Quote Originally Posted by Argyle_Darkheart View Post
You'll learn to effectively mitigate the damage pretty quickly (well before your first clear); you don't at all need to have "mastered" the fight. I wouldn't recommend what I did if you needed mastery of the current content.

The point of more STR is to make your first clear easier. That is, the main hurdles of T9 are NOT tank mitigation management or healing. Rather, the difficulty of T9 comes from managing mechanics and clearing DPS checks. Neither of these are much impacted by your VIT and/or Parry.
When it comes to ways to increase the overall damage inflicted by the group, giving the Main Tank a little extra Strength is by and far the least effective option. Get the DPS to 110 weapons, for starters. Second, if additional DPS really is necessary, you can get the Off Tank into full a Strength spec(bonus stats and accessories), which will make a difference. Meanwhile, a main tank who's stacked on mitigation can spend enough time not being healed that the healers can sling a few damaging spells of their own out. Sure, they'll miss a few times, but hitting with just one spell deals more damage than over a minute of adding up the 10 or so more damage per hit you can get by switching Vit for Str. That alone will will put an i100 tank well below your proposed breakpoint of 7400 health. If the healers alone can hit with 11-15 spells over the course of the fight without getting anyone killed, they've surpassed anything a less survivable tank could have traded for over the entire fight.

In my opinion, if I'm ever in a situation where my damage as the tank is what will make or break a fight, then there is some kind of issue with the group. The job of the tank is to keep the attention of foes and, more importantly, not die. If the tank dies, so does the party. Doing as much damage as possible is not in that job description, and attempting to do so only makes your actual job harder unless you appreciably overgear the content. Even if making the job harder increases the difficulty from "Very Easy" to just "Easy", that's still more stress you're putting on the healers and by extension the rest of the party.