Is not using tanking stances actually best?

I've looked over some threads on this, and plenty of people seem to have an opinion, and it is overwhelmingly against using tank stances, but I haven't seen any numbers to back up those opinions.

Out of tank stance you are taking more damage, or taking less healing than if you were in tank stance; currently by 20% according to the tooltips. So rampart/convalescence will only give you the equivalent of being in tank stance for a short period.

What is the realistic trade-off for making your healers work 20% harder? How much more DPS does a tank put out? How much of a DPS loss do the healers take to make up that 20%? How much shorter is the fight?

It really seems like a middle finger to me to make the healers do that extra work when it isn't necessary. I'd like to see some numerical evidence that running out of tank stance is actually the best option for the group.

The answer is difficult without getting really specific. In general this question breaks down to two parts.

Part 1: Trash pulls. This is healer dependent, but if being out of tank stance will cost your healer GCDs to heal you then it is probably not worth it to drop tank stance. This is because healers generally have better aoe than tanks. However, if being out of tank stance doesn't cost your healer any GCD's then it is a win win for both of you to output as much as possible. Generally people aren't talking about trash pulls when talking about being out of tank stance.

Part 2: Bosses. This is what people are usually talking about when discussing this topic. In dungeons, there isn't a single boss which requires me to heal with a GCD provided people do mechanics and the tank pops cooldowns at appropriate times. There is no benefit to the tank being in tank stance in this case, I'm not losing GCDs because healers have really powerful oGCD heals to keep tanks topped. I'm not a healer main, but this is very easy to accomplish when I do runs on healers.

Savage isn't really different, but to heal without using a GCD does take some planning, but it is also possible in a number of turns. This does takes planning and coordination. In general, taking more damage being out of tank stance doesn't directly translate to using 20% more healing GCDs, especially if people work together to keep damage down. Things like feint/addle/etc. exist to help with busters and mitigate fluff damage.

However, this all assumes a number of things: like your healer is actually doing dps and isn't pure healing and people playing their class optimally. Ultimately the questions will come down to how comfortable is your team with using their tools and how much do you gain while minimizing how much your healer loses. 25% penalty in tank stance is a lot of lost dps, but if your healer takes a 90% penalty when you are out of tank stance then this is clearly some things should be discussed.

Tank stance is a learning tool.
You use it to say "okay, i'm going to be hit for this amount, and I can afford to mitigate it this much." Even then that only applies to end-tier raids and such, EX primals and whatever like that. But just doing dungeons? Eh. The "aggro is a tank's job" meme is a bad one and needs to go away. Yoshi himself stated that DPS should learn to use their hate tools, like Diversion and such. If they aren't and stealing hate from you? That's their fault. They get upset? They're just not playing the game as it ought to be played: as a team endeavor.

In PF/DF where you can't guarantee that the DPS know how to play their class properly, any and all DPS helps things go smoother.

But. You should only be doing what you're comfortable with ultimately.

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Originally Posted by NikolasCalypso

What is the realistic trade-off for making your healers work 20% harder? How much more DPS does a tank put out? How much of a DPS loss do the healers take to make up that 20%? How much shorter is the fight?

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Just because you don't gain the 20% bonus mitigation from being in tank stance doesn't mean that the healer is working 20% harder. Speaking as somebody who's both tanked and healed content at every level in the game, there simply isn't anything in this game outside of Savage that can't be healed with OGCDs, the occasional shield, and regens. I've healed entire EXRs with Paladins that never leave Sword Oath, and Benison, Tetra, Regen, and Asylum carry me the entire way through while I just set up Aero III and holy bomb.

It's a matter of comfort and experience. And, yes, that does include going into your DPS stance once you've completed your hero pull: most of them aren't actually that dangerous as long as you're using your cooldowns properly.

