Shining Slash: Biting off more than you can chew

Part 3

This column will aim to help new players or people not acquainted with the fine arts of Tanking to gain an understanding of the mechanics, ideas and application of a Tanking class.

If you've ever attacked a mob in an MMO, you've experienced Aggro firsthand. As the gargantuan snake monster bore down on your avatar, the thought that it would be nice if you could kill it without it attacking you likely passed through your mind. Tanks are there to scratch that itch.
The most important role a Tank fills for their group is, of course, letting the group do its thing without the big bad guy chop them into bite sized pieces.

It is unfortunate then that many players, even as they attempt the highest tier of PvE content available to them in a game, fail to understand the basic principles behind Aggro.
When a damage dealing player prides themselves on never falling for a boss's tricks, and never hurting their raid's performance, but regularly gets the attention of said boss, they have failed to understand a thing that they had supposedly had to learn to get to that point.

The person who "has Aggro" is generally the person with the most Enmity. Enmity is a representation of how much of a threat you are to the mob in question. When you attack a mob, its Enmity towards you increases by an amount presumably equal to the amount of damage you did in that hit. Similarly, Healing will generate Enmity. It is important to note that Enmity is invisible in Aion. You have to take a guess as to how close you are to pulling Aggro off of the Tank (I would advise playing regularly with the same Tank, to get a feel for how much Enmity they generate, so you know what you can pull off without killing yourself). While some classes have defensive abilities that reduce a mob's total Enmity against them (permanently or temporarily), others have abilities that generate more Enmity than usual.

In Aion, the Templar class has, inside the first ten levels, access to four abilities which are designed to help them hold Aggro. These abilities all generate high levels of Enmity (one is passive, and increases Enmity done by all attacks!). By using these abilities as soon as possible and as regularly as possible a Templar will generate enough Enmity to hold Aggro, and keep their group safe.

Of course, it's rarely that simple. If every Tank could just keep Aggro without a worry, it would be unimportant and boring, not to mention far, far too easy. As is immediately apparent, gear plays a large part in Enmity generation. Luck, high damage dealing stats and higher quality gear than their Tank can easily cause a damage dealer to pull Aggro, especially with a Tank they are unfamiliar with.

Most pulls in PvE group content aren't single monsters, either. Pulls of two, three or even more mobs are commonplace. Tanking them all with one Tank can be impractical (multiple spellcasters at opposite sides of a room), impossible (the collective damage output of the monsters vastly outweighs the collective healing output of the group's Healers), and at times merely challenging. Yet most content is designed to be attempted with a single Tank, and so all Tanks must know how to keep Aggro on multiple targets at the same time.

Step one: have the damage dealers all attack the same target

This is usually the most practical way to help keep Aggro controlled. Enmity is not cumulative between players, and so the Tank need only stay ahead of the damage dealer generating the most Enmity. This is vastly, vastly more practical than having the damage dealers attack targets of their choice, which will require the Tank to generate high amounts of Enmity against all targets in a pull, which is, at times, impossible. It is also vital to let the damage dealers know in what order to kill all of the mobs in the pull, not just the first.

Step two: use crowd control

While the Tank is an avatar of crowd control, more direct methods are advisable if the collective damage output of a pull is too much to handle, or if there are simply a vast number of mobs in the pull, regardless of damage output. Assigning damage dealers to CC specified targets by sleeping, entangling, stunning or kiting them (or anything else that comes to mind) can put individual dangerous mobs out of a pull entirely, allowing the group to leave them last.
Unfortunately, as Aion appears to lack an "instant Aggro" button (Taunt in World of Warcraft made me soft!), and as Healing generates Enmity on all targets, including CC'd enemies, the moment that the CC breaks on a target it is likely to run off and pummel the Healer. Immediately apparent solutions include leaving the mob 'til last and kiting it while the Tank builds Enmity, or having the Tank use a non-damaging high Enmity ability (damage often breaks CC, be warned) while Tanking the other mobs. A similarly immediately recognizable flaw is that this means the Tank will generate less Enmity on the main targets as they are using an ability regularly on a CC'd target. This leads me to...

Step three: have the damage dealers hold back

If a Tank has trouble with generating enough Enmity, one quick fix is to have the damage dealers just CC for the first, say, 10 seconds of a fight, giving the Tank ample time to generate Enmity on all necessary targets. Which leads logically to: if you pull Aggro, don't keep attacking the target until the Tank has re-established Aggro.
You'll be signing your own death warrant, and nobody will miss you.

Step four: break up your abilities intelligently

The primary target is going to be the one that the Tank needs to generate the highest Enmity against to hold Aggro, naturally. Thus, the Tank need only generate enough Enmity against all other targets to keep them off of the Healer. As a Tank, figure out how few abilities you can use and still hold Aggro on all secondary targets. Many games use the Tab button to cycle through nearby enemies. This is usable, but unreliable and usually too slow. It also encourages laziness. As a Tank know all your enemies, know which ones to hit when, and target them manually. Thanks to the fact that each attack takes time to occur, clicking on each target in turn is hardly too slow. Be fast, be accurate, be prepared to break off and get a mob back if it goes after the Healer.

Thus, if you take nothing else away from this, remember that Tanking is not a one man job. For a dungeon run to go as smoothly as possible, the entire group must work in concert to that end.

Formal Apology:
That was too long. Oops. I'll likely make this easier on peoples eyes once Aion is in full swing. Videos and the like. Fun for the whole Legion. That and more in depth, specific guides. How to Tank specific dungeons, bosses, pulls. Templar leveling guide.

One last thing, though. As noted, Enmity isn't cumulative between players. One thing to remember while playing Aion is that there are multiple quests that require you to get a mob to follow you to the questgiver. This is supposed to, presumably, teach players that doing more damage to mobs gets them to chase you further (so higher Enmity means they'll follow you more).

What a few people don't seem to have taken away from this is that, in groups, only one person should ever hit the mob. Anyone else hitting it is wasting everyone's time. They aren't helping, and they're making it more likely that the mob will die before reaching its destination.

Please take that on board.