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Tanking is a tactic commonly exploited in PvE. It takes advantage of the AI to focus damage on a character with higher defense than the rest of your party. This is done to prevent damage taken by soft targets, like a monk, elementalist or mesmer. A nice second effect, is that in a succesful tanking action, your party healer has only the tank to focus on, making his job a lot easier.
How to tank[]
- Tanking on its most basic level is simple. You should just charge in and attack the melee characters, so they'll stick on you. This will also cause the spellcasters to waste a cast or two on you before they turn to your backline.
- It is best to attack melee characters, as spellcasters aren't limited by range anyway, and melee AI tends to rush back to your "squishy" characters. By stopping them before they get there, you are reducing a large amount of damage to your team.
- Strafing quickly left and right will cause you to body-block multiple enemies, and the resulting stopping of them will cause them to attack and hopefully stick on you.
Extremely High Defense Tanks[]
- For areas with obscene amounts of damage, (for example, some areas in Hard Mode) protective enchantments, stances, or armor boosting skills are used to channel it into 1 character, since pure heals are often too clunky to use to prevent the damage.
Skills[]
- Stoneflesh Aura, Armor of Earth, Stone Striker combined with Mantra of Earth.
- Dolyak Signet, various blocking stances.
- Life Barrier, Life Bond.
- Balthazar's Spirit is a common form of energy management.
Invulnerable Tanks[]
- For areas which can not be tanked normally by just high armor, there are two tanks which are commonly used to deal with the issue of the huge amounts of damage that would normally be taken.
Obsidian Flesh Tank[]
- This build uses a Warrior's high armor and the Elementalist skill Obsidian Flesh to create a spell-immune super-tank of sorts. It uses multiple earth enchantments to boost armor and reduce damage.
- Variants include the E/W DoA Tank and the D/E Obsidian Tank
- All three of these builds, although archived, are still usable as variants to Shadow Form tanks.
Permaform Tank[]
- The Permaform Tank uses the skill Shadow Form to be immune to most sources of damage, thus reducing a lot of the strain normally put on a monk. This build even following many successive nerfs, is still a huge favorite due to this.
Pulling[]
Pulling is a tactic to make sure you don't get overwhelmed by too many monsters at once. Pulling is often done to separate a mob from others in the neighbourhood, or to get a certain mob into a position more favorable to you, like into traps for example.
There are 2 ways to perform a pull.
- The first method, is to let your edge of your aggro bubble go over 1 monster, and then back away from it. The monster you went over with your aggro bubble, and his mob, will become aware of you, and start attacking. By backing away slowly, you can therfore seperate it from its environment. This type of pulling is often done by a tank.
- The second method, which is sometimes more preferred, is to use a long ranged weapon like the longbow, to fire a single shot a the nearest monster of the mob you want to pull. This will also make the mob agro and rush towards you. Again, slowly backing away, makes you able to separate the mob from its normal surroundings. This type of pulling is often done by a ranger, or tank.
When playing with henchmen and/or heroes, you may want to flag them somewhere backwards. You really need to flag your henchmen and/or heroes when pulling with the 2nd method, because when you shoot your first projectile, your henchmen and heroes will rush into the fray, and this might not be what you want. By flagging them distance away from you, when you perform a pull, prevents this most of the time.
- Pulling is the art of holding as much "aggro" as possible.
- Pulling to corners is a common tactic, as enemies are usualy not smart enough to walk around you, and casters tend to move up into the AoE.
- In some cases, running right into the group of casters is a very effective tactic.