Radical thought...remove the off-tank?

[jarlmcqueen]

I'd be for it if not just for the sake of stopping one thing I've run into from time to time

Tank 1: I'm the tank.
Tank 2: NO I'm the tank!
Tank 1: NO!!! ME!!!
Tank 2: ME!!!

*fight starts after 10 minutes of tanks arguing*
*tanks proceed to try and out tank each other, mess up positions, dps and healer rotations and wipe the group*

Tanks 1 and 2: HEALERS FAULT!!!

If I am main tanking, and the off-tank won't stay out of tank stance and keeps spamming their agro combo, I'll drop out and let them have it. I refuse to fight another tank for agro.

[Mycow8me]

Radical thought: Make Tank stance and DPS stance so vastly inferior to each other that a main tank and off tank have to choose them. Current DPS spread between tank stance and non tank stance is fine but DPS stance needs a +25% vulnerability up or so to keep main tanks from using it. Another way to go about it would be to make tank stance stronger and gear defenses lower but its fairly cumbersome. Less reliance on auto attack fluff damage, more boss casting bar attacks. Mini tank busters between stronger busters since every class has active cooldowns (innerbeast, TBN, Sheltron). Overall just give tanks a necessity to use it.

Part of the problem is how fast gear overpowers you to content, gotta love these giant ilvl gaps of 5 and 10 instead of 2 and 4... But if a DPS stance were to sacrifice mitigation for DPS instead of just adding DPS baseline, we would see alot less use of it in MT slots. +25% damage to a tank is pretty rough.

Dark knight needs a DPS stance and SE should have realized this by now. Darkside needs a DPS stance rework and grit/darkside should be less costly to activate than what grit currently is.

Well that's my two cents on this anyway.

[ChameleonMS]

I like the idea of having variety in the raid design. This issue is not enough fights actually require the OT to do anything to avoid a death/wipe. Too many fights, especially of an older raid tier, or story mode can be just powered through with 1 tank and 1 healer.

A change which could help this situation is a modification to the Duty Finder (not the party finder).
When a tank or healer queue's for e.g. Main Scenario, and that tank/healer has an iLvl above i100, the DF could dynamically change the required party composition. So, you could end up with 2-2-4, 1-2-5, 2-1-5, or 1-1-6 party compositions based on the iLVL of the people participating.

[Avatre]

If I am main tanking, and the off-tank won't stay out of tank stance and keeps spamming their agro combo, I'll drop out and let them have it. I refuse to fight another tank for agro.

That's why I always start off in DPS stance until I know the other tank isn't going to go all "I'm the MT now"
*insert "I'm the captain now" meme*

[Gravton]

Because communicating and doing something skillful is at least a little more fun than PLANTING YOURSELF IN ONE SPOT and just doing such a good job "tanking". I'm all for easy shit, but not at the expense of skill.

Hahaha ummm what? Sooo yelling swap and having the tanks move from front to back is "such a good job tanking" in your opinion? That's it? That's all it takes? Swap!

There are so many different ways to make 2 tanks required. Putting a debuff on a tank to force a swap is the laziest.

[Gravton]

Um... What? Does not compute. Right now PLD is the preferred tank for raiding due to its mitigation and utility. WAR is fine and can be used for raiding, but I don't know a single raid group that would say this. During HW, yes, but not in SB.

Hahaha, ok. Then it would mean play pld or gtfo. I mean really, as it relates to her comment it would mean "play <insert tank here> or gtfo". Is that better for you?

[Dzian]

There are so many different ways to make 2 tanks required. Putting a debuff on a tank to force a swap is the laziest.

Yes but alot of stuff is lazy by design every encounter is so heavily scripted it's gets to a point you could almost automate your cooldowns. 45 seconds into fight pop cool down. 90 seconds. Pop cool down. Etc etc. There's never any variance...

That also makes for uninteresting tank swaps because there's never a situation where a tank has had to use all his cooldowns in a random 30 second burst and then swap out because he has none left or anything such. Where currently most swaps are because of those arbitary vulnerability things.

[ViolaCrossfire]

Susanno intermission and lakshmi ot cleave are probably examples of good duo tank implementation. They are interactive, different and managable to their fullest extend.

[CaTi]

I miss the old tank swaps based around a creeping debuff like with Ultima's Bane. Not exactly difficult but it's something to keep an eye on which feels a little more dynamic

[Chiramu]

I miss the old tank swaps based around a creeping debuff like with Ultima's Bane. Not exactly difficult but it's something to keep an eye on which feels a little more dynamic

I miss when a tank has to grab adds or the healers and damage dealers will die :P. It means you can tell if the second tank is truly awake or not, moving two centimetres to the left and pressing, "provoke" is not really anything hard.

Old primal fights were not really any different to the primals now, swapping because of a debuff is the same as needing to swap cause all cooldowns are used.