Guide to Tanking: Advanced Strategies

Make use of social-ness and aggro. The relatively weak power of Hate compared to melee critical attacks means tanks lose aggro fairly quickly on most mobs (depending on your group). Make sure to get the first few hits in as well as the Hate, so that even if the mob does go off on someone else, the mob gives half the damage to you and half on someone else, saving the healer mana.

Building hate on one social mob builds hate on all of them. If two social mobs are near each other, hate one and then attack the other. This builds hate on both the mobs, but more on the one you hated. By attacking the other mob, you start to build more hate on it. Let me explain how this works. When you hate a single, social target, it builds approximately half hate on all social mobs in the area. Scenario 1: you attack the mob you hated. Other people start attacking it, building hate on all the mobs attacking you. One person goes over half your hate power on the other mobs. This sends a signal to all the social mobs to now attack the guy who went over half the hate power. Scenario 2: Attack the additional, non-hated target. Now, you are building hate on the mob which had half the hate power added to its hate value, and DDs in your group have to overcome the full hate power on the mob you originally hated, thus keeping the mobs on you longer.

Make sure to know when to Area of Effect (AoE) hate. If two mobs that are not social are near each other, don't do an AoE hate! In the case that three mobs are near each other, two are not social, but those two are social with the third mob, make sure to still attack the non-social mob first. That way, you have only two attacking you and not three. Then, make sure to attack that doubly social mob before anyone else. When you then attack the mob that's social with the rest, it will then pull the last mob you havn't been fighting one onto you. I'm uncertain if the 'social hate' works here or not, you may have to experiment.

Save AoE hate for dangerous situations, ie, three or more mobs already attacking you. In those situations, one stray mob and you're going to be toast.

You don't have to hate every mob! This is the first mistake of many tanks. Just aggroing a mob by running into it's aggro radius builds a substantial amount of hate. If you do this at about 2 seconds before the mob your group is currently fighting dies, you can get the first couple hits in on the new mob, building even more aggro for yourself. In a catacomb melee party, you can stand in the middle of the room and use hate to pull the mobs to you, reducing the running time and increasing kill speed.

Attempt to always have at least one mob attacking you constantly. Any time moving, waiting, switching targets, or otherwise not attacking a mob is lost experience time. Use the passing of aggro as an advantage: when a mob nears death, pull or otherwise aggro another mob and return to finishing off your current target. This can usually be done with a quick hate, or stepping to the side and getting another mob. A good tank can maximize your party’s XP more efficiently than any other party class in the game.

SKs, as many of you already know, Hex is your best friend. It casts just a little bit slower than Hate, and builds a decent amount of aggro, plus the added side effect of less P. Def to eat through. Plus, if you have the fortune of a melee party, it'll help their HP regen if you have a healer/buffer with Vampiric Rage. At high levels, Lightning Strike can be used to paralyze and disable one mob for two minutes—very useful when you have multiple adds.

Human Tanks, 90% of the time, don’t use Shield Stun on the mob you're currently attacking. Learn to use your stun as an 8 second melee sleep. Use it to stun adds, and it will stay up the whole 8 seconds. This is very helpful when dealing with magic resist, sleep/hold resist mobs. That usually gives you enough time to kill the mob you're currently fighting, thus reducing the number of mobs you have to fight.

Make sure to save Ultimate Defense for especially dire situations. Having a few mobs on you, even four or five, is not a problem as a tank if you have a good shield-defense position. Having a hostile or careless player come by with a room or two of monsters and having them aggro onto you is more of the kind of situation in which you would want to use Ultimate Defense.

Never underestimate the power of Vampiric Rage combined with Soulshots. Even as a tank, the amount you can heal from Vampiric Rage can almost negate the damage you take, especially with full support behind you. Tank shield blocking negates a considerable amount of damage, so always take advantage of it!

Finally, fight with other melee classes. The class that’s able to pull aggro the fastest in parties is usually an archer. A single early crit can pull all aggro away from you as a tank, whereas a crit or two from a Gladiator usually won’t. An all melee party can maximize the use of Vampiric Rage, and never needs to rest for MP, making them some of the most efficient parties in the game.

In addition, Ellyrion Fiallathandriel (Reckless_Knight on the official forums) of Kain has this to say:

”In addition to Glav's tips on tanking, have a chat to whoever is your crowd controller in the party. They may not understand what Glav has posted and will just sleep/root mobs willy nilly and expect you to tank them in the order they were CC'd. Talk to your group, that's the first step in effective tanking. Every group of players will have their perceptions based on experience with tanks they have grouped with. So unless you have regular clan groups you may need to have a quick chat on how you'll be tanking with your group.

Remember that the only obvious thing to a group is your equipment and they will generally make their assumptions on that basis. They will not generally know your exact level, nor your expertise in playing your class.”

Lorak has this to add:

”While tanking if you don't have an official targeter, (most folks just double click assist tank) try to tell your party members to not switch targets until the one they are beating on is dead.”