The simple answer is healers loose FAR FAR FAR less dps from a tank taking slightly more damage than a tank looses by taking slightly less damage. But for a quick and dirty, just go look at FFlogs and see how much damage people are actually doing. For a simple example, look at the 99th percentile for tanks and healers. I think its safe to assume anyone breking the 99th percentile is NOT using tank stance outside of an opener if at all. So, see how much tanks do, -20% damage (to pretend they swapped to tank stance even though each looses far greater amounts than that), then do the same for healers but assume (very wrongly) that their DPS would INCREASE by the same % (which it wont get anywhere near as outlined below).

Highest damage healers are Sch right now. So lets take 99th% scholar on Chaos as an example: 4250. Add 25% (tank takes 20% less damage means saving 25% heals in theory). 5312. +1062 dps.
OK lets take the LOWEST damage tank in chaos 99% (to make the point clearer) and reduce by 20%. Pld 5309. 4247. 1061 lost

So: The best healer gaining 25% damage matches the loss of the worst tank loosing 20% damage. Seems fair? Well it doesnt work that way. Those numbers are completely unrealistic and angled in the most extreme ways to benefit the healers.

Tanks loose more than 20% damage. Pld looses 50% of their auto attack damage from sword oath which is roughly another 10% damage gone. Wars loose 5% from deliverance and every inner beast is 200 potency lost over fell cleave. Drks loose access to a powerful haste effect. So tanks outside of tank stance actually loose around 30% of their damage.

Healers on the other hand will NEVER gain 25% increased damage because a tank takes 20% less because they dont just heal the tank. They heal the party, and regens/fairys/OGCDs tend to handle the tanks just fine in most cases. So swapping out of tank stance results in the OCCASIONAL need for a GCD physic/cure 1 etc throughout a fight. A handful of GCDs throughout a 10 minute fight will never be in the same league as 30% of a tanks damage.

The bottom line is:

*tanks natively deal more damage than healers to start with. So any direct % gains losses applied equally favor the tanks anyway.
*the direct % gains are far greater than what a tank stance tooltip says. 20% is just the beginning of what is lost.
*Healers do NOT gain x% dps for every x% less damage a tank takes because only a fraction of their time is spent actually curing tanks. They cure aoes, single target other players for single target damage, also DPS. What is left is on the tank and 20% of that isnt going to make a dent in their workload.

When you combine those points with the fact that it is not dangerous to drop tank stance (nothing in this game hits hard enough to 'require' tank stance anymore. Not like coil for example) then whats the point?

Tanks dont need stance to live, and the loss to tank damage far outweigh the gains of healers by miles. So theres really no argument for it in high level content where DPS checks actually matter. In any other content (dungeons, 24 mans, lv 60/50 etc) you can clear anything with any job combo with 0 healer DPS and full time stance, so this debate doesnt even matter there.

Thanks for the replies, especially the ones that give more than a quick opinion. I think there are some exaggerations here, or I'd love to see a video or something because otherwise I must be healing wrong if for example I don't need to use GCD heals.


But anyway, here's a point that I have seen far less often.

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Originally Posted by WhyAmIHere

But just doing dungeons? Eh. The "aggro is a tank's job" meme is a bad one and needs to go away. Yoshi himself stated that DPS should learn to use their hate tools, like Diversion and such. If they aren't and stealing hate from you? That's their fault. They get upset? They're just not playing the game as it ought to be played: as a team endeavor.

In PF/DF where you can't guarantee that the DPS know how to play their class properly, any and all DPS helps things go smoother.

But. You should only be doing what you're comfortable with ultimately.

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Sure, everyone should be maximizing their performance by using tools like Diversion and such, but I'm curious how much you pull when running a dungeon. Hopefully we can at least agree that with 20% damage resistance it is possible to pull more (and not die) than without it. Do you find that pulling a bit less (say one group less) out of tank stance makes for a faster run than grabbing that extra group in tank stance?

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Originally Posted by NikolasCalypso

Thanks for the replies, especially the ones that give more than a quick opinion. I think there are some exaggerations here, or I'd love to see a video or something because otherwise I must be healing wrong if for example I don't need to use GCD heals.


