Tank the style your team needs. Personaly i run into the group, do some power to activate gauntlet and taunt the surrounding mobs whom i missed.
In case of a bad spot or closeby group, i do a quick taunt from distance and run behind a ledge. I do let the team know they have to backup a bit due possible aggro.
Taunting from distance can create some nasty situations, if you are capable (as in strong enough) to jump in and take some big beating from the mobs, thats imho the nicest way to go (note nicest, there isnt a 'best way'). Likewise having a aoe blaster that tend to blast his endurance away before you even reached the mobs, tricky moments where you need to keep big eye for the full overview. Wich mobs can they handle, wich you should pick, where to run for best mobbing... Dont expect to tank the whole group instantly, specialy lower lvl all AT's can survive a 1-2 minions pretty ok. Focus bosses, lts and special mobs (void, sapper, earth casters) and known their effects (aoe's, sleep, holds etc).
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Aye, it will depend on the teams and the enemies how you play.
On a team full of scrappers, you will likely play as a scrapper and wade through mobs, gauntlet works quite sparklingly in this kind of situation.
In a blaster heavy team, you may need to use taunt a lot more. I tend not to taunt through people, because I'm worried that they will have shifted target before I get to them.
Taunt-pulling... That is something I rarely do with my Inv.
Most of the time it's much a case of select the closest ones, sprint in, leap over them to the back of the mob, then taunt the front ones back. This puts you in a great position of watching your team, and being able to quickly locate mobs that are moving back to them without watching health bars.
One great thing about invulnerability is being able to jump into a big mob, and seeing none of them hit you, because your Invincibility has maxed out it's little defence buff. It's not really comparable to something like Ice or Stone, but it's a good buff. And those that get through, they don't hurt that much at all really. That's why we're known as Invulnerable heh 
Superstrength has better gauntlet than Axe, if I understand it correctly. Quicker attacks, more AoEs, and huge damage (with Rage). Of course Rage does have the huge downside of leaving your teams in the lurch when it runs out 
. Or so I understand it.
Playing defensively is good. On a team based tank I find that you shouldn't need a great deal of attacks. Hell on a lot of teams I very rarely get to attack, I'm just taunting and watching, with the odd cone attack for gauntletting.
You will adapt your own playstyle 
My first main was a Controller, Ill/Emp. I didn't find it a huge transition. I actually find blasters and scrappers hardest to enjoy...
Good luck, and enjoy!
All good advice there and agree with it all. At your level you need to be aware of how much aggro you can safely take. Jumping straight in is the best tactic but could well cause a few faceplants for you when you take the alpha. See who is on your team and get a plan (have the empath fort you and focus heals on you, advise the Rad to lay debuffs as soon as you start running in etc..). Should help you survive the initial attacks. As you level up you won't need as much support and can just jump in when you like.
You'll soon find what works and pick up your own playstyle. But yeah, first in and last out is the way a tank should be. 
If you have taunt you are currently in the top 10% of all tanks so I wouldnt worry to much.
I was in a lvl 35 team yesterday. 6 man team, 3 tanks. None of the tanks had taunt. The non tanks face planted on a regular basis. And both I and the other two non-tanks were pretty experienced players.
Currently, the standard of tanking is so low, that you will probably shine. Its not hard to shine in manure.
Ona more serious note, there are two basic strategies:
1. Jump into the centre of the mob, hit an AoE attack, and taunt anymobs you have missed.
2. Get rest of team out of line of sight, taunt, run round the corner, wait for them to all pile into your AoE taunt in a lovely cluster.
If you have a debuffer (rad/dark particularly), playing tactic 2 and getting all mob debuffed is practically god mode.
The basic goal of a tank is probably to secure as much enemy aggro as you can handle. Ideally, that should be all of it, but that's not always possible or wise.
How you go about this depends on your powers. Do you have a "taunt aura", something like Chilling Embrace, Invincibility, Icicles, etc.?
If you do, then foes in close proximity will almost always have no choice but to attack you. So jumping right into the middle of a group of bad guys is a strong plan. If you don't, then it's more important to use area effect moves early, as well as simple attacks, to get enemy attention.
