When should I drop tank stance?

[KatsuraJun]

As a PLD, I view changing stance as a risk which has little reward and a high risk of losing aggro. As stated above, it only helps auto attack, so it amounts to little damage in the ground scheme of things. Nothing makes you look worse than losing aggro and causing instability, and it's other people's jobs to focus on ways to maximize damage. Sure, gutting out the last bit of DPS from each member of the group has its value, but PLD tank is the last member to bring their focus to this element. DPS should come well behind increasing enmity and decreasing damage taken to ensure stability.

When playing OT I could see emphasis on changing stances as a PLD, but that isn't what is being discussed here.

A lot of talk in these forums about how to maximize damage when it's such a low priority. I blame game dynamics influencing priorities. People get bored playing hate and damage sponge, so lets care about trying to get up the DPS meter. No, be a tank.

PLD should never be using their tank stance in a raid scenario, unless you're running 2 PLD and one of you is forced to pull or shit hits the fan. You have the most to lose - it's not "just" your autoattacks, it's your autoattacks on top of a damage reduction, and swapping back and forth is a 2GCD loss.

It's not people being bored and squeezing out a miniscule amount of DPS, staying in tank stance is losing about a third to half of your damage, and tanks do about 70% of a DPS role's damage output. If you do savage, a good static will want you to dps as much as you can because keeping you alive is not difficult for healers - they just want to make sure they meet damage checks which can be very tight. Meanwhile, in a pug group, you definitely still want to DPS because it's very likely that the DPS and your co-tank are underperforming where at least one DPS is doing less than you and the other tank is doing half of that. Either way, staying in tank stance is only appropriate for content that's not difficult. Which, if you don't do, then fair enough, you can do whatever you want - back when Flash was cross role, there was a guy that went around flashing his entire way through ex roulettes on DRK. But if you want to do content where your performance actually matters? Drop your tank stance. Use it to pull or to get snap aggro if the DPS are about to overtake you, or use it as an emergency cooldown if the situation took a wrong turn and you're down a rampart for an oncoming tankbuster. That's what it's for. Well, that and leveling dungeons.

Maximizing damage is not a low priority. It's just the only thing that takes effort to do, so that's what people talk about. Pressing two buttons because you see a tankbuster on the boss castbar is not hard.

So while this thread seems mostly aimed at paladins, I do have a question. I recently dinged 70 on DRK and realized the stance-dance was far more costly on it vs PLD. As PLD I would treat Shield Oath as another "defensive CD" when others are down and drop it when able, but doing so on DRK has proven to be a bit difficult when trying to balance MP use between Grit and TBN, especially when from what I understand, you want Grit on to do Bloodspiller. Is there a method to the madness of balancing stance-dance on DRK, or is it more 'use only for first pull and BS'?

No, stance dancing is less penalizing on DRK than PLD. You should still minimize it because there's still a penalty unlike a certain Warrior job, but you lose 1GCD and some mana instead of 2GCDs, which is far worse for PLD. For the most part though, unless your healers are on another level of incompetence, DRK has a bigger array of defensive tools than PLD at 70 thanks to the power of TBN, so you can pull with grit and forget about it for the rest of the fight.