Area of Effect Tanking

Area of Effect parties (AoE for short) are challenging, risky, and rewarding experience parties. The general idea is for a puller, usually a fast heavy armor class, to gather several mobs at once, and then kill them all at once. There are two main ways of doing it: Polearm tanking, and Hate tanking. Only pure tanks can do Hate tanking, but polearms can be used (to less effect) by anyone.

There are three phases in AoE tanking. The first is the setup, the second is the pull, and the third is the kill.

The Setup

The setup is the easiest part, but often overlooked. First, determine how you wish to pull: Hate or Polearm pulling. Dwarves, Destroyers, and Warlords are your best bet here for polearm pulling, due to their polearm masteries. If you have a pure tank pulling, you will want to do hate pulling. The party should consist of at least one healer, and classes with efficient AoE damage skill and ability: essentially nukers and polearm users. Overlords are useful as well. A good location is also extremely important. Using a corner or other terrain feature to herd the mobs into an appropriate blocking angle helps dramatically.

The main tank is often also the puller, but this is not always the case. Sometimes a party will have a fast DD such as an archer, dagger, Tyrant, or a heavy armor user be the puller for the tank. This has some distinct advantages: the tank is at full health when the mob train arrives and (if the puller is fast) more mobs can be pulled in less time.

The Pull

This is probably the second most dangerous part of the AoE party. The puller must gather mobs for the party to kill without getting killed himself. In Chronicle 4, skill damage can only be applied to 20 mobs at a time, so the puller must make sure to pull less than this. The puller often, but not always, will use HP healing potions, such as Healing Potions, Greater Healing potions, or in the most dire of circumstances, Quick Healing Potions to stay alive.

Pulling enough mobs that the party can kill them all, yet not getting killed on the way back, is extremely important. Pullers need to take care to watch for mobs that disable in any way: a badly-timed slow, stun, sleep, or paralyze from a mob will end can end pull in a heartbeat.

The most dangerous part of the pull is when the puller then returns to the party. After the puller stops moving, the puller will receive a burst of damage from all the mobs catching up to them, and the puller may die. Healers in the party should pay very close attention at this moment, and decide whether or not the puller needs a heal or two to stay alive. Most of the time, they will be fine, because the tank will take over aggro from this point on. Timing is critical at this point. The tank needs to quickly take the aggro, or if the puller is the tank, build aggro, so that the healers can start healing without getting attacked by the mobs in the train.

The Kill

The mobs have arrived. The tank has the mobs. Now it's time to kill. If you are doing polearm parties, the pole-users usually start attacking right away. This builds aggro, and, with Vampiric Rage, helps restore their HP. If your group is Hate tanking, however, while the tank pulls agro with his AoE hate skill, a Sorcerer or Spellsinger in the group casts an AoE sleep on the mobs, giving the healers a breather to fill the tank’s HP up. At this point, the process is simple: hit them all, and kill them fast! Pick up your loot, and repeat.

Advantages Over Traditional Experience

The basic advantage of AoE experience (XP) is twofold: Fast, and cheap. If your XP team gets good at pulling, you can kill more mobs in less time than with traditional one-mob-at-a-time XP. Nukers are not usually efficient in big parties due to their high mana consumption per damage. However, AoE nukes are optimized for killing three or more mobs at a time. So, the more mobs killed at once with an AoE skill, the more efficient the skill gets. Plus, the AoE skills spread out over several mobs save money; soulshots and spiritshot costs are spread out over many mobs at the same time, improving the cost per kill ratio, saving the party money.

The biggest non-material advantage to this kind of XP is that there’s a controlled risk, one that’s very exhilarating. There’s little more that gets your heart beating fast and the adrenaline running than seeing a dozen and a half large, angry, and dangerous creatures heading towards you, then destroying them all, as a team.

Disadvantages over Traditional Experience

There are three big risks to AoE parties: Mobs, Buffs, and Players.

The Mobs part is fairly obvious: if your tank doesn't take enough hate, or your healers start healing too early, or one nuker over-nukes another nuker, a key member of the party will die, and the entire party will die. The best way to counter this problem is to make sure everyone knows their place in the party.

Losing buffs can be one of the worst things that happens to an AoE party. This risk is lessened in Chronicle 4, due to buff timers so you know when you need to rebuff, but it's still very important. A cancel at a bad time or fallen buffs will more often than not lead to the death of one or more party members.

Players. Lineage II is a PvP game, and that means all the time. Players can ruin an AoE party faster than anything else. A silence or cancel to the healer in a clan war, a PKed tank, or the loss of a damage dealer can all spell doom for the party. AoE parties often involve the use of AoE skills, and hostile players can use that to their advantage. A flagged hostile player can move into the kill zone of the enemy. This causes the AoE party to flag when they use their AoE skills, leaving the party vulnerable to PvP. Often, players will only kill one or two key members of the party, leaving the rest of the party to die to mobs in hopes that gear drops. Most AoE parties consider tactics like this most despicable, but the enemies of AoE parties can use this to great advantage.

Wrap-Up

AoE parties are still a fast, fun, but risky way to gain experience. Even with the Chronicle 4 limitation of 20 mobs makes pulling limited, it's still quite rewarding. It allows tank to perform what they do best while giving healers and classes with AoE skills a chance to shine.