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What is a tank?

A tank is a character whose job is to take damage to prevent squishy classes from dying basically. A tank stands in melee distance from monsters and his soul job is to make sure he is the one getting hit. Tanks are always full STR, they never have any use for any INT and all their attacks and skills scale from STR. Tanks come in 3 forms here is a list from best to worst.
Warrior / Cleric: The best kind of tank, the subclass doesn’t necessarily matter here; this is just a common example of a standard tank. The cleric subclass is usually there for buffing party members with cleric defence buffs before the party gets started or to res a cleric… it is also useful for soloing and luring.
Warrior / Bard: This is getting more common as people like being able to be lazy and get power levelled up to 100 so I think it is right to address this build. Warrior is obviously your tanking class and Bard is used for speed and that is it.
STR Cleric: I’m not a fan of this class but if you are a rogue cleric and your being told to tank then you have no option, if you would like to know more about how to tank as a rogue cleric then please read below, if you anything other than a rogue cleric then either you are not a tank, you should be playing warrior / cleric or you should be INT.
Lure: This is the other section I will be doing, please see below this guide on a guide on how to lure.

Warrior Tanking
Ok so you are a warrior, this means you are a tank in pve and you are only ever going to tank or lure. As I previously said, your job is to make sure that no one dies. The only people that should ever get hit in a party are the lure and YOU! Sometimes the cleric will get hit but this is due to the high amounts of agro their skills can cause, you should be aware that they should also not be allowed to die. There is a general rule for partying, if anyone dies, it’s the tanks fault. If a tank dies, then it’s a clerics fault (however please do not assume you are invisible you must know your limit)
Ok let’s get onto the good stuff!
Weapon: 1H and shield. Don’t argue with this.


Armor: Usually Heavy Armor or Light Armor

Skills: http://www.rev6.com/tools/skill/eu/?id=134510

HOW TO:
How to tank…



Buffs: You have 4 buffs to get that clear.
Your cleric and lure should have ALL 4 BUFFS! Usually this isn’t the case so I will try to break it down into another option:
Protect: Cleric and the highest damaging wizard in the party
Pain Quota: Cleric and the 2nd person to likely get hit in the party (whichever wizard is being stupid usually)
Fences: Cleric and someone who occasionally gets hit (usually a wizard who can’t stay with the main party all the time)
Screens: Screens are used in 2 cases, either to buff the lure or to buff in an emergency to keep a character alive.
Skins: you shouldn’t use your skins with bless, this is often the largest mistake people make. They should be used when you’re tanking lots of mobs/party giant/giant/party champion or to make it easy, whenever it’s not on cool down.
Vital Increase: This buff should always be active, without question this is as vital to you as life turnover is to a wizard.

AGRO!
This is the main part about tanking and we will only be using 5 skills in this rotation:
- - - - -
Taunting Target – Howling Shout – Daring Berserker – Taunting Target – Cunning Stab – Slash
Repeat this sequence over and over, if you want set it up as 123456…

The only other skills you will need to use are Shield Crush and Sprint assault HOWEVER these should almost never be used; they are used for only 2 things.
1. To disrupt a mob from attacking a INT or the cleric
2. To move towards a new lure to start building agro quickly

Shield crush is used in case number 1 and sprint assault is used in case number 2. THEY SHOULD NEVER BE USED IN REGULAR MOB TANKING.
The other thing to mention is the mob you target should be either the mobs running towards the INT’s or should be cycled, this way you can keep a fair amount of agro an all the mobs.
The exception to this is when attacking party giants, obviously you still want to stop mobs attacking the INTs but direct your skills at the party giant
Whilst putting your agro skills into practise, try to keep still. In fact I like to walk in a little circle to face the mobs away from the party so I can easily see when one turns around to attack the INTs.
As for the amount of mobs you can tank at one time, that depend on your gear and cleric, I’d probably say 5 party mobs are sufficient. This is for many reasons, firstly your own survivability, secondly what your cleric can heal; thirdly there isn’t an aoe that can hit more than 5 mobs anyway.