But anyway, here's a point that I have seen far less often.



Sure, everyone should be maximizing their performance by using tools like Diversion and such, but I'm curious how much you pull when running a dungeon. Hopefully we can at least agree that with 20% damage resistance it is possible to pull more (and not die) than without it. Do you find that pulling a bit less (say one group less) out of tank stance makes for a faster run than grabbing that extra group in tank stance?

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I mean, I don't really know what more you expect from me. I'm not gonna go and record video evidence of the fact that regens and Benisons are just about enough to cover 95% of situations that the casual playerbase is going to run into.

What I am saying is that you can have your tank and eat it too. I run EXR with a PLD every day that pulls as deep as the walls allow, and goes into Sword Oath for spamming Total Eclipse. Tank defense values, and healer tools are so overpowered for that level of content that the only danger comes from both parties being fully negligent.

It comes down to good cooldown management.

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Originally Posted by NikolasCalypso

Do you find that pulling a bit less (say one group less) out of tank stance makes for a faster run than grabbing that extra group in tank stance?

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The problem with this is that doubling the number of pulls means almost doubling the amount of time it takes to kill all the things, because now we're talking about damage dealers losing DPS--a lot of it--because the tank didn't want to use tank stance (or wanted to use tank stance but didn't want to pull everything). It will take your DDs the same time to kill, say, 9 mobs as it would take them to kill 4. If you can survive pulling everything, it's a waste of time not to.

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Originally Posted by NikolasCalypso

Do you find that pulling a bit less (say one group less) out of tank stance makes for a faster run than grabbing that extra group in tank stance?

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As Chrono said earlier the main time tank stance use is dropped is after the pull on a boss, you can do it during trash pulls if you are good enough but it is perfectly fine to have it on for large pulls. Tank damage is negligible on a large (3 group) pull compared to the dps a healer would lose by keeping you up due to how fast they die, so if you need tank stance and a cooldown so your dps and healer can aoe spam then go with that.

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Originally Posted by NikolasCalypso

I'd love to see a video or something because otherwise I must be healing wrong if for example I don't need to use GCD heals.

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It might not be you doing things wrong. The tank could be undergeared, not timing their abilities well, or even just standing in stuff they could get out of.

It essentially comes down to, if you can be in DPS stance without being excessively squishy (I.e. Being low geared for the content, standing in avoidable damage, not using CD's effectively, DPS not using their debuffs etc) then it's almost universally better to be in DPS stance than Tank stance, given that if you're surviving the content without diverting too much extra attention from the healer, extra survivability from Tank stance does nothing.

However, if you're new to the content, aren't confident in your abilities or that of your healer, or are still gearing up (So you're a bit squishy/and or are having threat troubles vs geared DPS), then Tank stance is a safety net to ensure your survivability, which is the first and foremost concern of any Tank, is to make sure they stay alive to keep the aggro.

Does this reflect poorly on the state of Tanking where in the ideal scenario you actively don't want to use your tanking stance? Sort of, yeah. It will always be an issue so long as defence doesn't scale into making fights finish quicker (And stances remain) unless they do something annoying like make Tank stance a requirement to have even a modicum of threat output...

Your job as a tank is to hold aggro and to stay alive.
Tank stance will help you with both of these tasks.

If you can hold aggro and stay alive in DPS stance, then by all means do so - the extra damage you can deal that way will always be welcome.
If you have trouble holding aggro or trouble staying alive in DPS stance, then you should be in tank stance instead. While doing extra damage is nice, it is not primary duty as a tank.

It's situational. If you're undergeared and there's no enrage timer, there's nothing wrong with staying in tank stance to learn the fight. If you're comfortable with the fight and know when the damage is coming and when to use CD's, then by all means, switch out of tank stance once you've established initial aggro and pump out that DPS. Tank DPS is very important when it comes to fights that have enrage timers.

