Does Tank Stance mean you're "bad?"

[Ashkendor]

Agreed. Especially if you're MT, tank stance is a must. It may mean a decline in your DPS, but you're the tank, not a DPS. Better to stay alive and prevent healers from dying than die due to being out of tank stance. I'm fairly new to tanking, but I like to have my tank stance on as much as possible for situations where the MT dies due to being out of tank stance. That way, no one can complain that the OT wasn't picking up the slack.

Having tank stance up as OT is actually a bad idea. If your MT is using a DPS rotation (which they should be doing after initial aggro is established) you can rip the boss off them if you're not using your skills correctly and you have tank stance up, especially those of us that like to tank more aggressively (which usually entails swapping to DPS stance and using cd's). This leads to situations where the boss will cleave the party, or at the very least, will cause melee to lose positionals which can be a substantial DPS loss.

There are plenty of fights where "main tank" just means "the dude that needs more accuracy since the boss faces him" because the damage output is laughable. I don't see anything wrong in tanking in DPS stance when additional mitigation just isn't needed.