After a few hours of FATE grinding I finally got my 2nd class to 50 (PLD). Think I got my defensive hotkeys sorted but I don't really know when the best time to use all of them are. I still find myself just panic mashing a one or two of them whenever I'm low HP.
So I've got a full set of soldiery tank gear but where do you even get a decent weapon if you aren't doing relic. You just run Syrcus over and over again until you're lucky enough to get one of those tomestone drops? Oh well, I guess the garbo Odin sword will have to do for now.
Generally speaking if you are low on HP then you've fucked up and using a cooldown is being too slow. All PLD cooldowns, and the most important aspects of warrior's, are preventive in nature. You could maybe argue otherwise for convalescence(and thril of battle) but that's getting away from the point. The usual idea is, if you see a cast bar on your mob and there's no aoe mark on ground, use a cooldown as you are probably about to get kicked in the balls. Once you've actually beaten the fight, or wiped and seen said kick, you will know ahead of time when your cooldowns will be needed. From there you can break down which cooldowns to use depending on how hard the hit will be or how far apart the next will be (much more important in higher end content because you will run out of cooldowns if you manage them poorly, and will likely die because of it).
I guess I should note all of that is for bosses. For trash it rarely matters unless you are doing huge speed run pulls, in which case you usually pop your strongest stuff first and pray your dps doesn't suck and stuff is dying before you do. If with a WHM who isn't a lazy jerk you can pop hallowed and let them holy things down too.
As for newbie weapon...do relic. Not like the whole line, only crazy and/or bored people do that, I just mean the first stage + maybe zenith if you want. It takes like an hour or two tops if you got the tomes (which isn't very many anymore). That will give you an i80 (or i90 if zenith) which is good enough to get you doing higher level primals for better weapons. If you want to work on cooldown management you can try tanking Titan HM aftwards - most groups won't let you with an i50 weapon (and by let you I mean you will find it physically impossible to keep aggro) but it's a good baby's first boss fight with the table flips. There's no cast bar for them so you gotta anticipate and learn the rotation, which is a skill that will be invaluable on future adventures in tanking.
Assuming you want to tank hard content at least...if your aim is to have a quick roulette queue then ignore all of this and spam flash and refer to second paragraph. Fun fact though: Flash is actually good on Titan HM too, since the blind works (if no jerk SMNs), and you can dodge the table flips like a boss.
this game must have a ton of bards. the last 3 dungeons i did had 2 bards each, wtf?
If I remember right BRD was tied with DRG as most played dps class in the game? So...yeah.
