Something people ask a lot about specifically, is
how to use Cooldowns as a Tank. How should they use their skills together? What shouldn't they
use together? So let's talk about this finally, and maybe shed some light on the subject. In
the meantime, please rate, comment, subscribe, follow me on socials, check my Twitch
streams, and maybe support me on Patreon. Let's get right into the topic at hand.
And a quick note, this video takes place in Endwalker. If any skills changed or were
removed and it no longer works this way, focus on the lesson I am using that skill
to teach rather than the fact that specific skilll doesn't work for the lesson.
For those newer, let's establish the base concept. Cooldowns when talking about
Tanks tends to specifically mean Defensive Cooldowns. Abilities with long cooldown timers
that augment your defense in some way, as opposed to Cooldowns that increase your offensive
powers. This is also referred to as Mitigation. You are Mitigating damage with Cooldowns. Despite
Cooldowns being able to mean offensive skills and Mitigation is purely defensive, they often are
used interchangibly. I will be doing so within this video too. This might be confusing at first,
but the sooner you get used to it, the better.
Cooldowns can have a number of different
ways of helping you. An effect on the enemy, buffing your stats, or just outright reducing
damage. What matters is they're increasing your survivial, and you want to be using
them often and effectively. Used early and often. But there is such a thing as too early.
You want to be mitigating damage before you take it, but you also don't want to be wasting time
on the timer. If anything, timing is probably the most complex thing about mitigations. It
even differs between trash mobs and bosses.
In trash, you want to be using cooldowns just
after you start taking damage but before you take a lot of it. That is, unless you're pulling
large groups as most Tanks tend to end up doing. You want to be using your Cooldowns once you
stop running and grabbing more enemies. You hit the button when you've gathered all
the enemies, but hopefully right before all of them hit you at the exact same time.
It's a small, specific window, but you want to be aiming for this window, then making sure you
always have something running until the herd thins out. Correct spacing of cooldowns is the other
difficult part of mitigating. When pulling large groups, you're trying to juggle doing DPS, moving
out of avoidable AoEs, and then still needing to watch your timers to make sure you're not sitting
around without any defensive buffs running.
Often in both trash and bosses, you're also trying
to pair Cooldowns and not just using one unless its a specifically very strong cooldown.
Several cooldowns are on the weaker end and will work better together than alone.
I think when it comes to pairing cooldowns, people are often over thinking things. That
they're missing some singular optimal cooldown usage or such, and that all other options
are outright bad. But there's many possible pairings of cooldowns that work, and basically
every pairing is valid in some way. That even includes your 30% mitigation with another.
This also includes Arm's Length. This works as a defensive cooldown on trash mobs. While it
only lasts for a few seconds, the Slow effect is much longer once applied and is damage reduction.
Slow is an attack speed buff, not movement speed. It's harder to quantify than a flat reduction
though. It might be less effective in pulls with magic enemies thrown in or such, and better in
others due to lengthy cast locks for enemies.
DPS can also make use of this. If
for whatever reason the tank dies, hit Arm's Length and you might survive longer!
The worry with stacking Cooldowns is not wanting to use everything at once. You'll have maybe 20
seconds of being near invincible and then a minute of being a wet piece of paper. Stacking this much
also makes each additional Mitigation weaker. To properly show this, we need to use Math.
Here we have Warrior. Vengeance is a 30% Mitigation. Rampart is a 20% Mitigation. Together,
that should reduce 50% of all damage that comes to you, right? Wrong, it actually will reduce
44% of all damage. The same reason you want to use all Offensive buffs at the same time
in Openers, we want to avoid doing it for Defensive Buffs. Cooldowns are multiplicative.
Let's say you have 10,000 HP and take a hit of 10,000 damage. Apply Vengeance and reduce this by
30%. That will reduce the attack to 7,000 damage. Now apply Rampart. Reducing 7,000 by 20% will
bring it down to 5,600. Now that's 20% of 7,000, not 10,000. It reduced damage by 1,400. That is
only 14% of that original value of 10,000.
Effectively, Rampart was only a 14% mitigation.
And stacking more makes each additional Cooldown even less powerful. This is diminishing returns.
At least, if it directly effects damage values.
Let's take Thrill of Battle. That increases
your HP by 20% for the duration. So with 10,000 HP, it is essentially a 2,000 damage
mitigation on any one singular attack. But regardless of how many other cooldowns you use,
you're reducing damage by 2,000. No matter what, it is a reduction of 20% of your max HP. At that
point the worry becomes not needing that extra HP, and also the fact that Thrill of Battle also
increases healing you receive. Healing you for the duration becomes far easier.
But what this all really boils down to is that point about all options being valid in some
way. There's a ton of factors that you should be accounting for. There is no one right answer,
because there is no one singular Dungeon, Trial, or Raid. Every Duty will have different specifics
you want to worry about if you want to use things to their maximum effect. How strong or weak is
your party? How strong or weak is the enemy pack you're fighting? Is there another one right after
this or is that group not worth mentioning?
If your party is weak, you want to stack
cooldowns even less, because the fight will be longer. Stacking cooldowns makes healing you
easier for the duration, but if the fight takes a whole minute before enemies start dying, you
need to space out cooldowns to last that long, or become paper and just die. Offload some of the
burden onto your healer, since they have their own set of Healing and Defensive Cooldowns too.
If you burn everything too quickly, the burden becomes the healer's alone anyway. So spread
out the burden by spreading your cooldowns.
If your party is strong, the opposite is true. If
you plan to use three cooldowns for this specific pull on an average run, you will use them all
much closer together and overlapping instead of spaced out. You don't need to spread your
cooldowns because the enemies will die before you need a second round of them. And if it's the
last group of enemies before a long walk to the next boss, no sense holding onto stuff.
