mobs hitting you from far away, either line-of-sightthem around a corner so they run to you, or pull the pack onto them so thatthe entire party can effectively use their AoE.
• If playing with a White Mage, be mindful that they have access to arepeatable stun, Holy. If you notice them using it, holdoff on using your mitigation until after the enemies become stun-resistant.

Each job's rotation is relatively quite straightforward, and all are perfectlycapable of clearing any content, so feel free to pick a job based onplaystyle, personal preference, or job fantasy. Highlighted below are someconsiderations:

• Warrior is a slow-paced job and simple to pick up. Inner Release is your burst window and lets you do hugedamage within a short period of time. There are two combos: one that appliesa self-buff, and one that builds more gauge to spend on Fell Cleave. Warrior's mitigation is quite strong, andfeatures very powerful self-healing. Bloodwhetting indungeons is essentially a 25-second cooldown Hallowed Ground.
• Paladin is a slow-paced job with several combos and two buff phases: Fight or Flight and Requiescat. It isdeceptively simple to learn the base rotation, but can require more thoughtwhen planning a rotation around an encounter with downtime. Paladin also hasunique tools like Clemency and Coverthat can be abused in a raid progression setting, as well as bringing moreraid mitigation to the table than the other tanks.
• Dark Knight is a simple job on the surface, with only one combo and a fewoff-global abilities that are used on cooldown. At a high level, by poolingresources for raid buff windows, Dark Knight has one of the busiest burstsand is able to deal DPS-level damage during raid buffs. It performs well inboth a progression and an optimization setting.
• Gunbreaker has high-APM burst windows every minute, with a Continuation weave required after each hit of the Gnashing Fang combo, as well as a slew of otheroffensive off-global abilities. It is the second-best tank at contributingto raid buffs in an optimization setting. The defensive kit is generic yetvery solid, with a powerful short cooldown and a sizeable heal in its main1-2-3 combo.

Job balance in Final Fantasy XIV is quite good, and each job can easily pullits own weight and clear any content without being a detriment to the party.Comfort and job familiarity are much more important than minor differences injob balance.