I tried tanking for the first time. I was so stressful. I got lost constantly. Having to know the fights, having to know the route, having to look out for everyone else.
How do you tanks do it?!
I admit I’d like to try tanking, but I think maybe healing is where I need to be.
Theyre a special breed for sure. I would cry 
Never PUG. Find a guild to your liking. Supplement it with communities and your own friends list. Pre made groups come with comms. You can practice with a couple of followers dungeons but I suggest just keep running reg dungeons. You will learn. As I said, pre made will make the whole thing much better. PUG’ing is for fools.
Reps. If I’m not sure about my route, I’ll do it first with a group of friends who know exactly what experience to expect (learning tank). If friends aren’t available when I want to plan my route, I’ll use a follower dungeon - not to go fast, but to pause with map open, noticing how packs look as I see them the way I will see them in the instance. I learn what social aggros what and think about how to pull smoothly. Then I try it with a real group. However that goes, I mentally note the rough parts so I can go back to practice those some more.
MDT (Mythic Dungeon Tools) is a great help. Also the Threechest-dot-io website where you can see the routes other groups are using. But I still like to go through in slow motion on follower dungeon to learn how it will look in-game. The more you get your route committed to muscle memory, the more mental bandwidth you’ll have free to think about other things.
I prefer having a regular group, but sometimes friends flake on you and you either drop out or pug till you meet new friends. All through DF and first two seasons of TWW, I had a regular group. This season I’m back to pugging.
Yeah, I hate pugs and their creepy little squished faces.
First of all, try and find some friends to run with, especially if they can give you tips. If you can’t do that and have to pug, then just tell your groups right off the bat that you are new to tanking and learning and would appreciate any patience and support.
That will go a long way to relieving a lot of the stress of learning to tank and you will be surprised how willing to humor you people can be if you tell them you’re learning from the start.
Secondly, you just have to keep doing it. Keep running Mos and low keys to get a feel for the dungeons. You will make mistakes and you won’t know what you’re doing at first, but before long you will start to pick things up.
And if you ever have any specific questions, go somewhere like the forum or class discords to ask about how you should tank specific fights and things like that.
This feels like bait.
Awww… Most pugs are fine. People are people, and the Pareto Principal applies. It’s always 20% of the people causing 80% of the drama. Most pugs are chill, even when things go wrong. But 1 in 5 may have issues. Definitely have to develop thick skin (Thick Hide) if you want to tank for pugs!
lol ~ I’ve been told I was fail tank and goat tank in back-to-back runs. I do play better some runs than others - I screw up sometimes, but also have my moments to feel good about - but in truth I am neither fail nor goat, just average player doing the best I can.
Is that a nibble? 
Tanks are the de facto leaders of dungeon content.
For that reason more than anything else, it’s an awful role to learn in the middle of an expansion. The start of a patch is preferrable to the middle of a patch in the middle of an expansion, but even that isn’t the best place to be, since people pick up some initial experience with normals/heroics/mythic0 in the pre-season and into Season 1 that will carry over into whenever they end up in the M+ Rotation.
People will put up with a tank learning the dungeons when everyone else is learning the dungeons, but they’re unlikely to be happy about it when a tank is screwing up their cooldowns by pulling weird packs and baby pulls 5 weeks into the season when routes and such are pretty universally established.
Hell, even if your route is non standard people won’t yell TOO much if you’re still combining packs and not taking time between pulls.
But to end up with a feasible non standard route you need to be doing those runs week 1 to figure out what works for you so you don’t appear to be meandering around to a group expecting the same thing they’ve seen the last 17 times they’ve run this dungeon.
Anyway, point being, Tanking has too much attached to it to just start whenever and wing it. If doing it now didn’t work out and you don’t have friends / guildies to surround yourself with while you learn, try it again week 0 of Midnight, when EVERYONE is learning.
And I do mean week 0.
“the start of an expansion” means the start, not 2 and a half weeks in.
Expectations move fast. starting to push endgame content at week 3 might not seem like a big deal to a more casual player but if you’re wanting the benefit of learning in an environment where people will accept that you are learning, week 3 is too late. Week 2 is less than ideal. You start right away.
We play a game where efficiency matters way more than it should to a whole lot of players, and you have to keep up with that if you want to have a good time with pugs.
Tanks aren’t going to magically get better routes as time goes on. So they keep failing due to routes until they have enough motivation to improve.
As a tank, you only see your route, not anyone else’s unless you do research.
Some people looked at ancient routes and never updated them even if the instance changed.
I spend as much time tweaking routes as running keys, especially early in season. I figure it’s time well-invested. Sometimes it’s just a matter of checking Threechest to see if anyone else is trying this pull combination I’m considering. Sometimes it’s whispering top DPS from last group to see what he liked, and what he wished I’d done differently. Sometimes I whisper healer to see how we lost someone in that big pull, and was it avoidable or was that pull just too much? And often I go to my class discord to see what they’re doing, or ask their thoughts on a change I’m considering.
Why not copy top route and just play it until you run into an issue somewheres too frequently?
You’re unlikely to innovate into something truly better.
(I think I’m going to run into the priory problem again at some point.) So many tanks do miniboss + knight still, and that is… a relatively high chance to brick.
Because I am not Kira, and don’t have Kira’s organized team to support me.
eh, it just comes with practice like everything else.
When you’re first starting out you don’t >have< to know some perfect route. You just go to the bosses and kill stuff along the way. If you’re unsure of % before you leave an area that’s hard to get back to, just say something. People will ping a pack you should probably pull, or a direction you should go.
While you’re healing, it also helps to look around and see what’s being pulled, what the dangerous casts are, etc, and you can go back and try tanking again with more experience.
Try an easier one?
It comes across as changing the strategy because your team made a mistake in executing it.
(Not arguing that copying mdi routes is the best.)
Run with friends and ask them where to go, or have the route on a second monitor and use a PuG friendly route.
Exactly. We’re not really disagreeing here. Threechest shows you the basic pug routes suggested by Quazii, Tactyks, and Yoda, then it lets you see the routes used by top 10 runs for that instance. The basic routes are often too safe to time keys past 10, and the top routes require really good players with coordinated comms. So I’m often working out something in-between, testing that, asking what VDH discord thinks, and adjusting it based on feedback after runs.
I drink a lot