Quote Originally Posted by Alahra View Post
It probably depends on what you mean by bad. A bad tank's going to be bad either way, but VIT makes things more comfortable for the healer when they're having to keep the tank alive through poor cooldown usage, eating AoEs, etc. But an average VIT tank and an average STR tank are a lot different. In my experience, a lot of tanks don't really use cooldowns aggressively on trash pulls (there's a sort of DPS mentality that you save them for the bosses, if I had to guess, which is sort of the opposite of what you should do as a tank in most dungeons), and STR tanking does tend to require fairly aggressive cooldown usage. VIT tanking doesn't really need to be that aggressive with them except for a few significant pulls from what I've seen, though. And that's where the difference is really.
Tanks really should be using cooldowns on trash pulls too regardless of how they are geared, if they aren't then they are not doing their jobs. This is where the argument gets mistaken. Optimization of gear comes after optimization of play. If a tank is learning his job still then by all means, use VIT to give yourself a grace period for mistakes. Once a job has been fully understood though there isn't alot of inherent danger that comes with speccing STR instead. If a healer is undergeared then alot of the time i'll throw on 1 or 2 vit accessories to give them a bit of a cushion as well. If your over i170 though in expert dungeons there really shouldn't be any problems with incoming damage.

If your tank isn't using cooldowns then he/she is inherently not performing optimally. Saving them for a bigger group, or on the last group before a boss is one thing, but you shouldnt have all your defensive cooldowns up going into a boss fight. If your leaving one or two then that is still enough time for the other ones to come off cooldown during the fight. As the healer they should be expecting your tanks to use cooldowns during pulls, and they should be vocal about it.

This is the crux of the argument though, it assumes your tank has a thorough understanding of his job.