Is not using tanking stances actually best?

[Nerael]

Personally as someone whom has tanked for years including savage content, you should always have a stance up. Either DPS stance or full on tankmode.

Tank mode for me is to get a good aggro lead or to give the healers some more breathing room.
If i see the healers struggling? Tankmode it is and I will pop an extra cooldown here and there.
Healers are fine? Mana fine? Everyone in the party is up? Full on hamsauce time it is and DPS away.

I haven't touched savage in this tier yet, but previous tier my co-tank simply provoke-shirked and I rarely went into tank stance during pull.
Dungeons? It's dependent on what the healer is capable of.

A good tank should be confident in their own abilities. We are first in the fight and are the shield which keeps the party safe. The sooner a threat is dealt with, the less danger there is to our party.
This means the higher damage we can push out, the shorter an encounter is, the less healers need to heal, the less strain on the entire group. Our first and foremost job is to keep the group safe however. Everything else is extra.

[Dualblade]

It comes down to 2 things really.

1.) How comfortable are you with tanking in the content you are doing? While the extra DPS is good if for whatever reason you don't feel comfortable being in DPS stance while learning whatever content you are doing tank stance will be good, then as you get used to it switch to DPS stance. The more comfortable you get the more you can switch over even if the content is completely new.

2.) How does your group, in paticular the healer, seem to be doing? All the dps you put out won't matter if for whatever reason your actually DPS players aren't doing much on large pulls for example. Meanwhile the biggest reason for why Tanks can do more tanking in DPS stance rather then Tank stance is because of how powerful Healing is, meaning if your healer is not keeping up for whatever reason while you are in DPS stance you should switch over to Tank stance.

[Nedkel]

Depending on the content you are making and the people you are playing with, but realistically speaking.
Most of the times in a content that is not savage and time gated you have to use tank stance in order to keep yourself alive and not fail, this because healer or dps are not competent enough and either healer just forgets to heal, or dps is standing still like a bot receiving damage near to death and need healing or you have a team composition that has almost no AOE damage or the other way your teammates are newbie or playing with one hand on the controller and doesnt care about nothing but to throw the spells aka "20 percintile and less".
Play with the offensive stance and shrink plays comes at the highest levels, at the top content of the game where people actually care to perform good and care to do best dps, because due to the timer they have to, anything below it that you may want to use tank stance most of the times.
If you use offensive stance in the dungeons i guarantee you, you will be called out on it or fail to complete dungeon.
I very often meet a team in which i have to tank stance all the time and use out all my cds when pulling 2 groups of trash mobs, because killing it takes ages or healer have one button on the keyboard to use.
It all depends on the content and people doing this content, you cant say you dont need a tank stance in dungeon, its heresy and bordeline griefing your team, most of the people in pugs are not 80+ percintile, i may be wrong but i guess the median on PUGs is like 30 percintile, im speaking off from my experience i cant pull 3 groups of mobs most of the times.

[Wyndam]

It's kind of a mountain out of a molehill, to be honest. I did the Burn last night with 2 players who were probably minimum item level and at least one of them was new. I was still pulling wall to wall. Outside of bosses I stayed in tank stance the whole time and we cleared to the final boss in 18 minutes. Maybe we could have shaved off a minute or two if I'd been doing more DPS but since the healer was one of the two struggling there were a few pulls where I suspect I'd have gone down. I still feel like we made good time up to that point and honestly if it went much faster I'd be disappointed to be back to sitting around in town bored so soon. The last boss we wiped a couple times because mistakes were being made (by everyone) and the answer was partially to use tank stance and buy the healer a little more breathing room.

[Terkhev]

If you use offensive stance in the dungeons i guarantee you, you will be called out on it or fail to complete dungeon.

On trash pulls tank stance is a reasonable thing to keep on (tho WAR and DRK can do some magic when they go ham), but using tank stance on bosses is just a waste with their damage in 4-mans. And this has nothing to do with percentiles. The team I cleared previous savage tier with was mostly gray-green parses and we still played "meta way". Tank stances are just objectively weak - including boost you are not getting from using DPS stance, tank stance lowers your total damage by 25-30% (too lazy to find and link those calculations, sry). 20% dmg reduction you get stacks multiplicatively with cooldowns, making it worth even less. On top of that, healers have less personal DPS than tanks, so even if you could boost their damage by 20% (it's way less in reality) by using tank stance at the cost of 20% (more in reality) of your damage, it'd still be a loss.

Honestly, if you've ever been called out in dungeon for not using tank stance, it's either because your team was bad and looked for excuse, or you made some mistakes that could be made up for with tank stance.

Imo the only tank that has no reason to ever drop tank stance on trash pulls is paladin - Sword Oath is single target boost, Shield Oath is "only" -15% dmg and PLD AoE is way weaker than healer's anyway. Outside of big pulls (3+ packs) or some harder trash mobs WAR gains too much DPS with Decimate spam to ignore it (mosnters die faster - you save cooldowns or can use more at once - you are actually tankier). For DRK idk tbh. BW + Quietus feels nice but I'm not sure if it's worth it.

[Nedkel]

On trash pulls tank stance is a reasonable thing to keep on (tho WAR and DRK can do some magic when they go ham), but using tank stance on bosses is just a waste with their damage in 4-mans. And this has nothing to do with percentiles. The team I cleared previous savage tier with was mostly gray-green parses and we still played "meta way". Tank stances are just objectively weak - including boost you are not getting from using DPS stance, tank stance lowers your total damage by 25-30% (too lazy to find and link those calculations, sry). 20% dmg reduction you get stacks multiplicatively with cooldowns, making it worth even less. On top of that, healers have less personal DPS than tanks, so even if you could boost their damage by 20% (it's way less in reality) by using tank stance at the cost of 20% (more in reality) of your damage, it'd still be a loss.

Honestly, if you've ever been called out in dungeon for not using tank stance, it's either because your team was bad and looked for excuse, or you made some mistakes that could be made up for with tank stance.

Imo the only tank that has no reason to ever drop tank stance on trash pulls is paladin - Sword Oath is single target boost, Shield Oath is "only" -15% dmg and PLD AoE is way weaker than healer's anyway. Outside of big pulls (3+ packs) or some harder trash mobs WAR gains too much DPS with Decimate spam to ignore it (mosnters die faster - you save cooldowns or can use more at once - you are actually tankier). For DRK idk tbh. BW + Quietus feels nice but I'm not sure if it's worth it.

I always turn off the tank stance in boss fights and sometimes in pull when i know dungeons.
However, believe me or not, in dungeons below 70 lvl there is a lot of players who fail to dodge the red, being hit, heal themselves with GCD and forget about you, there is no rule if you should or not use each stance.
If the players are not experienced enough or dont know the dungeon i recommend a tank using tank stance in the whole dungeon, this could save them wipe in many cases, for example when there are aggressive and dmg dealing adds that could kill off your healer, you may want to aggro them, but without tank stance a enmity generators are just too weak and you have to use them several times to pull adds from the healer, at this point he could be low hp and get 1 shoot by boss mechanic or red, this happened to me one time.
And i know there is a 20-30% dps jump when switching to offensiv or turning off the tank stance, still if you wipe that doesnt matter at all you still lose a lot of time.