Goodbye strength tanks. Let us never be forgotten.

[Odett]

Yes, STR tanks will hit a small DPS hit with the transition to full VIT, BUT! You will also have more HP and more survivability, allowing healers more time to DPS before they need to heal you.

Ehhhhhh, yes and no. A tank with more HP could make a healer take longer to get out of cleric stance, but a tank with less HP will require the healer to heal them less, since they also need less heals to be topped off, so it balances itself out. Conversely, a healer doesn't have to top you off, but if you have a ton of HP, while having the option to allocate those points to something else, and you're not being topped off, you're achieving absolutely nothing. It WILL be nice having the best of both worlds, but it was also nice to have some choice in how I geared up as well, you know?

Someone on another board also made a really good comment about how having more HP can make a tank lazier and slack on their mitigation. For example, a full Vit DRK can Foresight a Heavenly Heel and survive, but successfully going towards STR forces you to play more skillfully and have much better cooldown management, because if you don't Shadowskin+Foresight, or Shadow Wall a Heavenly Heel, the only thing you will be tanking is the floor. This argument is mostly aimed at the people who are saying that the bad STR tanks won't plague their groups anymore, but it will just encourage those same lazy players to eat unmitigated tank busters (or barely mitigated), and if addressed by a healer, will just spout the usual "We didn't wipe, so stop complaining" excuse.

Regardless of this change, lazy tanks will remain lazy, and good tanks will adjust. Having more HP doesn't necessarily make you tankier, and that's something that many healers will start realizing tomorrow.