Fresh 60 Help.

[Jpec07]

Look I don't mean to be a dick, but you by your own admission don't have raiding experience and even when you're not doing world first, doing more DPS to clear faster is always preferable. I.E. swapping to sword oath for the small phases in A5S, doing entire fights in sword oath because you have a ninja or a war pulling, etc.

When we're speaking about theory and general raiding concepts, experience is not always necessary. You also do much to assume that I don't know what I'm talking about, just because I admitted in another thread that I haven't been in Savage yet. Such an attempt to invalidate my argument by attempting to undermine my credibility is called an ad hominem, which is a logical fallacy, and does not actually address the matter at hand. We're talking in high terms about raiding and raid progression in general, the discussion of which does not hold experience as prerequisite. Suggesting that someone can't talk about raiding concepts because they haven't raided in this game is presumptuous, and quite frankly elitist.

If you want to raid and be a good raider, you always need to be good at all aspects of your class.
What good is a black mage with a top 1 dummy dps who can't move during a fight?
A healer who can't balance healing and damage?
A tank who only uses RoH because it's the most enmity?

Except that when SE balances the fights, their healers don't do damage, and their tanks only do the bare minimum action required to hold enmity. I'll have to find the interview, but the developers balance endgame fights around DPS having certain gear levels to accomplish the fight. Any additional DPS from tanks and healers is nice, but the fights are not balanced around it, and so technically don't require it above a certain gearing threshold.

None at all. Being able to stance dance and play your class to it's fullest is something that will never hurt a raid. If you keep making these compromises, that "it'd be nice but not necessary", at what point do you stop being good and start being a burden? If the entire team is okay with being "ehh it's not needed", when do you stop being a raid group and start stagnating?

I'm not arguing that one should ALWAYS TANK IN SWORD OATH (it's fun though), but learning HOW to do it, from tracking enmity, gcd usage, cooldowns needed, etc, without the safety net of 20% damage down and enmity up, is something every raiding tank should know. It's a lot harder to learn how to do this in a fight, than coming in with a broad understanding of how it's done and when it should be done.

I never said that more DPS didn't help, or that faster clears weren't better, nor that stance dancing isn't fun (I'll agree that it is), nor even that a PLD should be in ShO 110% of the time, even when offtanking (that's just silly). I'm simply saying that the fights aren't designed to require it when the DPS are at a proper gear threshold. Before that, as the developers said in the same interview, yes, a clear will probably require more DPS contribution from tanks and healers, but it's making up for the DPS jobs' low gear.

Mastering a class is always a good idea, and knowing how to maximize your output is also a good idea. But the game is not designed to make stance dancing a necessity. It's a good skill to learn, I agree, but I would not suggest it to someone new to tanking until they've learned and are comfortable with the basics.

EDIT: Here's the link to the interview.