Afraid of tanking in a dungeon? Maybe it is about tank anxiety… Tanxiety… Tankxiety… Regardless of what you call it, I hope to suggest some ways to overcome this problem that just might help you!
Video suggestions for further learning:
Tanking Tips: https://youtu.be/vdIYobuVpbY
Paladin Starter Guide: https://youtu.be/msnDmv2LXWc
Warrior Starter Guide: https://youtu.be/o85OMqC6-Sc
Dark Knight Starter Guide: https://youtu.be/TnWz4no6MRo
Gunbreaker Starter Guide: https://youtu.be/4_WJJSmZt_8
Discord Community Server, come hang out:
https://discord.gg/FDNFgEYyaT
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CaetsuChaijiCh
Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker – Cradle of Hope
#ffxiv #endwalker
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:50 (1) Watch/Read a Guide on Tanking and your Job of Choice
02:55 (2) Practice with Duty Support
04:14 (3) Practice with Low Level Dungeons First
05:22 (4) Tanking is more about being Predictable than Optimal
07:21 (5) The worst that can happen is that you Wipe
09:50 In Summary
10:44 Fun Fact
source
How can you be anxious just pressing 1 2 3 keys and some def cds. Lol
The best way I learned to find comfort while tanking is to simply not give a shit. Did you just die from pulling too much? Oopsy daisy, you're fine, just don't do that again next time. Did DPS just pull a pack you didn't want to? That's a damn shame… They may need to eat a few autos while I learn things at my own pace, sorry healer! Is the healer not keeping up with generally acceptable pulls? You're being throttled, just go 1 pack at a time until someone gets toasty and then blame the healer.
It borders on narcissism, but honestly, it's pretty chill. You are the only person there that matters, and as long as you do your job (or are continuing to get better), the thoughts and opinions of others mean nothing. Go forth and fuck shit up!
Can't speak for other people, but I have very recently diagnosed anxiety and I've had to fight it in order to max all my jobs and do the other group content I like doing, even when it's harder content with a group of friends. In particular, waiting for a queue to pop can often make me feel sick enough to leave the queue and try again later, which is one reason I heal normal content most of the time.
1. As said, preparing and knowing what you want to do ahead of time helps a lot. Even if you freeze up and do dumb things, at least you know what went wrong and you've actively improved a little. Being able to record and watch back also helps, particularly for cases where the healer is being really dumb and you're too focused on getting your rotation right to notice.
2. WAR was really liberating at 56+, especially since I heal most dungeons by default. Rather than having to rely on the healer to be decent enough to handle normal pulls, you have that control back to be able to manage with just about any healer and salvage things when shit happens (and if you have to salvage things, it's usually bad enough that no one's really expecting you to salvage things, so the judgment factor is a lot safer).
3. Obviously, the more you play something, the comfier it gets, especially with #1, knowing how you want to play and actively working on that.
4. Spite can be a really useful short-term motivator. Nothing is quite as effective for me to jump into something and stop caring about anxiety than being spiteful. That practice feeds into #3. For me, this was most notable with one healer I had in my first ShB dungeon (Qitana) on PLD before EW. I wasn't playing perfectly of course, it was my first chance to use all my 70+ stuff, but it took me recording and going back through very slowly to realize that if I were on healer, I'd be more than happy with myself as the tank. The SCH pushed approximately 0 of their buttons, both making it incredible that I even survived as much as I did and making the pulls significantly longer. I had caught whiffs of adlo and physick on the first actual pull (the one where you have literally every cooldown up on healer+tank) and thought for the rest of the dungeon that I was doing poorly because of that, but it turns out the SCH was playing worse than a bot and then being either passive aggressive or clueless when I died later. You'd better believe that discovering this was a good motivator to go back and level my tanks.
5. Closely related to #1, if you're doing that, you're already better off than a ton of people. It's magical, really. Simply knowing what you want to do and failing to do it already realistically means you're playing better than most random people. Any mistake you make or failed chance you take is a lot easier to write off because it's for the sake of improving—it's going to good use to improve everyone's experience in the future.