For me:
Dungeons - Always in tank stance for trash pulls because I like to pull large. For bosses, I drop tank stance after getting aggro.
Trials/Raids - I only use tank stance if I pull, then drop it after I get aggro.

For me, Trash pulls in dungeons and certain trials I use tank stance. For bosses I drop it shortly after the opener.

You have several defensive cooldowns at your disposal so the 20% makes up for it.

Also you have things like regen, shields, etc.

You have to consider if you are in tank stance and the healer is healing but you are taking little to no damage while in tank stance. You are causing a group dps loss, especially since healers have OGCD healing abilities.

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Originally Posted by SargentToughie

I mean, I don't really know what more you expect from me. I'm not gonna go and record video evidence of the fact that regens and Benisons are just about enough to cover 95% of situations that the casual playerbase is going to run into.

What I am saying is that you can have your tank and eat it too. I run EXR with a PLD every day that pulls as deep as the walls allow, and goes into Sword Oath for spamming Total Eclipse. Tank defense values, and healer tools are so overpowered for that level of content that the only danger comes from both parties being fully negligent.

It comes down to good cooldown management.

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Doesn't Sword Oath only affect autos? I would think turning off Shield Oath and saving a GCD would be just as effective in EXR for large pulls.

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Originally Posted by Hierro

Doesn't Sword Oath only affect autos? I would think turning off Shield Oath and saving a GCD would be just as effective in EXR for large pulls.

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It has the flat 20% damage down. If you do stance+4 eclipse, you break even with tank stanced 5 eclips and get some freebie AA damage. But really, thats quite irrelevant. You flash/lob everything for aggro as you pull, then when you arrive at the destination the mobs are still chasing and havent gathered yet. Just use your GCD when it would otherwise be wasted. While sprinting after you tagged the last pack or while they are still gathering.

You dont have to wait for mobs to gangbang you to change stances and waste a gcd at all. Hit button while running. Max DPS at no price.

Since dungeon pulls were brought up as a limiting factor, I'd like to point out that Dark Knight tends to become more effective without their tank stance the more they're able to pull. If a Dark Knight is pressing their buttons fast enough, each additional enemy amounts to more MP and more HP gained. While this is a justification in Dark Knight's favor for dropping tank stance even in pulls, really as mentioned all of the tanks have enough tools to offset a mere 20% more damage intake in most situations.

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Originally Posted by Valdegarde

Since dungeon pulls were brought up as a limiting factor, I'd like to point out that Dark Knight tends to become more effective without their tank stance the more they're able to pull. If a Dark Knight is pressing their buttons fast enough, each additional enemy amounts to more MP and more HP gained. While this is a justification in Dark Knight's favor for dropping tank stance even in pulls, really as mentioned all of the tanks have enough tools to offset a mere 20% more damage intake in most situations.

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I'm a Dark Knight Main, and I don't see where you get more MP the more the enemy amount you have on you WITHOUT tank stance. If you are refering to Blood price, you need the tank stance. And for a Pull of trash mobs, who even care about your dps as a Tank ? I feel considerably more confortable in my tank stance for this situation, because sometime heal are really sloppy and 20% Mitigation is really helping the heal and doing large pull can sometimes be tricky following the monster you pull. But I saw every "Meta-player" coming and says, you don't have to keep your tank stance... And.... I will agree, but ONLY on Boss.

And I will says this too. The more you pull, the fatest your health drop, and that's for any tank in any game. So Constant mitigation from Grit and Shield Oath are more than welcome for that.

Btw. Abyssal Drain don't heal as hard as you can imagine even with large pull. Monster generaly hit stronger than your abyssal drain.

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Originally Posted by TabrisOmbrelame

I'm a Dark Knight Main, and I don't see where you get more MP the more the enemy amount you have on you WITHOUT tank stance. If you are refering to Blood price, you need the tank stance. And for a Pull of trash mobs, who even care about your dps as a Tank ? I feel considerably more confortable in my tank stance for this situation, because sometime heal are really sloppy and 20% Mitigation is really helping the heal and doing large pull can sometimes be tricky following the monster you pull. But I saw every "Meta-player" coming and says, you don't have to keep your tank stance... And.... I will agree, but ONLY on Boss.

