Warrior Have I been tanking wrong the whole time?

You aren't wrong, most AoE tactics are typically wasted on small groups that are less than 4 and typically single target DPS will take them out faster. The only exception to this rule really is when your trying to kill all the mobs in a group at the exact same time.

 

First of all, it's the most rudimentary of tactics that you try to reduce enemy damage output (because defensive cooldowns do not last an entire fight and MP is not infinite). Secondly they NEVER ever keep the hate. If you have a ton of enemies, a single target DPS burning one enemy, another single target DPS burning a second enemy, and the Healer pulling massive hate from everything else by spamming Cure II to keep your stupid @$$ alive you have just created for yourself the perfect storm for Tanks maintaining hate. This stupid technique only works when the DPS can AOE burn with 150+ damage rating AOEs before the Tank runs out of TP/MP or loses hate on everything. It never works in practice because lazy tanks always try it when you have insufficient Blackmages/Bards to pull that tactic off. On my Monk and Whitemage I see this done all the time and it ALWAYS makes the runs take much longer, is much harder for everybody else (especially the healer), and causes a lot of pointless conflict because instead of having one Tank everybody is tanking one or more enemies in every pull. I have seen exactly 1 successful speedrun and it had 2 overgeared Blackmages. The Tanks I know who do this openly admit that they hate dungeons and many speedrun PUG Tanks have told me the same. It you hate doing cooperative content you should not be tanking dungeons and don't tell me it's a tactic. Not all Tanks who speedrun are bad. But those who always speedrun are nearly as bad at tanking as the undergeared newbies who don't understand their role and get carried. The proof is in the pudding. I've had one good speedrun and over a hundred very bad ones including dungeons where we could not finish.

 

Ive started doing dungeon content again and have noticed this now that more people are starting to over level. Had one group with 2 level appropriate dps and me. Sent a /tell to the dps to hang back and let the tank run headlong into too many pulls while we waited around the corner. Once he noticed he was not getting healed he flipped out, died, and was told to scale it back. He did and rest of run was fine.

Personally think some of it is just we get leveled so high we forget what a chore some content is when you are still using gear 5-10 levels behind.

 

I always feel bad for Conjurers/Whitemages when their 0 patience tanks insist on never giving them time to regain their MP. I also feel bad for new tanks who get badgered into speed-running dungeons they don't even know by DPS who can't stand the thought of spending 5 more minutes in a dungeon they took 2 hours queuing for. Most of the time it seems to be endgame Tanks doing their daily roulette or working on Animus books who will lock their healer out of bosses sooner than wait for them to catch up to the group and who think two inexperienced Lancers can burn 3 full trash pulls simultaneously (and consequently let them and the healer end up tanking most of the mobs). It feels like a mix of elitism and laziness. None of us ever liked those players when we were new and many of us have become those players now in endgame. We should all strive to be that understanding end-gamer who helps new players, is contentious about doing their job, and makes this game enjoyable for everybody.

 

Yeah, worst place for this is roulletting into either of the last two story missions. Cant count how many times ive been locked out of a fight because someone couldnt wait to be sure everyone was up. Those 2 missions seriously could use an ilvl cap just to slow the pace.

 

No, I meant in pretty much any job with the ability to AoE spam. Potency from all AoE attacks are pretty small and have high tp/mp costs and burst tactics (such as Double Flare) aren't sustainable in drawn out sessions (even BLM has inhibitors). If your AoEing everything, you're generally resource starved for the next fight and usually need to take a moment to recover mp/tp and job abilities. Trying to do that for every small group of 3 or less becomes highly inefficient because you have to rest and recover every fight and end up taking more time in the long run to accomplish a goal.

However, the larger the group is the more overall damage each AoE does, making the resource cost more efficient. The attacks themselves won't do more, but a 200 damage attack on 3 enemies is only going to come out at 600 total damage, while the same attack on 8 enemies is going to be 1600.