6. When things are still very new is the best time to hop in and get some practice. Anyone who's expecting people to know the content and not make mistakes on day 1 in a learning party is being unambiguously idiotic. Normal content is easy enough and similar enough to other normal content that your practice elsewhere heavily carries over and you can be confident that the new content will go fine (and it's okay if something takes you by surprise, it's new and most normal content has a lot of leeway anyway), so this is mostly for the harder content.
7. General thing for me, thinking about something happening is almost always a lot worse than it actually happening. Of course I don't want to do something dumb and die, but it still happens after years of practice, can't really help it and there's no way I'm going to adjust my entire play around flukes. When it happens, it's almost always just a "woops I did a dumb" and that's it. Of course it's easier to shrug off when it's a job you're more comfortable on and you wholeheartedly know that it was actually a fluke.
I had a strategy that others have called "weird" for learning to tank. I started playing in HW and started leveling the tanks after all the melee dps so I had decent idea of dungeon layouts ahead of time. The "weird" part was that I just got it in my head that if a healer has time to cast a Damage spell, then clearly I'm not pulling enough. Glad I got that out of my system before Stormblood, but it did get me very comfortable with large pulls.
My tankxiety is mostly with randos who expect me to do wall to wall. But A. Tank is my off role and B. I usually heal so I get lost/turned around easily when tanking sometimes. I'm not sure I'll ever tank raids or anything, I don't know enough people and I learn by doing unfortunately.
I definitely have dps anxiety on melee dps though, even if I didn't it's fun, but it's also exhausting, and I'm always afraid a stray hitbox or weird monster positioning will kill me, and I don't want to be chastised by the healers.
So I tend to only tank or heal in dungeon based on how I feel and which queue I'm going into, and dps when I'm with friends.
Plot twist: I posite that tanking is the easiest role in the game.
I personally don't go out of my way to let my group know I'm inexperienced until my inexperience becomes an issue. Letting the group know you're new could make the criticism less harsh but it also could open you up to more critique than you would have gotten normally. Tanking really is about appearing confident, and trying to undercut myself right out of the gate might give the wrong impression to some people.
Something that helped the small amount of tankxiety I had is knowing that a pull is a group effort. If you are spacing out your cooldowns correctly and you still wipe, it may not be entirely your fault. Maybe the dps didnt dps hard enough or the healer was dpsing too much. Those things can happen. And if they do happen dont point fingers. Just do the best you can to improve the next pull and if your party members are decent party members they will too.
I advise if you want to try tanking just say fuck it and do it, it's not as bad as you think it is and below endgame content I have never had anyone give me shit for fucking up. The worst I have had people do when I was starting out was get impatient and pull mobs I wasn't ready for because I was underestimating how much I could take. Also watch dungeon guides before you go in if you can it helps to know the mechanics beforehand then you may have been ignoring as a DPS or healer. Also pro tip when you start pulling bigger groups, you want to run ahead of the pack (out of melee range), hit them and get away from them because your healers ability to heal you while running is drastically less so you want to minimize the pack hitting you that what when you hit the wall and stop you not a 15% HP which a healer that shitting themselves. Another thing if your healer isn't shitting their pants you can pull more, if you do this you too can have your tanking PhD (pull harder daddy).
as someone who has very heavy tanxiety, i will add to the point about duty support: after doing a dungeon in duty support, you gotta also make the effort to then GO INTO THE DUNGEON AGAIN WITH OTHER PEOPLE.
i, unfortunately, just end up reinforcing my anxiety by relying too much on the duty support. for one thing, while i am aware that the npcs are much worse than real players, i still always end up trying to pull a bit big (never anything ridiculous in a normal context) and whenever i end up dying, i begin thinking "oh god maybe i am a horrible tank. if i go in with REAL PEOPLE i'll make a fool of myself!" so i don't do it (when in reality, the pulls would definitely go much smoother with others). this then leads to me staring at the DF screen, trying to encourage myself to just jump in, and then chickening out and going back into duty support.
