Am I bad for actually "tanking"?

Hey guys, Lindis here.

So I've long since caught on that most players who roll tanks spec toward strength more instead of vitality, if not completely. I'm assuming it started due to the high dps requirements in later content, as every job is expected to deliver certain numbers from their damage output to optimize efficiency and thus clearing said content.

Now I've been playing mmo's for a long time, and I'm no stranger to tanking. I stuck with Paladin in ffxiv exactly because I prefer to tank. I really love it, and always do my best. But to experience players leaving and/or badmouthing me for speccing fending gear just leaves me puzzled.

All this focus on dps is honestly turning me off, and I feel like this 'trinity' of Tank/Dps/Healer is more or less evolving into Dps/Dps/Dps. And those reluctant to go with the status quo are just straight up ostracized.

Am I alone on this? Because if others feel the same, please tell me so I know I'm not going crazy. Sorry if this has been brought up before.

The point some people try to make is simply that at a certain point you just have an abundance of HP.
Sure it takes longer to kill you but a healer will try to keep you up either way.
So with good use of Cooldowns you don't need 20k+ HP as Paladin, so might aswell go for more damage, killing your targets quicker is also a kind of damage mitigation.

While I agree that the trend with DPS is going overboard it also gets addressed with 3.2 and they have some plans with tanks too.
We can only wait.
I'm sure you're not alone with this, there are plenty of full Vit Tanks here and for dungeons it's enough, it might even save you from bad healers to have that extra HP.

Nope, you are not alone. I like to do the same, even though I don't think I'm really good at it. ^^;; Besides, I love seeing all that HP. hehehe I just hope they have more stuff for tanks to do.

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Originally Posted by Torunya

I stuck with Paladin in ffxiv exactly because I prefer to tank.

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You tank by taking less DMG than other classes and keeping hate on you.
VIT does not help with either of these 2 things. STR on the other hand helps keeping hate and does not negatively affect your defense.
All you have with more VIT is a larger HP pool, which is not required for any content in the game because all attacks are either weak enough to be healed just fine without having 20-30k HP, or so strong that they kill you instantly anyway unless you pop HG/LD/etc. no matter how much HP you have.
If VIT also affected defense it would be different, but it doesn't. So implying that tanks who focus on STR are actually "not tanking" is not just rude, it's also false because their stats are actually more tank-y than a pure VIT build ;)

As a healer, tanks with excessive HP are a pain to heal and as a DPS I pull hate off them all the time. While I would like SE to adress this and make VIT matter as a tank stat again, that is not how it currently is. Currently stacking VIT makes it harder for you to be a good tank.

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Originally Posted by Atoli

Currently stacking VIT makes it harder for you to be a good tank.

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Yeah, i was kinda forced to go STR build, what with DPS getting more powerful and WARs ripping hate off of you

You're tanking whether you have vit or str. Whatever primary stat you decide to use on your right side does not matter, str or vit, you're still a damn tank regardless. There is no such thing as "actual tanking". Using vit is not "actual tanking". Using str is not "actual tanking".

It's tanking regardless of whatever stupid stat you take, there's zero difference in the jobs mechanically whether you take str or not.

Tanking is so easy in this game that you have tons of time to maximise DPS. If you're not making use of your full skillset and deliberately taking more HP than you need, you're not being a good tank.

As a main WHM, please, continue to do what you're doing. Your HP buffer from fending gear makes my life much easier and allows me to DPS at least 10 seconds more in each pull. :D

Here we go again... Look Turtle up! That is fine if thats what your like / comfortable with... Not once have i seen a guy get hate from the party or another tank because he chose the Turtle life... I DO however see tanks get hate because they cannot hold aggro... Now if you can do your job as a tank theres no issue here

You're coming off as a bit arrogant for wording it "Am I bad for actually "tanking"?"

...as if tanking in str accessories isn't "actually" tanking.

Basically, vit accessories are the training wheels of tanking; if you need them, fine, but as you gear up you won't need them as much any more, depending on the content.