FFXIV Tank Guide: Tanking Basics for Dungeons and Raids

Tanking in FFXIV looks scarier than it is. You stand in front, you keep the monsters mad at you instead of the party, and you try not to die doing it. The whole job comes down to a handful of habits: your stance, how you pull, how you spend your cooldowns, where you point the boss, and (in eight-player stuff) how you hand the boss off to your co-tank. Get those right and the rest is mostly details.

Tank Stance and Keeping Aggro

Turn your stance on. That's the entire secret to holding aggro, at least nine times out of ten.

Every tank calls the stance something different, but they all do the same job. Paladin calls it Iron Will, Warrior calls it Defiance, Dark Knight calls it Grit, and Gunbreaker calls it Royal Guard. You pick the skill up at level 10, and it stays on for the whole fight. The game describes it as "significantly increases enmity generation," and enmity is just the game's word for aggro, or hate. The exact multiplier isn't printed anywhere, but it's big enough that as long as your stance is on and you're hitting things, the mobs stick to you like glue.

Once the stance is active, the skill turns into a "Release [Name]" button. You basically never press that. Just leave the stance on.

How aggro works now

A few expansions back, tanks had a separate "aggro combo" you'd spam to build hate. That's gone. As of patch 5.0, every damage skill generates stance-boosted enmity, so your normal damage rotation is your aggro rotation. One less thing to juggle.

Your area-of-effect skills carry a little extra enmity kicker, which helps grab a fresh pack. You don't need a special combo path, though. Just hit stuff and the hate follows.

Healers and DPS also generate far less enmity from their damage than they used to, so you've got a wide margin. The party list shows little aggro bars under each name; if yours is full and theirs are low, you're doing fine.

Practical aggro habits

• Tag a pack with your ranged attack on the run. That's Shield Lob for Paladin, Tomahawk for Warrior, Unmend for Dark Knight, and Lightning Shot for Gunbreaker. One tap glues the first mob while you gather the rest.
• When two or three mobs are loose, hit your AoE a couple of times to spread hate across all of them. Don't tunnel one enemy down while the others wander off to munch your healer.
• The one spot stance alone won't save you: FATE mobs and Hunt marks ignore Provoke entirely. There you lean on your ranged attack to build hate the slow way.

The classic beginner mistake is turning the stance off mid-fight. If you ever lose aggro for no obvious reason, glance at your buffs, because odds are the stance got toggled off. Flip it back on, throw a Provoke, and you're set.

Wall to Wall Pulls and When to Stop

A wall-to-wall pull means grabbing every pack of trash mobs between you and the next locked door, then fighting them all in one big pile. The name comes from the invisible barriers (walls or gates) that block the hallway until the current trash is dead. You drag everything up to that wall, stop, and AoE the pile down together.

How the walls work

Dungeons are built in three sections, each ending in a boss. Between bosses, a barrier keeps you from running past the trash, and it drops the moment the required mobs are dead. That barrier is the only thing capping your pull size in modern dungeons.

Forced walls showed up at level 51 and up, which is Heavensward onward. Pre-50 ARR dungeons don't always have them, and that's part of why those old dungeons get messy. Nothing stops a tank from dragging half the map into a single fight.

In level 81-plus dungeons, the walls are tuned so you can only stack two packs at a time. So "wall-to-wall" in current endgame basically means "both packs, up to the wall," not some giant train of mobs.

The run itself

As you move, tag each pack with your ranged attack so they follow, then keep running to the wall. Once everything's bunched up, stop, turn them so they're clustered in front of you, and pop your first cooldown after they settle. Mitigating while you're still running wastes the duration, because the mobs aren't actually hitting you yet.

Keep the pile tight. Your DPS want the mobs clustered so their AoE hits everything at once, and your melee want a target that isn't sliding around for their positionals. A loose, drifty pile costs the group damage for no reason.

Why people do it, and when to stop

Big pulls finish faster, full stop. Your group's AoE damage scales beautifully against a pile, so two packs at once usually dies quicker than two single pulls back to back. There's also a cooldown argument: your big mitigations sit on long timers, and they're way more valuable soaked across a big pull than dribbled one pack at a time.

Still, knowing when to stop short of the wall matters more than the pulling itself.

• First time in a dungeon. Pull two packs, see how it feels, then add more once you know the layout.
• You or the healer are undergeared for the dungeon's item level sync. Two packs will just chew through you.
• The healer is new, low on mana, or clearly struggling. Dropping to one pack at a time is completely fine, and most parties won't blink.
• ARR (pre-50) dungeons. The kits are thinner, the pulls are awkward, and there are no walls saving you. These are arguably the hardest dungeons to pull big in.

The one rule that beats all of the above: don't pull more than you and your healer can survive. A wall-to-wall that wipes the group is slower than two safe pulls, every single time. If a pull goes sideways, scale back on the next one.