I overcame my tanxiety by watching WeskAlber's guide on tanking as I was starting the game and learning WAR and he mentioned that it's often an issue that new tanks often face, so that was when I first acknowledged that it was something that I was subconciously facing. I then started putting myself in uncomfortable positions from the very start so I didn't know what being comfortable was like and I haven't dealt with tanxiety as much since besides returning from a break, but at that point I just do the same as I always do, put myself in discomfort till I feel comfort
There was a saying l used to bound around about this, hmm? something like "These players arent worthy of my best" or these players "arent good enough for me to be tanking for them"
It was pure egotism, l was good enough, but eventually became great and mellowed out, lost all my ego about it, lost my "you pull it you tank it bullshit" and just started to realise lets just get on with it yeah? Lets just clear the duty and go home 😀 My only anxiety these days comes from running to the kitchen in the middle of a boss fight to get my food out the oven XD Id sacrifice a 24 man raid for a plate of chicken <3
Trying to talk myself into tanking with real people. This popped up as I was thinking about it. I'm not new to tanking, I tank in WoW. The difference is the mitigation in WoW is built in to the rotation for all the tanks I play ( DKs bone shield, Paladin's Shield of the righteous), high uptime on mitigation is natural. Bigger mitigation has CDs, but the rest are part of the rotation. ffxiv tanking gives me anxiety, because the mit is situational, and not built in.
Did I hit the right button just now? Is there a better button to hit? Is there a better time to hit a specific button and I just wasted a better button for a later situation, on this situation that didn't need it? Did we just wipe because I should have used a different one?
Tanking technique is second nature at this point for me, the disconnected mitigation is what throws me off. I agree with the hesitancy to play DPS too. I main tanks and healers normally for the exact reasons listed for some people avoiding DPS.
this useless "fear of failure" is pretty bs, the healers carry duty's. if you can't avoid simple aoe's just practice.
Like always, it's other people that makes the idea of tanking stressful. Tanks have expectations to them from the get go, such as how much to pull and how fast the pace should be. There's more pressure put on the tank to perform correctly, and you still get blamed if the healer screws up by DPSing too much and not healing you in time. If you make a mistake, or even if you don't make a mistake per se but things go wrong, you're the one on the forefront of the failure. And you can say whatever you want about the FF14 community, there's always someone gatekeeping you for trying something for the first time and making one single mistake, or even making no mistake but not doing it the way they want. No thanks. Also, tanks require different knowledge of enemy and boss mechanics than non-tanks do. It's a very old example, but Garuda's Slipstream always was one I stated as an example of mechanics for tanks to know that you wouldn't really know by playing a different job beforehand. It's a frontal cleave attack that she casts but it has no ground indicator. She doesn't follow you after beginning the cast, so you can dodge it. If you went into a Garuda duty as a tank, you'd just stand there, probably, and take the extra tank buster that an experienced tank would know to avoid. You just need to know more mechanics as a tank from the get go. You could have done all duties in the game a hundred times as a healer or DPS, and still not know certain mechanics for tanks to handle. That's a big hill to climb.
I play WAR a lot but only in non regular duties, such as Eureka, Bozja, maps, etc.
Part of how I deal with it, is that I focus on how much fun I'm having playing my role and how very much I love my job. Naturally, trying my best comes out of it. And while embarrassing, wiping isn't the end of the world.
As an optimistic player, I will cheer for anyone who manages to get over their Tank anxiety!
But my tank anxiety is more of frustration mixed with anger than a "fear of failing". I'm WHM main and I can't for the love of Twelve remember more than two button rotations or remember when tank busters happen. Yes, I'm the Casual with a big capital C. Guess how many times players have yelled at me? It has happened on multiple occasions, that I don't enjoy dungeon content at all.
But I'm very glad that there are other options for leveling combat jobs. Squadron and Duty Support have saved my skin so many times! Bless for Yoshi making them! I bask in the Frontline's sun because winning that mode is really a coin flip and I see less salty players there (CC is another topic of worms so I'll skip it this time). I run Deep Dungeons by myself and level up with Fates. Yes, this is properly the slowest method of leveling, but when you've seen the pile of poop I've seen fling at my in-game chat window, I think you would understand. Luckily I have a few friends to play with and they have been kind to help me to level up jobs that I find hard to play. Cheers for a good vid with good tips!
The thing that ultimately broke my tanxiety was my FC's weekend blind alexander (savage) runs. I volunteered to fill in for our usual tank on A10S because they couldn't see mechanics clearly on their new monitor and just kinda got used to tanking "serious" fights from there. We're up to A12S now.