As long as you are taking into account the diminishing returns of stacking cooldowns, most
every use of your cooldowns is valid. The issue isn't the complexity of what cooldowns to pair
together, it's what your party is like. Smart cooldown usage is a good skill to learn, but
the part people are missing is that it's not the Cooldowns that are the real issue.
But that's what we're here to discuss and learning when a party is doing well is mostly
something you just have to get a feel for. So let's move onto more exceptions to the rules.
Sticking with Warrior. Warrior has Raw Intuition starting at level 56. And as everyone knows at
this point in Endwalker. Raw Intuition is-
When it comes to trash pulls, Warrior
shouldn't use basically any cooldowns beyond Raw Intuition until after Raw Intuition
has been used. Get to like, 50% Health, pop it, then instantly heal back to maximum. Then maybe
pop Vengeance for the Healer to actually take over Healing. At least until Raw Intuition comes off
cooldown in 25 seconds and you use it again.
Looking at Dark Knight, we have The Blackest
Night. You basically want to use this off cooldown, every 15 seconds, regardless of what
other cooldowns you have running. The difficulty with it has always been not accidentally spending
all your MP and not being able to use it to begin with. 25% of your HP is a flat 25% of whatever
your HP is, and the cooldown is so short.
Paladin and Gunbreaker also have these short,
super spammable cooldowns, but these you actually want to take into account as normal
cooldowns. Their effects aren't so completely specific that you put all your focus on it.
When we talk about Trials and Raids though, things obviously start getting different. As
said, we want to be using cooldowns before we take damage. But the damage we're mostly worried
about in this content is Tank Busters. Typically these have a cast bar and do very heavy damage
even to you as a tank. You might need three or even more cooldowns to survive in Savage Raids.
Once again, what cooldowns are good here and what you should be pairing here depends massively,
but this time based entirely on the fight itself. Pacing of a fight really changes
how cooldowns work. If the boss only uses Tankbusters at a very rare and slow pace, you
can dump most everything for the buster and use the rest for reducing Auto Attack damage.
In Savage, Auto attacks are their own hell.
Otherwise, some fights have extremely
common tank busters. Cooldown planning can be pretty tight. But it will be unique
to this fight, and this fight alone. Another fight with common busters might only spam the
busters in a specific point in the fight, with the rest of the fight beind normally paced.
What Cooldowns do you use in Savage? You have to learn fight to fight. But otherwise,
you're definitely using your short, spammable cooldown for every Buster
along with some of the stronger stuff. But depending on the fight you have to ration
those stronger things across every buster.
It's good to come in with a basic plan of
cooldowns you will use before going into any new Duty. Plan to use this on pull one, this on
pull two, or this for tank buster one and buster two. But you need to also expect to have to scrap
the plan and do everything different from now on. A basic cooldown rotation is commendable, but
more often than not will need to be entirely adjusted because the plan doesn't fit.
But of course, there's also the one Cooldown we've not mentioned. Your Ultimate Cooldown.
Superbolide, Holmgang, Hallowed Ground, and Living Dead. These are something
you use in emergencies and emergencies only... is what you say if you don't know
how to tank. You should be using these.
In Savage raids especially, these get used all
the time for either completely cheesing some mechanics, or dedicated for Tank Busters. A tank
buster Stack marker? Solo take it with using your Ultimate. Stupidly strong Buster that requires
you to use four or five cooldowns? Ultimate.
The power of these skills cannot be understated.
That includes in dungeon runs. Plan your cooldown usage around your Ultimates, not just
your normal cooldowns. While Paladin is kinda screwed with having a seven minute
cooldown, most dungeon runs can fit in even two uses of Hallowed. That's two spots of ten
seconds where you do not take any damage.
Or let's go back to Warrior.
Remember how Raw Intuition-
Well start with Holmgang! Instead of hitting Raw
Intuition, let your HP drop low, hit Holmgang, then when Holmgang has three or four
seconds left, pop Raw Intutition and-
And when you can do this multiple times in
a dungeon run, you can even make enemies die faster. The healer doesn't need to heal
you at first, meaning they can do extra damage for free. Or they're a White Mage
and will spam Holy afterwards for another six seconds of not taking any damage.
The only thing is that you should be telling your healer your plan ahead of time. Don't
just run in with your plan without telling them. They're gonna assume you're an idiot
who isn't using cooldowns otherwise. Make a macro of some kind, or stop moving to type
out your plan quick. Give them a heads up, then get to being invincible! Though there
is no guarantee that they actually listen to your plan, and just spam heals anyway.
My motto has been for a long time that you should prevent emergencies before they happen.
Saving tools until it's already too late is not going to help. And then if emergencies never
happen to begin with, you just wasted a tool by never touching it. Once you start using
all your tools instead of just most of them, you'll see a huge improvement in your
ability to pair things in more ways.
Which just loops back to the beginning.
There's no real invalid way to pair stuff, because using everything gives you a ton
of leeway to do things in so many different ways, and in flexible ways.
Just remember, don't do this.
Unless it's an Ultimate raid. Then you probably
have to do something like this at some point.
Thanks for watching this little video on
how to use cooldowns as a Tank. Please do the rate and sub and all that, and feel
free to suggest further topics to discuss. This is one that was commonly asked for
that I didn't feel was needed, but well, here we are. I hope it did shed some
light on why I didn't really think it was needed. It's both simpler, and more
complex than people tend to think.
Take care and may the power of an a
Nidhoggs lay waste to your enemies.
