Originally Posted by
ElHeggunte
Tanking is tanking, the type of content does very little to change how you'd play. FFXIV rarely has tank-swaps, but knowing how to use Shirk makes transitions easy. Otherwise, the off-tank is just a glorified DPS who might have to pick up adds.
The problem comes when that "trial and error" is causing the rest of the group grief. Especially when it's something you should know better on. Like a lvl70 tank shouldn't need to be told not to face a boss towards the raid (and everyone else should know better than to ever be in front of a boss anyway), but I had a tank in Orbonne yesterday kill 90% of the raid on Agrias because he didn't face her away for Thunder Slash.
I just... I'm almost at a loss for words.
Intentionally eating easily avoidable damage just because it can be healed through puts you square into the camp of people that this thread is talking about. The least that would happen is you're forcing your healers to waste MP on you instead of using it to contribute DPS or do something else more productive.
The worst that happens is you flat out die (because how will you know if the AoE is trivial or not without eating it at least once? Sometimes you're going to lose that gamble) or you incur a debuff that will likely get you killed later. Using Mustadio in Orbonne for example, his Handgun attacks won't usually outright kill you if you're topped off, but they will give you vulnerability stacks. Even a single stack will make it impossible to survive his Last Testament sniper attack--all because you couldn't be bothered to move out of the way of what you think is a trivial AoE. Now the healers have to waste time, mana, and cooldowns on picking you back up.
If the entire group played like that you would never clear anything, so keep that in mind the next time you think it's appropriate to sandbag it and make your group pick up the slack.