Mitigation Cooldowns and How to Rotate Them

Mitigation is where most tanks either overthink it or underthink it. The goal isn't to save your big cooldowns for an emergency that never shows up. It's to keep something running on yourself pretty much the whole time you're taking hits, and to never blow everything at once.

The shared role kit

These are the buttons every tank gets, so they're worth knowing cold.

• Rampart is a flat 20% damage reduction for 20 seconds, on a 90-second cooldown. This is your bread and butter. From level 94 on, it also bumps your healing received by 15%, so your healer gets more mileage out of their spells while it's up.
• Reprisal drops the damage of every enemy around you by 10% for up to 15 seconds (10 seconds before a level 98 trait), on a 60-second cooldown. It's a point-blank area effect, so it shines on big packs where mobs are piled on you.
• Arm's Length is sneaky-good on big pulls. It nullifies knockback for 6 seconds, but the real trick is that enemies who hit you while it's active get Slowed by 20% for 15 seconds, so their auto-attacks come slower. On a pile of eight mobs, that slow adds up to a ton of avoided damage.
• Low Blow is a single-target stun, 5 seconds, 25-second cooldown. Handy for pausing a nasty caster or a mob winding up a telegraph. Interject (30-second cooldown) interrupts enemy casts that show a pulsing red bar, great for shutting down trash that likes to hurt you.

Your personal big cooldown

All four tanks get an equivalent at level 38: a 30% damage reduction, 15 seconds long, on a 120-second timer.

| Job | Level 38 cooldown | Level 92 upgrade | |---|---|---| | Paladin | Sentinel (30%, 15s) | Guardian (40%) | | Warrior | Vengeance (30%, 15s) | Damnation (40%) | | Dark Knight | Shadow Wall (30%, 15s) | Shadowed Vigil (40%) | | Gunbreaker | Nebula (30%, 15s) | Great Nebula (40%) |

These are your anchor cooldowns for the hardest pulls or a chunky tankbuster. At level 92 they all upgrade to a 40% version with a little bonus tacked on.

Then each tank layers smaller, short-cooldown stuff on top. Dark Knight has The Blackest Night, a barrier worth 25% of max HP that refunds a free attack if it gets fully soaked, plus Oblation, a 10% reduction you can bank two charges of. Warrior has Bloodwhetting and self-heals baked into its combo, which is why the job is famously tanky in dungeons. The point isn't to memorise every one of these. It's to know you've usually got something off cooldown you can press.

How to actually rotate them

• One at a time on a steady pull. Drop Rampart, ride it out, and when it fades move to Reprisal or Arm's Length. Then go to your 30% if the pack's still alive. You're chaining, not stacking.
• Don't stack two big reductions on the same pull unless you're about to die. Two 30%-ish cooldowns overlapping waste part of the second one, and then you've got nothing for the next pack. The community shorthand is "don't double-mit."
• Reprisal and Arm's Length play nice together because they work differently. One cuts the enemy's damage, the other slows their swing speed. Pairing those two on a big pull is a solid combo.
• Save at least one cooldown for the boss, especially your invuln. Boss auto-attacks in FFXIV are mostly gentle. The real spike is the tankbuster, and you want a 30% or a Rampart ready for that.

A quick example for a nasty two-pack: open with Arm's Length as the mobs pile in, so the slow kicks in immediately. Layer Rampart while they're hitting you, and hold your 30% in reserve in case the healer falls behind. Aim to end every pull with at least one cooldown already ticking back toward ready, so you're never walking into the next group naked.

Positioning Bosses and Facing Them Away

Once you've got aggro locked, the next habit is pointing the boss the right way. The short version: face the boss away from the party, keep it still, and don't spin it around.

Why facing matters

A lot of bosses have frontal attacks: auto-attack cleaves and tankbusters that hit in a cone in front of them. If the boss is pointed at your party, those cones hit everyone. Point it at the wall, and only you eat them.

Your melee DPS also care about where the boss faces. Their hardest-hitting attacks get a bonus when they land from the rear (behind the boss) or the flank (the sides). No melee job has a "front" positional, so you should be the only one standing in the cleave zone. Keep the back and sides clear for them.

So the standard setup goes like this. You grab the boss, drag it a few steps so it's facing away from the group (a lot of tanks just aim it toward the nearest wall, often "north"), and the party stacks behind it. The exact compass direction doesn't really matter. What matters is consistency. If you always park the boss the same way, your group always knows where the safe spot is and where the danger cone sits.

Don't spin the boss

"Spinning" means turning the boss's facing over and over, usually because you're dodging by running through it or jittering around the arena. It's a fast way to annoy your melee, who have to keep repositioning to land their positionals and end up losing damage chasing a turning target.

Worse, every time the boss rotates, that frontal cone sweeps a new slice of the arena. Spin at the wrong moment and you clip a DPS or a healer who thought they were safe.

