I don't understand the point of the various tank/dps stances for tanks

[Felorr]

That's around the inverse of his real words. He wanted to raise the skill flood and lessen the gap between low and high skilled players (By lowering the skill ceiling or simply raising the skill floor high enough, who knows), which ends up beeing contrary to your argumentation.

Raising the skill floor is correct. I incorrectly referred to "lowering the skill floor" to mean "lowering the bar" so to speak, which is actually what raising the skill floor means. Thanks for the correction. I can't find the interview now, but I'm fairly certain he wants to raise the ceiling to allow skilled players to excel at the jobs, while raising the floor to lower the bar for everyone else, so to speak.

[Phoenicia]

Raising the skill floor is correct. I incorrectly referred to "lowering the skill floor" to mean "lowering the bar" so to speak, which is actually what raising the skill floor means. Thanks for the correction. I can't find the interview now, but I'm fairly certain he wants to raise the ceiling to allow skilled players to excel at the jobs, while raising the floor to lower the bar for everyone else, so to speak.

It was the live letter before the media tour where he showcased BLM's new Enochian changes and we were told the new reward is Foul along with how new abilities and gauges looked like. Yoshi-P said the team wanted to raise the skill floor so more people can perform while still leaving space for a high skill ceiling. He did also mention he wanted the gap between unskilled and skill to be smaller, this means they tried not to raise the skill ceiling (though it ended up going real high for SMN and MCH :P).

[Ultimatecalibur]

Obviously gear helps you, but the question was whatever or not the tank stance was needed or not. I'm by no means a top player, and neither are the team I'm playing with, yet we cleared 1-4 savage with both tanks in 0% tank stance in 320 gear outside the pull establishing a small enmity lead that lasts for the rest of the fight.

This is exactly the crux of the problem, tank stance is just not needed for anything the game can throw at you outside of giving you an easier time with enmity.

Actually your very statement puts you in the "top player" group and your situation points heavily to your groups ability to push over the edge where tank stance is needed/not needed.

This is another case of the high skill Dunning-Kruger effect causing miss-analysis of difficulty and necessities.

[LalaRu]

...even the hardest content can be done comfortably without the mitigation from tank stance...

o1s's twin bolt will oneshot me in my i310 and sword oath. Shield oath or die. Or are you talking only about people geared BiS, pentamelded, etc?

[FallenWings]

o1s's twin bolt will oneshot me in my i310 and sword oath. Shield oath or die. Or are you talking only about people geared BiS, pentamelded, etc?

Consider using defensive cooldowns maybe?

[Shinkyo]

o1s's twin bolt will oneshot me in my i310 and sword oath. Shield oath or die. Or are you talking only about people geared BiS, pentamelded, etc?

You still need to respect tank busters and use cooldowns.
In O1S, you should have rampart/sentinel + sheltron for each twinbolts.

[Thela]

o1s's twin bolt will oneshot me in my i310 and sword oath. Shield oath or die. Or are you talking only about people geared BiS, pentamelded, etc?

Yeah no kidding, i will die to twin bolt in 340 as well if i don't use cooldowns. What are you saving cooldowns for anyway if not for tankbusters?

[LalaRu]

You still need to respect tank busters and use cooldowns.
In O1S, you should have rampart/sentinel + sheltron for each twinbolts.

Afaik twin bolt ignores Sheltron, cd aren't fast enough to have a couple of them active at the times, and using only one (tried it) doesn't suffice. If you keep in sword and one cd suffice, it means you are not i310 but much better geared.

[Launched]

Afaik twin bolt ignores Sheltron, cd aren't fast enough to have a couple of them active at the times, and using only one (tried it) doesn't suffice. If you keep in sword and one cd suffice, it means you are not i310 but much better geared.

Sheltron works on Twin Bolt. At i310 you have about 40k HP, Twin Bolt does about 50k unmitigated. Sheltron by itself should be enough to just barely survive, combining it with Rampart or Sentinel (or even Reprisal) definitely means you'll survive. Plus you have Hallowed for one Twin Bolt. They're far enough apart that you'll always have something on top of Sheltron, even if the fight goes on for over 8 minutes and you get 6 Twin Bolts. You should Sentinel the first one because it's only 20s into the fight and you probably won't have the gauge for Sheltron.

[Phoenicia]

Afaik twin bolt ignores Sheltron, cd aren't fast enough to have a couple of them active at the times, and using only one (tried it) doesn't suffice. If you keep in sword and one cd suffice, it means you are not i310 but much better geared.

Only thing that ignores Sheltron is "Critical Hits". Tank Busters (like twin bolts) do not crit. If you are staying Shield Oath you will never fill your gauge fast enough without Holy Spirit but spending that for gauge kills your DPS. On a 1 minute gap between tank busters you can always have something up. Example: Rampart, then Sentinel, then Rampart again and that's the first three settled.