No longer solely about hitting a taunt button, how can you maximize your tanking ability?

A common question that people ask is, how will tanking work in an action based Role-Playing Game (RPG)? In traditional style MMORPGs, as most of you know, it involves tanks that build threat, hate, enmity, whatever… using their attack and taunt skills. As a result of this, the mob focuses on that player, and in most situations, everyone else is pretty free to do as they please aside from dealing with positional Area-of-Effects (AoEs) or mob adds. TERA does have the traditional aggro and taunt systems, but what about special attack patterns, target switches and projectiles in an action combat system? What can you do beside relying on building and maintaining a numeric value?

Players are able to make use of collision or body blocking, to actually get in the way of attacks, to assist in defending your team. Additionally, due to manual blocking and evasion, you must learn the proper cues and develop reflexes to optimize your damage avoidance, mitigation and positional team defense. Not only do these higher demands on player skill add interesting dynamics to PvE game flow, but it enables a much larger potential for PvP tanking than seen in traditional systems. No longer do you need a pillar to hump (a common arena or battlegrounds tactic from other games which involves getting line-of-sight by repeatedly shuffling around a pillar often just shortened to “pillar humping”) you could use your friendly local lancer.