Quote Originally Posted by Donjo View Post
3. Sure, play around with whatever you want in the dungeons. That's all fine and dandy because they're supposed to be facerolls. In Coil, being out of your Tank Stance should always be nigh suicide. The ways people are doing the "hardest" encounters exposes so many mistakes in encounter design it's not even funny.
What you need to remember is that the people tanking FCoB in Sword Oath are people that are pretty much already overgeared for FCoB and have the timing on the fights down pat by virtue of the fact that they have the turns on farm. People that are still progressing through FCoB are most likely using their tanking stances as normal. How much time you spend in your tanking stance depends on the comfort level of your healers in whatever content you're in.


5. Not necessarily. What I'm sniping at with the Cleric Stance change is that Scholars can add their DPS far more easily than a WHM can because of their fairy healing at 100% throughput while they're in Cleric Stance. If that is removed, they're on equal ground in this regard.
One word: Holy. White mage can deal massive damage AND reduce tank damage in one fell swoop. WHM is better for mass pulls, while Scholar excels at single target DPS (I rarely leave cleric stance on a lot of trials).

They seem pretty even to me when you take that into account.

Regarding the Tanks, it's that the current tank meta exposes massive failures in stat and encounter design that brutally killing the aggressive tank is just one step in resolving.
Honestly, I don't get what you have against the "aggressive tank" meta. It makes playing tanks a lot more fun. Probably the worst part about playing a tank is the feeling of utter futility when it comes to solo play. Everything is a battle of attrition - you mayaswell just leave yourself on autoattack and go afk for all the fun you're having dealing 100-200 damage at a time with your skills. Sure, you aren't really killable but neither is whatever you're fighting. Let's face it, mobs in the overworld aren't really even a threat for squisher classes anyway so all you're doing is slowing yourself down if you run around in a fending set.