Taunt is something wonderful. It's a tool that lets you get the attention that your physical presence alone won't allow. I find it works best pre-emptively - ie, don't look at taunt as something you can use to pull an opponent off a flagging team-mate, but rather something you can use to prevent your team-mates ever getting attacked in the first place. Jump in the middle of a group, hold them with your taunt aura, and taunt the middle enemy of any foes outside that immediate area. That should lock down many encounters all by itself. It's easier to control the aggro once you have the aggro.
On the other hand, there are times and places where you will need to pull an enemy off a friend. Then you've got to use your judgement - snap judgement - to determine how to do it. If you know what's attacking him and it's close by, sometimes a little movement is all it takes. Put your friend and his foe under the umbrella of your taunt aura. Othertimes an attack will get the job done - particularly if you don't have a taunt aura, make use of gauntlet from punching. Many attacks execute faster than taunt does.
If there's a big distance between you and your friend's attacker, but you've identified the enemy in question, then taunting directly is usually best. It takes a moment or two but it lasts a while and it's effective.
If you see a friend's health drop but you can't ID the problem immediately, then assist taunting is usually worth a try. Moreso if your friend is a blaster or the like than if he's a defender or something. It won't always work but it's a strong fallback.
Tanks do well when they keep a good overview of the fight, and when they lead the way. If you can handle the foes you face without undue difficulty, you should ask the team to let you lead the way, pick the mobs to engage, and back your plays. There's nothing worse than playing as a tank and not knowing where the aggro's going to be coming from. If your group opens up fights on two fronts too far apart, there's not much you can do to bring the fight under control.
Multiples tankers work best together by staying apart. If two tanks are standing close by each other, they're competing for the same mobs' attention. They should try to spread out so their presences are working on different sections of an encounter. If you do this you can lock down mobs much more easily. Get it right and you may not need to Taunt, which leads to more attacking.
If you're in over your head, don't overdo it. If you can't handle the aggro of an entire mob, don't take it on - try to isolate part of a group, stick to the edge of an encounter, and beat a more manageable chunk of the overall force.
Most of all, have fun. Tanking is a big job, don't let it weigh you down.
Nice post Upsurge
Tanking, for me at least, is a tale of 'beat stuff up till it gets [censored] + tries to hit you back', taunt the stuff what doesn't hit you, then run around beating things which turn away'
(provided you are ofc tank enough to take it )
Camara movement is also necessary imo to help make sure everyone is poking you, even if there's a troller running PA, better safe than sorry. I supplement this tactic by keeping an eye on the magic green bars on the left, incase someone out of my Line of Sight is getting ganked.
If all is well, I keep those around me [censored] off by hitting them more, most of the time attacking the same target as the scrapper/blapper, incase they steal my beloved agro 
, although obviously if you have a taunt aura this will be less important.
This is of course a tanking tactic for when you are so amazingly good ata taking damage that any number of mobs that you will encounter in most teamed missions will make you laugh so loud you become winded and regret you laughed, thus regretting you are so [censored] good
Oh, and I also rely on my RoXXor build
@Rooks
"You should come inside the box... Then you'll know what I mean."
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Oh, and I also rely on my RoXXor build
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Ofc
thePhilosopher Martial Arts/Regen/Fire Scrapper
theRegulator Empathy/Energy/Soul Defender
Total Inertia Ice Blast/Kinetics/Psy Corruptor
Total Inferno Ice Blast/Thermal/Leviathan Corruptor
I am only at lvl 26, so I am not an expert Tank (this is my first Tank alt). My observations are:-
1) communicate with your team;
2) be aware of the composition of the team and the likely weaknesses/strengths inherent in the group;
3) in most situations I use my AOE taunt (Mud Pots) and aim to get centre/farside of the mob while the team waits. I secure the mobs aggro then PBAOE with combustion - which is the teams signal to open up. I then use taunt to draw any loose mobs to me;
4) corner pulling is really useful;
5) the biggest problems I have are: (a) the blasters opening up too soon; (b) mob scatter due to AOE rains; (c) holds going off before mobs are gathered. Talk to the team (see (1).
Those are my observations. I love tanking and get great satisfaction from working with them - I think they enjoy it more too as a result.
FB
(edited for grammar)
I'm new to tanking, lev 7 at the moment. I agree that there's a real satisfaction knowing that you are doing something that benefits the team as a whole. Another plus is that having being used to playing blasters, controllers and defenders I feel pretty tough.