Your party should look like this

(this image was originally made by RayCrisis thanks for letting me use.... or steal )

If you follow this guide you will be the only one in your party to die… because I haven’t wrote a cleric guide to teach them how to do that job -.-

sweet one nice

That's only true until lv.80 or maybe lv.90.

After that ints can usually tank just fine on their own and the warriors can just drop the monsters on the pt and go for the next lure to increase the exp rate of the pt.

Perhaps it is true that wiz can tank mob on their own, but it is simply inefficient. When you have all the mob stack together in a spot you are taking advantage of all wiz's splash damage and warlock's debuff. Plus warrior are for tanking anyway, and Rouge's luring skill is way faster.

your statement is only true for close to cap, ill explain why....
because a good party can kill mobs 9 lvls higher then them. when you dont have 9 levels left of mobs (like close to cap) then it is sometimes more efficient to use other techniques however STILL keeping these techniques as a basis.

having a warrior switch to cleric to do the clerics job AND aoe tank is fine if you have another warrior in the party that can dish out buffs... then rogue and other warrior can lure for the party. other then that, any aspect of what you said is, as mac said, not as efficient.

i didnt include the "other" examples in the guide because im trying to teach people how to tank... if they are pros that can use other methods of partying with a great exp rate then they probably wont gain anything from this guide as this is all common sense

At Alexandria we never lack monsters actually even with a D12 sun wizard and several D10 som wizards on lv.101 monsters. (we can't go higher up yet, as some of us including me are not yet lv.95, but we are getting there^^) The respawn is just great, so you won't really need a rogue lurer. And due to to the huge ammount of monsters, wizard AoE's usually won't get wasted. There are always 5 monsters in the AoE range. Your point is not valid.

I am not saying that warrior tanking is bad, i did that for around 70-80 myself. Until around 80 it's better to have a warrior for tanking after that it's faster to just drop the monsters on the pt. The basic idea of the role of a warrior doesn't change though. He still has to protect the wizards and use screens in emergency situations.

For beginners it's a good guide though. Just sayin that there are other and in my opinion better options at higher levels. Also with 2 tanks you can take turns in luring. When the first tank gets back to the pt, the other one goes luring. Then there won't be any breaks between lures even with 2 tanks.

Another option would be to have 1 luring tank and another one that takes the monsters over and protects the ints. But the luring tank should keep luring then to make sure, that there are always enough monsters around the pt. With this method there are barely any breaks between lures either.

the main point really is the wizards and bards should never be hit. the warrior buffs shouldnt be their to allow them to tank they are there to protect the wizards and to prevent the cleric from getting raped.

wiz/bard using life control with robe getting hit by a mob 5 lvls higher getting potential killing blows time after time is NOT acceptable...
warriors have:
heavy armor
a shield that BLOCKS attacks and adds more denfence
pure str, more hp.
vital increase to increase hp ever MORE (and to increase agro)
Power Shield passive to increase defence
Blockade passive to get more blocked shots
critical void passive to allow you to go to higher lvl mobs and not get killing blow hits!

these things are there for a reason, yet warriors still assume that wizards are just fine to take hits... yea thats ok at the same lvl mobs if you have a competent cleric but that isnt the point...

Very good guide only. Only thing is that the lurer should be a second warrior, not a rogue! Second warrior means all the people who need them get warrior buffs and personally I think they are better are luring anyway.

But then what will us rogues do? *sad*

You need 1 warrior to Buff the cleric & highest dmg dealer. For luring you can use a chinese, rogue, whoever. Yes extra buffs are nice, but ive been in tons of parties who didnt have 2 warriors and it went fine.

btw, how exactly would a rogue pull if the mobs are not agro? Oo
because auto attacking one at a time would be fail.

Use the Rogue fast shot and also use the one that hits multiple targets at once (can't remember the name). Trust me, rogues can be darn good lurers if played correctly.

Hm, you never noticed, that nearby monsters are also getting aggroed, when you attack a monster while being in a pt?
Just shoot one of them and a whole bunch of monsters should come to you, if they are close enough together (and if they can move).