 

We went in with both healers a dps and the offtank and there were 4 people watching the opening cinematic so we asked the MT to let us watch the cinematics. Let's just say he went in with a just a couple of DPS and wiped repeatedly before he got the hint. One of the worst things is that you always have pallys in i110 gear who dash past the mobs and immediately go to the next area knowing that there are new players who then let the entire rest of the full party take on 5 trash mobs at once. At most 3 ppl get through when they do this and now a gimped party has to take on an entire floor worth of trash.

--- Double Post Merged, Nov 5, 2014, Original Post Date: Nov 5, 2014 ---

You're absolutely right. And unless you have a Bard restoring MP/TP to the party most DPS classes will have trouble keeping up trying to AOE down mobs. If you have a Scholar, a Summoner, and a Bard/Blackmage it's not so bad AOEing most of the small mobs while the Arcanists Bane and Shadow Flare but Melee DPS pays a lot of TP for garbage damage on their AOEs and it's prohibitively expensive for most everybody else.

For XXL trash pulls AOE's are much more efficient (provided you have actual AOE classes) but you have to stop in-between fights because if the Tank isn't basically out of TP he wasn't keeping hate off the Healer and DPS and I can guarantee you a WHM is critically low on MP with Shroud on cooldown. But by the time you've typed "Need MP." a speedrunner has face-pulled the first two trash mobs down the hall already. A Scholar can probably keep pace with the MP use, provided nobody dies (including your fairy), but I don't know how well they would handle the burst healing requirements because when your i108 WHM is using Presense of Mind, Divine Seal, Shroud of the Saints, Benediction, Eye for an Eye, Virus, and spamming heals to try and keep the tank above 50%. At that point I think Eos just packs her backs and goes home to mother.

In my experience, pulling an extra trash mob or a trash mob and patrol, works fine when your whole party is overgeared but makes dungeons actually take longer to complete more often then not. If you have an all AOE party and your Tank is popping his CDs then sure, but if your party ain't built for it and/or not all your party is comfortable with it, speedrunning becomes a long drawn out clusterf***. Having farmed various dungeons for gear I have observed that (for most party compositions) the actual fastest runs come everybody focuses down the same enemies so the healer is only healing the Tank and nobody's starting fights with without TP/MP. I don't think I have to say this but wiping wastes more time then speedrunning can save you.

 

I don't get it. I'm a DRG (not the best aoe class out there) and I've done countless speedruns (when I needed myth for books and stuff like that) and even though I don't actually miss doing speedruns as a method, but my statistics are VERY different, I'd say I had one bad speedrun to every 10 good speedruns.

 

I don't do speedruns anymore, as I don't have any reason (right now), but I used to do some with my friends, some with PF and some with DF. The only thing that really screwed me was when the tank decided to do a semi-speedrun, because that really starves my TP, getting groups of 6 or so, killing them and immediately moving towards next groups. Regular speedruns used to be fine. I haven't done any SR with monk, though, but as a DRG I can kind of counterattack excessive tank movement by stunning the first mob I hit before applying Heavy Thrust, then Ring of Thorns, then stunning it again with spineshatter dive, Heavy Thrust again, Ring of Thorns and then everything is fine, since tanks generally stop moving too much after they have stablished a little bit more of aggro. After that, depending on how many enemies, how well they are stacked/lined and if I can spend TP like crazy, I can just Doom Spike them, keep doing HT > Ring of Thorns or, if things are really erratic, just spam ring of thorns until I can get into a better position.

I won't lie to you: I had my fair share of bad Speed Runs with randoms, but they were less than 10% of the runs I made.

 

There's also a HUGE difference between a bad run to a DPS and a bad run to a Healer. As a Monk doing Expert Roulette in 2.3, almost every tank would speedrun and I would do fine because I used <tt> macros to keep myself from pulling aggro from the tank but our healer would get mobbed every time and the tank would do nothing. I ended up frequently burning all my defensive and healing cooldowns to rescue the healer who was perpetually out of MP and being attacked by adds. As a Healer I was the person stuck with half the hate and none of the armor. Speedrun endlessly with PUGs as a Healer and tell me it's fine, they are the ones who suffer not the DPS.

 

I'm not saying speed runs aren't bad, I'm saying that most of my speed runs were ok i.e. they were actually fast and no one died aka they were actually speedruns.

