People are overcomplicating this.
Tanking, like basically everything in XIV, is incredibly simple compared to other MMOs. You do not have to actively block. You don't have to avoid showing your back to bosses or risk being instagibbed by a crit/crushing blow. You don't have to juggle perfect parry, defense and block ratings to achieve critical hit immunity. You also don't have 38 different abilities that you commonly use while tanking. You don't have to constantly dodge massive spams of ever-shifting AE telegraphs with odd shapes.
Basically tanking as a WAR goes like this:
Use your damage cooldowns. Do your threat combo. Do your debuffing combo. Rotate defensive cooldowns as damage comes in. Keep Inner Beast on standby if you know you're going to need to eat a big hit, or use it for extra DPS/threat if you know the damage won't be spiky.
If the boss hits like a semi truck, keep Storm's Path up. Don't forget to use Fracture for extra threat and DPS (don't listen to people who say DoTs don't generate threat, ask any good geared SMN how close they get to pulling hate at any time on raid bosses). Make sure you use Holmgang a moment before things really start going south. Because apparently in XIV, panic buttons are not actually panic buttons and the defensive buff takes a couple of seconds to actually register.
Use Vengeance in conjunction with Bloodbath and Berserk, especially if you're tanking a bunch of trash; you can kinda just throw out Overpowers and the healing helps mitigate the damage you take. Use your other cooldowns whenever you know you might need to weather some massive damage... pop Convalescence after taking massive damage to help get healed up fast. Save Thrill of Battle for when you get low on HP--it'll give you a bit of a boost, drop Inner Beast right after it, and while it's up lustrates will heal you for more than usual. It's helpful to use to crawl back from low HP. On raid bosses I usually just use Foresight and Featherfoot between my better cooldowns and Inner Beast, just to make things a little easier on the healers.
The hardest part of warrior tanking for me was learning when (and when not) to use Inner Beast. There are two problems with Inner Beast--one is that it's not an off-GCD skill, so you can't treat it like a panic button unless you are just not attacking, which should be never unless there's some mechanic that requires you to not attack. The other problem is the damage mitigation it provides only lasts six seconds. So. You sort of have to know when and where you're going to use it, which means you won't use it very effectively on a fight you don't have lots of experience with.
On Twintania I save Inner Beast for death sentence. It's regular, I know when it comes, it announces itself with a cast bar, so... yeah. Easy. Not all bosses are as polite as the Allagan Empire's pet guard wyvern, so you definitely need to get used to the boss before you can start really using your mitigation tools to their greatest effect.
Practice, practice, practice. Try running dungeons and pulling several trash packs at once; it's good practice on learning how to stay alive when taking lots of damage, but without having the risk of making your raid members upset with you since you're just in a 4-player dungeon with friends.
Tanking, like basically everything in XIV, is incredibly simple compared to other MMOs. You do not have to actively block. You don't have to avoid showing your back to bosses or risk being instagibbed by a crit/crushing blow. You don't have to juggle perfect parry, defense and block ratings to achieve critical hit immunity. You also don't have 38 different abilities that you commonly use while tanking. You don't have to constantly dodge massive spams of ever-shifting AE telegraphs with odd shapes.
Basically tanking as a WAR goes like this:
Use your damage cooldowns. Do your threat combo. Do your debuffing combo. Rotate defensive cooldowns as damage comes in. Keep Inner Beast on standby if you know you're going to need to eat a big hit, or use it for extra DPS/threat if you know the damage won't be spiky.
If the boss hits like a semi truck, keep Storm's Path up. Don't forget to use Fracture for extra threat and DPS (don't listen to people who say DoTs don't generate threat, ask any good geared SMN how close they get to pulling hate at any time on raid bosses). Make sure you use Holmgang a moment before things really start going south. Because apparently in XIV, panic buttons are not actually panic buttons and the defensive buff takes a couple of seconds to actually register.
Use Vengeance in conjunction with Bloodbath and Berserk, especially if you're tanking a bunch of trash; you can kinda just throw out Overpowers and the healing helps mitigate the damage you take. Use your other cooldowns whenever you know you might need to weather some massive damage... pop Convalescence after taking massive damage to help get healed up fast. Save Thrill of Battle for when you get low on HP--it'll give you a bit of a boost, drop Inner Beast right after it, and while it's up lustrates will heal you for more than usual. It's helpful to use to crawl back from low HP. On raid bosses I usually just use Foresight and Featherfoot between my better cooldowns and Inner Beast, just to make things a little easier on the healers.
The hardest part of warrior tanking for me was learning when (and when not) to use Inner Beast. There are two problems with Inner Beast--one is that it's not an off-GCD skill, so you can't treat it like a panic button unless you are just not attacking, which should be never unless there's some mechanic that requires you to not attack. The other problem is the damage mitigation it provides only lasts six seconds. So. You sort of have to know when and where you're going to use it, which means you won't use it very effectively on a fight you don't have lots of experience with.
On Twintania I save Inner Beast for death sentence. It's regular, I know when it comes, it announces itself with a cast bar, so... yeah. Easy. Not all bosses are as polite as the Allagan Empire's pet guard wyvern, so you definitely need to get used to the boss before you can start really using your mitigation tools to their greatest effect.
Practice, practice, practice. Try running dungeons and pulling several trash packs at once; it's good practice on learning how to stay alive when taking lots of damage, but without having the risk of making your raid members upset with you since you're just in a 4-player dungeon with friends.
attractive enmity device
