Can Healers Stop Running Ahead in Dungeons

[Shurrikhan]

I'm surprised this thread is still going lol. It's all just common sense to me, the tank tanks, the tank pulls, the tank takes the damage, etc.

It ends up less than common sense when you go from "we should clear as quickly as we can" to "only X may take damage, and even if X is in a better position than Y to fill Y's role for a few GCDs, and vice versa, neither should ever do anything but their own tasks."

What's the harm in someone ripping off a tank if the ripped mob is not going to lose out on AoE damage and will die before reaching the DPS without the DPS even having to run? What's the harm in a healer gathering mobs for AoEs, if his sprint is still available while the tank's is not, if he can take literally no effective damage from doing so? The mobs were still being tanked in either case -- which is to say that they were handled in a way that reduced incoming damage and improved the efficiency of damage the party could put out (through (a) sooner access to full AoEs and/or (b) through fewer healer GCDs that need be lost to healing or fewer tank GCDs that need be spent in a damage-reducing stance).

One can't help but wonder what would have happened to these specialist-as-the-only-one-who-can-complete-a-role-related-task hyper-fixated people in A4S during the isolated add-fight when a tank isn't available...

You lost me at algebra.

X and Y are just shorthand for "any given person" and "any second given person".

To reiterate more simply -- tanking (reducing effective raid damage taken and increasing raid damage doable by opening up space, redirecting enemy attention, and repositioning or grouping enemy mobs) something that is something any character can perform. It is any action which acts to that effect. It is not, however, any action as performed by a tank. A tank has the best toolkit for tanking, but that does not mean that a tank will tank simply because it possesses a, in most ways, superior tanking toolkit; that toolkit needs to actually be used effectively. Similarly, that toolkit does not make it uniquely capable of most of those tasks. Anyone who can create distance over which enemy attacks are ineffectual, bait out AoEs away from others, and gather enemies, etc., can to some degree tank. "Tanking hits" in the sense of surviving otherwise one-shot attacks (or, "tank-busters") is the only unique advantage available to tanking specialists.

Far too often people conflate a tank's unique ability to survive a massive strike, or their greater mitigation efficiency, with a need to command attention of every mob from the moment they are engaged to the moment they die, even if it means taking longer and, in effect, more damage, all without the risk of even taking an extra healing GCD actually paying off. If it's best practice, it will correlate pretty well directly to speed. If it has no, or a negative, impact on speed, then something's gone wrong -- likely due to a role being either slightly misinterpreted, or not capitalized upon well enough.