When should I drop tank stance?

[Claire_Pendragon]

This heavily reminds me of 2.0 Halatali as GLA/PLD.
People would argue "You must suck as GLA/PLD if your DPS can rip off hate from you."
Im like, there's literally only 2 options at this low of a level.
Threat combo, or flash.

No oGCDs to weave except FoF / mitigations.
No complex rotations or anything.

of course not every DPS could pull hate, but the best played DPS would build up more threat than a tank could generate on a boss fight. (of equal gear/skill)
The ONLY thing keeping me higher in threat, was if I got a full GCD off before them. (Sprinting and Shield lob.)
If there was a BRD who ranged or BLM who started casting as i ran up, then they held hate the entire fight, even with a voke prior to a FoF+savage blade in combo. (If they were geared and good)
Heck WHM could do even more DPS than everyone else at that level.
(Level 20 copperbell/halatali were poorly designed for tanks)

I had people argue with me "you must suck". Asked them to jump on their tank to prove me wrong. I jumped on WHM/BLM (mostly WHM), and every time, I proved them wrong by just spamming stone2 as WHM, and NOTHING ELSE. No cures, nothing. They would voke, and then the very next stone2 would pull hate back, and id be tanking till im either dead or the fight ends. (in the case of copperbell, no heals are needed until the last boss, so WHM can tank the 1st 2 bosses just fine. Last boss requires you to heal yourself between stone2s, and cures wont generate enough hate to overtake a tank.)

With the examples you gave above though, i havent done very much testing, but it might not have been possible for them to overtake you, even if they do get extremely close. (I did my extensive testing back in 2.0, and now i just dont care about what the limits are.)

the best and worst RDMs cant be that much different, due to how RDM is on the easy side of playing. When people told me what my DPS was as RDM in savage, the difference of 50 DPS would be a massive percentile difference, where as 50dps wouldnt be much of a difference to a MNK or SAM for example.
But then looking at the DRG/BRD, they dont really hit as hard as SAMs/BLMs, but they do compliment eachother. So I couldnt really say much in their case.

At Lv60 you do have more DPS options, so they do need to weave in threat reductions, but sometimes the threat meters are deceptive.

When I used to do A12S, the WHM of my group was solo healing, and would be right up my butt in threat. I had to do extra powerslash combos (our WAR didnt want to start the fight for extra threat, and we had no NIN) but after the add phase, no matter how close the WHM got in threat, he would never over take me, but it always looked like he was a hair from overtaking threat.

So its really hard to say based on threat meters.