Swapping stance - when should it happen?

I've been tanking since the very start of 2.0.

I completely fell in love with final fantasy xiv, and the classes that I enjoyed playing the most have always been the tanks.

I've tried playing some DPS roles (summoner being my favorite among them) and healers (though I find myself very lacking in the healing department).
I like to think I do good work - I seldom cause a wipe (of course it can happen from time to time, but I'm generally a quick learner). I know my rotations, I know how to hold enmity almost exclusively (almost!) by just playing with my dps rotation.

All of that, but one thing escapes me still - I never know the right time to swap stances.


I never really thought it was an actual thing I needed to worry about, it seemed obvious to me that the tank stance should only be dropped when I'm off-tanking, or when I have a healer that refuses to do anything other than spam-heal. But I've read differently on the forums very often, and it's starting to make me question my play-style.

So I'd really like to learn, in which circumstances are other tanks doing their stance swaps? Me personally, I've always been eerie because as a (bad) healer I absolutely hated tanks that did that - it effectively forced me into a situation where all I could do was heal them and nothing else.


So what am I missing? How do I improve from here? I hate feeling like the paladin that melded parry, I'd like to perform better.

From my point of view, it's a matter of when you feel comfortable doing it. If you are worried about staying alive, just stay in tank stance. If you are comfortable with the dungeon, your healer, and your cooldown rotation, then you can swap stances.

Since 4.0 I only go into SwO for bosses and dps checks for current content. Any 60> content you can SwO most of it.

Situation's galore! Generally it depends on many things. Durining pulls I.E big pulls i keep it on all the time but during boss i do aggro combo and if im happy with my aggro lead and the incoming damage isnt too high then i turn it off and dps all the way. But if i notice a dps die or the healer needs to do extra work and turning tank stance on makes it easier for them then id turn it on.

If you've been tanking since the very start of 2.0 then I'm incredibly surprised you've yet to figure out when you should stance dance now that we're on 4.x, especially since this is something you would've had to learn in order to be effective in hardcore raids.

That being said, the method I institute, even in dungeon content, is to start a pull with my enmity combo in tank stance, put up whatever status effects I can (namely Maim and Storm's Eye on Warrior), throw out another enmity combo for good measure (if necessary), then change over to my DPS stance and proceed with my rotations from there, occasionally throwing out my enmity combo to maintain hate if and when I should see other players starting to gain a bit of aggro.

This is, of course, without taking the new Meter changes into account. But, when accounting for it, I've altered my methodology to such where I make sure I build a full, 100% bar before swapping, thanks to the whole "50% bar depletion" mechanic while stance dancing.

From there, the only time I'd be switching back into my tank stance is if I had a sudden need to re-establish my aggro lead in the case that a DPS somehow manages to edge me out in terms of threat generation (or, once again in Warrior's case, if I need a clutch Equilibrium heal that the healers can't provide or if I actually require Inner Beast for regen/damage mitigation purposes, which is generally not very often).

Of course, this is only taking into account single target pulls, like bosses. For trash mobs/big pulls, the best way to go about things is to stay in your tank stance at all times. Small trash pulls, you can MAYBE get away with DPS stance pulling as long as the rest of the DPS are on-point.

I could tell you to just ignore tank stance unless you need mitigation or enmity, but honestly there's no substitute for personal experience and experimentation. Turn off tank stance - > did you die? - > did you keep hate? - > did anyone else die? If the answer to all these questions was no, then its safe to conclude DPSing during these situations is completely justified and tank stance was not required past whatever point at which you turned it off.

Learn what you can get away with, and establish a baseline. If something happens that deviates from this experience, then you can start asking other questions. "I've held aggro and kept everyone including myself from dying before in this situation without tank stance, but this time something went wrong in spite of doing the same things..." - > Was the healer bad? - > did DPS ignore their aggro dumps? - > etc.

I feel like since 4.0 it's harder to turn off, mainly due to aggro. It used to be more for surviving because aggro wasn't a problem, so you just turned it off if you weren't worried about damage. But now you do want the aggro bonus as well. I think this is what they were going for, I think they want tanks to stay in it so they probably hoped the new aggro issues + dmg reduction would convince people to just leave it on. Instead it just made it harder to drop the stance but you can still do it.

The thought process I go through as a Warrior is this:

- Do I have enough threat on the mobs to keep them all facing me?
- Do I have enough HP/Cooldowns to survive the damage while DPSing?
- Has my healer been able to deal with my shenanigans just fine so far?
- Can I survive a tank buster in DPS stance?

If the answer to all of those is yes, then I switch to Deliverance and bring the deeps.

Simple enough, if the party is relying on you for aggro and mitigation, sit in tank stance. If the party is willing to participate the aggro management, than just switch to dps stance after a first aggro combo.

Depends on how luck you are with df,pf. Static? if they friends they won't be mad at you if you screw things up.

It just involves:

1. How well you know the fight
2. How geared you are in comparison to the fight
3. How confidant you are in your healer
4. How confidant you are in yourself

Generally if I have healers I know and trust, I'll swap right away after establishing aggro.