I disagree. Tanks tank, damage should be a secondary priority.
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In endgame content, your tanks damage (just like your healers damage) are expected to be above a set dps number to push phases and better overall skill yourself as a player to play your job to the best of it's abilities in tanking and dpsing. And it's a expectation in a standard static. Maybe not for PF and DF, but in statics, yes. Unless it's a very new static, this method hasn't changed since Coil. Literally, nothing has changed about this since coil.
DPS numbers ain't everything. See, if you just have enough iLvL and can contribute enough to win the raid, then all that gears and BiS stuff won't even matter! I'll just stick to the gears I got from both Creation, Omega, and EX runs to get myself geared up.
Crafted gears are a thing but it's never a necessity. Its price are high for a good reason; because it helps to ensure that crafted gears are but an option, to cater to every crafters who worked hard to create the gear, is healthy for the economy, AND also inspires people to craft! Tank BiS being crafted is a good thing. It rewards people who have spent and worked hard to reach that point and is rewarded handsomely for it.
All the while, you still have the option to just get the gears from raids and creations and clear that very same content. I think SE is doing a good job with gear balancing with consideration to economy.
Min-maxing will always exist, even if just for the sake of a tiny % gain on output (dps, mitigation, heal, whatever contributes to faster clears). Considering the low difficulty level of current savage contents, competing for kill speed and dps via fflogs is probably the only challenge left for some of us in this game. Being competitive is natural for some people, that's why you see competitions for nearly every activity imaginable, from math/science olympiads, sports competitions, multiplayer games, heck people even compete for records in single player games (high score, fastest clear). If you're not into speedkill race then you don't have to worry about BiS, but for some of us that care, contributing barely enough to clear the raid isn't enough. We'll put effort into shaving that 1 second off our group's kill time.
Yes, and?
Of course damage is second priority. However, most good tanks learned how to tank and do tanky-things forever ago, and frankly the mere act of holding aggro, positioning, and mitigating damage is extremely easy. So believe it or not, even aggressive tanks consider damage second priority, its just we complete our first priority very quickly and move on.
Sitting there dwelling on or struggling to meet that first priority isn't indicative of skill or being more in touch with tanking as a job, its just an inability or refusal to remove training wheels. Tenacity is the tread on those wheels.
Yes. This comment totally adds anything of worth to the conversation.
Rude.
I haven't tanked end game content yet, but it just seems common sense to me. What's a tank worth when he's dead ya know?
I can imagine str or dh being better if you already know the fights and know what you'll have to endure, but we don't when it comes to upcoming content, do we?