And I will says this too. The more you pull, the fatest your health drop, and that's for any tank in any game. So Constant mitigation from Grit and Shield Oath are more than welcome for that.

Btw. Abyssal Drain don't heal as hard as you can imagine even with large pull. Monster generaly hit stronger than your abyssal drain.

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quietus is affected by blood weapon so you double the amount of MP per target hit when you combine those 2, the result is a huge amount of MP gain that can be use to spam abyssal drain alone or with dark arts depens of what you need being sturdy and dealing pretty high dps, more targets more mp gain and more self hears from AD.

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Originally Posted by TabrisOmbrelame

Btw. Abyssal Drain don't heal as hard as you can imagine even with large pull. Monster generaly hit stronger than your abyssal drain.

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DA Abyssal Drain with rampart or convalescence with some ogcd heals is enough to cover healing during mass pulls. Especially combined with TBN and Quietus.

ok SO... yes, it is.

for one, paladin and warriors tank stances have the ADDED downside of NOT being in their dps stances. so EVEN if the tank loses 20% but the healer GAINS 20% damage, the party is still DOWN the 5% from the warrior NOT being in his dps stance. net loss.

next, on average a tank will out damage a healer, so 20% gained by the tank is MORE THAN 20% lost by the healer.

finally, you assume that the loss of tank stance requires ADDITIONAL healing compared to with it on. with proper play this is simply not the case. think of the damage a tank takes during a boss fight:

auto attacks are often trivial, and can be mitigated with things like anticipation, raw intuition, shield blocks, the passive lifegain from storms path, and regens/embraces that are gonna get cast anyway.

room wide aoe already require the healer to roomwide HEAL. how hard this hits the tank ALMOST doesn't matter at all, as the healer has to heal THE PARTY anyway. so if the RDM, NIN, and SCH all need a succor to survive, the paladin gets a succor for free.

so now we move on to actual tank busters: use cooldowns. mitigation doesn't stack additively ANYWAY. sheltron + rampart amount to about -40% damage taken (if the shield block is worth 25%. a high end shield is actually worth slightly MORE) sheltron + rampart + shield oath is about 52% (same value for sheltron) the 20% shield oath is only worth an extra 12%, but it still costs you the full amount in damage penalty. (also, the numbers get WORSE for tank stance if you use sentinel, vengeance, or shadow wall instead. the higher the mitigation, the less adding more does)

so now i ask, does the healer have to cast any MORE heals because we're missing that 12%? NOT does he have to heal, cuz he has to heal the shield oath guy to. i'm asking if he has to heal MORE. the answer is almost always no anyway, but even if they DO have to heal more, how MUCH more, and then how much potency is LOST by that hypothetical increase in heals versus GAINED by the tank himself as touched upon earlier?

I may or may not stay in tank stance for trash pulls in dungeons depending on the healer, but I know being in Deliverance is optimal whenever possible.

I'd like to see a healer try and make up for the DPS loss if I'm stuck in Defiance when I could be in Deliverance and drop 7-9 Decimates on 6+ mobs with 5 of them being crit/direct hits, most likely beating both damage dealers in DPS.

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Originally Posted by TabrisOmbrelame

And for a Pull of trash mobs, who even care about your dps as a Tank ?

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The faster a pack of mobs dies, the better. You can pop your cd's, the pack dies or is dying off within the duration and things don't get a chance to be much danger.

Tank stance is perfectly fine on mobs, but if you're comfortable downing a pack in dps stance, it's a small plus.

I would say that if the majority of advice is that tanking in dps stance is preferable to tank stance then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the gameplay in that department.