Battleflag
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I am only at lvl 26, so I am not an expert Tank (this is my first Tank alt). My observations are:-
1) communicate with your team;
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This is good, it's nice to have a few binds and macros to tell them common things. [ I'm bringing them here stay out of sight ]
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2) be aware of the composition of the team and the likely weaknesses/strengths inherent in the group;
3) in most situations I use my AOE taunt (Mud Pots) and aim to get centre/farside of the mob while the team waits. I secure the mobs aggro then PBAOE with combustion - which is the teams signal to open up. I then use taunt to draw any loose mobs to me;
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Never underestimate the power of Combustion as an aggro consolidation tool. It has a nice AoE, larger than your taunt Aura and does DoT damage this annoys the enemies. Foot Stomp from SS is also good, doing Knockdown instead of DoT, but it is available at lvl 38 rather than level 4.
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4) corner pulling is really useful;
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Corner pulling is the safest way to tank. It is also the best way to get your team's AoE attacks to be devastating. It ensures that you can keep the enemies in your Aura. My tanking playstyle is very corner-pull heavy.
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5) the biggest problems I have are: (a) the blasters opening up too soon; (b) mob scatter due to AOE rains; (c) holds going off before mobs are gathered. Talk to the team (see (1).
Those are my observations. I love tanking and get great satisfaction from working with he team - I think they enjoy it more too as a result.
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One thing that I've noticed is that some tanks tend to herd a bit too much. IMO the tank should not be away from the team herding for much longer than 15-30 seconds or he is wasting everyones time.
Unless there are 2 really close spawns I would just get one spawn and make sure they all see me, then duck round a corner. If I'm soloing or duoing I might get more than one.
If you try and gather up 3-4 spawns on a large team you end up with so many stragglers, clearing them up afterwards takes longer. Also you can only have 17 enemies attacking you and can probably only keep 10-15 taunted ( aura is 10 closest, + taunt is 5 ranged and punchvoke is 5 but they are probably in your aura ).
@Unthing ... Mostly on Union.
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One thing that I've noticed is that some tanks tend to herd a bit too much. IMO the tank should not be away from the team herding for much longer than 15-30 seconds or he is wasting everyones time.
Unless there are 2 really close spawns I would just get one spawn and make sure they all see me, then duck round a corner. If I'm soloing or duoing I might get more than one.
If you try and gather up 3-4 spawns on a large team you end up with so many stragglers, clearing them up afterwards takes longer. Also you can only have 17 enemies attacking you and can probably only keep 10-15 taunted ( aura is 10 closest, + taunt is 5 ranged and punchvoke is 5 but they are probably in your aura ).
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Yes, I agree with that- too much herding means too much aggro and a face plant at my level. Been there, learnt that lesson!
FB
I agree with above posts.
Here's a few tidbits gained from my experiences of tanking;
a) Corner pulling. Especially useful when there is a room with more than one spawn closely together. The running in tactic here is likely to aggro both groups, so I'd advise against it in this instance. What I do, is to taunt a boss in one of the groups and run around a corner, or behind an obstacle - such as a crate, box, pillar etc - and wait.
b) Sometimes there will be single spawns and it is viable to jump into the centre of this mob and let your taunt aura + taunt keep the mobs focused on you.
c) A tip when fighting mobs like Nemasis - face the mob group away from the rest of the team and encourage the team, espcially the more vulnerable members, to attack from behind.
d) Always be aware of your aggro limit. There's no point surviving if the rest of your team has not. Aggro only what you and your team can handle, together.
All this depends on your playstyle and of course, you could decide to pursue a completely different approach to tanking. All of these approaches are viable and useful in different ways.
The main thing is to enjoy your experience
Hi, I'm just a beginning tanker, but I think my playstyle is gimped.
As first characters I played a controller and rad/rad defender (both to their 20s) which required a defensive playstyle. Not getting the aggro and relying on teammates. After that I rolled Broadsword/SR scrapper and he is now in his 30s and with him I can play more and more aggressive.
With my tanker though (now 15) I feel like I'm not tanking enough. Should I run in front and jump in the group, or use taunt to get the attention of any foes? Or are the any other things to consider? And what is a good way to taunt? Taunt every enemy not near you, or taunt "through" teammates?
I have the feeling I still play too defensive, the playstyle I picked up with my first two toons.
Any advice.
ps. I try to play in groups alot, they are mostly pickup groups.
My tanker is invul/SS (Cor Leone)