Tanking certain ARR dungeons is worse than tanking higher level ones :')
If you can handle Stone Vigil with a baby sprout healer youre more than ready for what comes after
To reduce the tankxiety: Consider yourself a glorified DPS. Honestly, tanking is as simple as 123. You're not the one with the spotlight, you're not the "leader", you're part of the team. IF a healer feels confident you can pull more, do so. Wiping literally doesn't matter int his game 99% of the time, so just go ham, limit test and see how well you actually can do. No one's gonna blame you if you explain you're trying to test some limits.
Those early days when I was but a humble Dark Knight learning the do’s and dont’s of managing enmity and remembering to use my defensives and AOEs during wall to wall pulls were the most transformative aspects of turning into the tank main I am now, like a baby taking their first steps you could say. Granted I still don’t consider myself good, passable at best, but my answer to all that intial anxiety and fear? Turning to others for help, like learning my ABC’s. You were one of my guiding lights Cae, my fist steps in my toddler days of tanking as I watched a lot of your guides, it’s the best advice I can give to anyone wanting to try it for themselves. You’d be amazed how helpful and willing others are once you put in the time to study and be more practical and attentive. We’re all here for eachother, no one gets left behind.
Press stance, press AOE, rotate mits = $$$
It's not rocket science.
If you are actively trying to improve, you are already better than 90% of the xiv population.
when i die in tank ,i blame the healer and the healer blame the dps for lowers damage and it's ok
I learnt by leveling as a tank and doing dungeons with duty support first, as I got high dungeons I watched guides on them to know what tank busters to shield for, also a macro that says Hi and lets people know I'm new to tanking. As I mention in your mentor video I also had a mentor talk me through 2 dungeons as we ran them. 1: added suggestion I would make try doing taniking while your solo outside, so useing defensive come as second nature in dungeons
i startred out as a warrior when i started the game if there is anything i can recomend to some one new to tanking its this star as a warrior its the easest tank to play. the combo is simple and you get alot of self healing it helps when your still learning.
I have all the tank jobs at cap, mostly through roulettes, but I have still never gotten over my tanking anxiety. Some of it is the fear of failure in front of strangers that you mentioned, but at this point, I think most of it is the ambiguity. That is, I can't reliably tell if I am tanking properly, nevermind well. When I am healing, I can tell that I have a decent grip on my job because I can successfully heal (and dps) even when things go sideways, or the tank is undergeared or not performing well, or the dps stand in everything. When I am tanking, I don't know if I am doing well because I can't tell if I am making the healer's job harder. Consequently, I always assume the worst. Perhaps it is a form of imposter syndrome. 🙂
What people dont know about tanking is that you get to make the most mistakes out of all the jobs mechanic wise c:
From watching new generation of tanks within last 2 years or 3 now, that if tank pulls everything it means they do not know what they are doing as a tank and you're gonna have a really bad dungeon experience with such newbie tanks They also refuse to take advice it's weirdest thing these days in this game.
I feel like the most important thing to know, and this is coming from previous savage experience – is that every job has their own responsibilities. Every job has their own mechanics that they have to do in content, and every job can make mistakes. The best thing you can do, is familiarize yourself with those mechanics (Yes going blind is okay), and own up to those mistakes. If you don't understand a mechanic in a dungeon, don't be afraid to ask the party for advice.
When I was a new player I had heavy tank anxiety, when I finally picked up a tank class and ran content however, it became my main job. I went on hiatus for a number of years and just returned, so I was nervous to go back into level 90 expert dungeons, since a lot of things have been revamped in those years – but popping mitigation and dodging AOEs still worked just fine. Tankxiety for me was always about letting the party down, but most groups are cool as long as you admit fault when you make a mistake (And don't assume all advice has negative motive behind it).
it didt take much for me, i kinda got into the zone really fast. Granted when other players pulled ahead of me i found it annoying to really hold aggro at times. These days i keep tanking, but i first like to gauge my parties I'm in. I'll do small pull then a big pull to see how well they handle it. If people bitch and tell BIG PULLS DO BIG PULLS, and cant take it out within a good amount of time, I'll go smaller since it means less risk for me to not die.
Hell most likely what made me just get in the zone as a tank, was cause during the beginning of the game i was one of the rare few good tanks. Who just knew what to do and got praise a lot for it.