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Originally Posted by Nolagamer

I would say that if the majority of advice is that tanking in dps stance is preferable to tank stance then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the gameplay in that department.

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Yeah, there's just a lack of compelling reasons to utilize Tank stance, given that both survivability and Enmity are such binary concepts. You either survive the tank buster (After which, you get healed back up) or you don't. You either have aggro or you don't (After which, DPS/Healers will just use a detaunt and drop their Enmity...)

While, damage scales infinitely. Every single point of DPS, continually adds up.

So, this combined with the fact that there's the two notable balance "Features" consisting of:

1) The vast majority of actually threatening damage, comes from Tank busters (Or Trash pulls) that coincide with a damage mitigation cooldown (Many of which, don't actually stack very well with 2/3 Tank stances...) so it's easy to just rely on popping a CD instead of having this constant defence.

2) Healing throughput is nuts. Like, it's expected that people should eventually not even bother using GCD's on Tanks and rely entirely on oGCD's, Regen and high potency Shields to sustain Tanks (Also, bypassing a Tanks need to do things like, have constant defences, use self sustain skills and use CD's on anything that isn't a tank buster)

That said, even if the above 2 points were addressed, people would still try and find a way to use DPS stances, because there's no downsides on them, only upsides. Unlike Tank stances which have that damage penalty associated with them...

Playing the Devil's advocate here... Tankstance isn't ideal, but sometimes it's needed.

Yes. Sometimes you will need that extra aggro or extra 20% defences. Because sometimes, someone screws up and you need to compensate.

It's honestly all that needs to be said about it.

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Originally Posted by Nolagamer

I would say that if the majority of advice is that tanking in dps stance is preferable to tank stance then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the gameplay in that department.

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100% agree with this, and squeenix is only further encouraging this behavior by raising the threat generation on everything that pulls additional threat to obscene levels and giving every single class threat reduction tools.
BLM SMN and RDM all get both presence of mind and diversion!
In what world are either one of these ever needed outside of savage content outside of having a bad tank?
Even in savage content, it's because tanks are encouraged to dps, dps, dps, not worry about threat.

The healer just has less to lose.

Here is an easy example to illustrate:
Let's say that we have a 1 second gcd and that the tank and the healer can do up to 100 dps with a gcd that does 100 dmg

We'll say the tank loses 20% of their dps while in tank stance, which means their max dps in tank stance is 80.

We'll say that when the tank is in tank stance, the healer must perform a heal every 5th cooldown, meaning their max dps is also 80.

If the tank drops tank stance their dps becomes 100. The healer now needs to heal every 4th cooldown, which puts their max dps at 75.

That's the gist of it. Healing 20% more is a smaller loss than tank stance. It's also worth nothing that in practice, the healer isn't necessarily needing to heal 20% more.

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Originally Posted by Nolagamer

I would say that if the majority of advice is that tanking in dps stance is preferable to tank stance then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the gameplay in that department.

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I mean we're the ones who call it 'tank stance' when really the term should be 'crutch stance' or whatnot. The game doesn't call it that, and when you read the tooltip it's up to you to decide whether or not you really think the penalties are worth the small bump in survivability and large bump in aggro. That's really where these entire conversations about whether or not 'tank stance' is appropriate or not fall apart; there are members of the community that insist it's mandatory because of a monikor we've given it coming from WoW or other MMOs, when the game itself doesn't really indicate that you absolutely should be using it. Tank stances are fine as is for people who cannot do the content without them, but they're not worth it to anyone worth their salt. It's not really an issue with tank stance, it's just something you take off your hotbar when you realize you don't need it anymore. Vercure isn't good on RDM because it doesn't do damage, you shouldn't use it, there is no reason to buff it because it isn't useful in most content most the time.

Imma be honest, but most of the tanks I know would quit if tanks dealt less damage and had to sit in tank stance. Tanks doing noticeable dps is what makes them more interesting and fun than tanking in other games, being forced into tank stance would make it was less fun.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Terkhev

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.

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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.