I'm sure it's much more stressful to do it as a healer, but I know when a healer is struggling with aggro and mp. It's literally written on the screen! To make it clear: Speed running endlessly is NEVER fine to me.

 

PSA to White Mages: Your tank was dumb and pulled too many mobs? Swiftcast Holy. Stun gives you time to pop your buffs and keep them alive. Had a bad Snowcloak tonight while healing, and Holy saved the tank's arse more times than I can count.

 

I have no problems when the party agrees to speedrun (or if people speedrun and neither I nor any person whom I do not hate is healing that party). My problem is that tanks NEVER ask for permission and when I tell them to cut it out they NEVER listen. They don't even wait for me to be on the same screen before they lock out bosses on occasion. Sometimes we don't wipe but people are regularly dying which is a crippling loss of mp for a healer in speedruns. I always end up keeping hate on a large percentage of enemies which the Tank never picks up, and I have had exactly one speedrun which was actually faster (or even not miserable). Plus, nobody ever adjusts tactics when they discover that their healer, shockingly, cannot heal them through 4 simultaneous trash mobs in Sastasha HM the first week it came out (we spent 15 minutes wiping on trash mobs). My point is, unless the ACTUALLY knows how to keep hate in a speedrun, the party is overgeared, it has the right classes of DPS, and the healer is actually OK with it, stop face-pulling through then entire dungeon 4 mobs at a time!

I have wiped before on Copperbell NM in an all endgame party because of an endgame speedrun tank. COPPERBELL! Who the heck ever has a party wipe in Copperbell after they clear it for the main storyline? The only time I ever had one back off was in Brayflox NM where we wiped two times on the very first trash pull before he gave up on having two Lancers AOE down then entire map. This is why I do not like nor trust speedrun tanks. I'm not necessarily saying any of you guys are THAT Tank. I main Healer and I know a lot of people who main Healers and not a single one of them likes speedruns. I may just bitch about you in FC chat like most Healers I know but some Healers are also selfish and passive-aggressive and those guys will wait till you've pulled the entire floor and then abandon duty (happened to me twice as a melee dps). Have fun sitting around for 7-10 minutes waiting for another healer to pip in (or 50 min like my first Sastasha NM run as Tank, thank you stupid "thinks he's the tank" goon).

 

That's pretty terrible. I know it's good to rant about this kind of thing, but I was not in anyway trying to saying that wasn't your experience, I was just saying that most of my speedruns, even on DF, were successful (faster, not-too-stressing, no one needs to be raised at all, healer doesn't pick aggro).

I understand the concept of bad speedruns, I've seen them, I just don't get it how you're so unfortunate. They are really exceptions in my case.

 

Since dungeons pull from all servers I could not tell you why I get nothing but incompetent Tanks in speedruns nobody asked for (ironically, Pallys are now worse then Blackmages for forcing speedruns, though sample size might be an issue with the BLMs). All I know is that about 1/3 of the dungeons I PUG into are speedruns and they are about 30% hectic, 60% cluster f**ks, and 10% the dps leave/vote abandon/vote kick bad. I wish more people were contentious as you seem to be but there are a lot of people who, as soon as they enter the dungeon, are "late for the door" and can't be bothered to take 5 extra minutes out of the entire dungeon run to not make it a horrible experience for everyone. It's gotten so bad I now make it a point to make friends with Tanks so I can invite them to do Expert Roulettes with me now just to stay out of queue with speedslob Tanks (of course, now that EX Roulette dungeons require DPS to know what they are doing or they are impossible; I'm trying to avoid PUG players entirely, though I will run with inexperienced guildies and ls friends because I don't mind wiping with friends as much as I do with strangers). Oh well, at least you rarely wipe in ST anymore (unless an alliance gets both healers frozen in a row in Scylla, which is all but guaranteed to wipe that alliance). And all this has gotten me to invite people from the forum LS to a lot more content (special shout out to Auger Asagi [Yosuke] for being like the most awesome dps ever).

 

We bask in your awesomeness, @Yosuke !
XP
(Totally only kinda sorta joking)

 

@Mindflenzing and @praysolace awwww I love u guys! I love running dungeons with u too cuz u both make it so fun!