The fix is mostly restraint. Move the boss as little as the mechanic allows. If you must reposition, strafe around to its front rather than running straight through it, so the facing barely changes. When a forced-movement mechanic shoves you, get back in front of the boss the moment it's safe. Predictability is the whole game here.

A couple of caveats

Some bosses, the big ones and the wall bosses, have an omnidirectional hitbox with no real "back." On those, facing barely matters for positionals, though you still want cleaves off the party.

As of Dawntrail (patch 7.01 and later), some bosses also gain a temporary "Directional Disregard" effect at scripted moments, which lets melee hit their positionals from anywhere. When that's up, you've got a little more freedom to move the boss. Melee carry a role action called True North, too, their own escape hatch that nullifies positional requirements for 10 seconds.

The habit that pays off most is simply parking the boss, pointing it at a wall, and then leaving it alone until a mechanic forces you to move.

Tank Swaps and Raid Tanking Basics

Dungeons have one tank, so everything above is plenty. Raids and trials bring a second tank, and that changes the job. Now you're trading the boss back and forth with your co-tank at the right moments. That trade is a tank swap.

Why swaps exist

A lot of raid bosses hit the main tank with a stacking debuff, like a vulnerability-up or a damage-taken-increase, and sometimes a death sentence if it stacks too high. The fix is to stop being main tank before the next stack lands, which means handing the boss over.

Other fights have a shared tankbuster, a big hit meant to be soaked by both tanks at once. There you don't swap at all; you stand together and split the damage. Knowing which kind of fight you're in is a per-encounter thing, so a quick callout goes a long way.

The swap itself: Provoke plus Shirk

The standard swap is a two-button dance.

1. The off-tank uses Provoke, which yanks them to the top of the boss's enmity list with a fat bonus lead (worth roughly a 4,000-potency hit's worth of hate, as of patch 6.2). That alone puts them in front, but only barely.
2. Then the old main tank uses Shirk on the new tank. Shirk hands 25% of your enmity over to a party member, so the old tank dumps a big chunk of hate onto the new one. Now the new tank has a comfortable, sticky lead, and the swap actually holds.

After that, the roles flip, and you wait for the next swap window to run it back. Shirk sits on a 120-second cooldown, so you can't lean on it constantly. The timing has to line up with the fight's busters, usually right after the previous tank's debuff stacks fall off, or timed so the new tank eats the next buster.

Raid-tank habits that catch people out

• Keep your stance on even when you're the off-tank. You want a strong second-place enmity so that if the main tank dies, the boss snaps to you instead of a DPS.
• Shirk only works on party members. In 24-player alliance raids, the other tanks are in different parties, so you can't Shirk them. Swaps there lean more on raw Provoke and raw damage.
• Don't tunnel the boss as off-tank. You've got bandwidth to watch mechanics, pick up adds, and step into a shared buster. Use it.

The invulnerability cooldowns (your panic buttons)

Every tank gets one big "don't die" button, and they all last 10 seconds now. They work differently, though, and they sit on different cooldowns.

| Job | Invuln | Cooldown | How it works | |---|---|---|---| | Paladin | Hallowed Ground | 7 min (420s) | True invuln; takes zero damage, no healing needed | | Warrior | Holmgang | 4 min (240s) | HP can't drop below 1; shortest cooldown of the four | | Dark Knight | Living Dead | 5 min (300s) | Two phases; must be healed for full max HP or you drop | | Gunbreaker | Superbolide | 6 min (360s) | Drops HP to 50%, then impervious |

A little more on each, since the differences matter.

Hallowed Ground is the cleanest: zero damage for 10 seconds, no healing needed. The catch is the long cooldown, so use it early in a long fight and it can sometimes come back before the end.

Holmgang doesn't stop damage. It just won't let your HP drop below 1 for 10 seconds. That short cooldown makes it super flexible. (One quirk: it needs a target in range to cast, so many Warriors use a self-target macro.)

Living Dead is the fiddly one. If your HP hits 0 you drop into Walking Dead for 10 seconds, where HP can't fall below 1, but to survive you must be healed for your full max HP during that window. The saving grace is that your own weaponskills self-heal now, so a Dark Knight who keeps swinging clears a big chunk of the requirement alone.

Superbolide renders you impervious for 10 seconds. As of patch 7.1 it drops you to 50% HP instead of 1, so healers can top you off during the window. That old "stuck at 1 HP" headache is gone.

These are your last line of defense when a buster is coming and your other cooldowns are spent, or when a pull goes sideways and you need 10 seconds of breathing room. Don't hoard them so hard that you never press them. A good invuln used early can often come back before the fight ends, and a dead tank helps nobody.

Nail the Provoke-then-Shirk rhythm, keep your stance on, and the two of you can pass a boss back and forth all fight without anyone taking a hit they shouldn't.