Is not using tanking stances actually best?

[Buzzwords]

ok SO... yes, it is.

for one, paladin and warriors tank stances have the ADDED downside of NOT being in their dps stances. so EVEN if the tank loses 20% but the healer GAINS 20% damage, the party is still DOWN the 5% from the warrior NOT being in his dps stance. net loss.

next, on average a tank will out damage a healer, so 20% gained by the tank is MORE THAN 20% lost by the healer.

finally, you assume that the loss of tank stance requires ADDITIONAL healing compared to with it on. with proper play this is simply not the case. think of the damage a tank takes during a boss fight:

auto attacks are often trivial, and can be mitigated with things like anticipation, raw intuition, shield blocks, the passive lifegain from storms path, and regens/embraces that are gonna get cast anyway.

room wide aoe already require the healer to roomwide HEAL. how hard this hits the tank ALMOST doesn't matter at all, as the healer has to heal THE PARTY anyway. so if the RDM, NIN, and SCH all need a succor to survive, the paladin gets a succor for free.

so now we move on to actual tank busters: use cooldowns. mitigation doesn't stack additively ANYWAY. sheltron + rampart amount to about -40% damage taken (if the shield block is worth 25%. a high end shield is actually worth slightly MORE) sheltron + rampart + shield oath is about 52% (same value for sheltron) the 20% shield oath is only worth an extra 12%, but it still costs you the full amount in damage penalty. (also, the numbers get WORSE for tank stance if you use sentinel, vengeance, or shadow wall instead. the higher the mitigation, the less adding more does)

so now i ask, does the healer have to cast any MORE heals because we're missing that 12%? NOT does he have to heal, cuz he has to heal the shield oath guy to. i'm asking if he has to heal MORE. the answer is almost always no anyway, but even if they DO have to heal more, how MUCH more, and then how much potency is LOST by that hypothetical increase in heals versus GAINED by the tank himself as touched upon earlier?

[Jollyy5]

I may or may not stay in tank stance for trash pulls in dungeons depending on the healer, but I know being in Deliverance is optimal whenever possible.

I'd like to see a healer try and make up for the DPS loss if I'm stuck in Defiance when I could be in Deliverance and drop 7-9 Decimates on 6+ mobs with 5 of them being crit/direct hits, most likely beating both damage dealers in DPS.

[Liam_Harper]

And for a Pull of trash mobs, who even care about your dps as a Tank ?

The faster a pack of mobs dies, the better. You can pop your cd's, the pack dies or is dying off within the duration and things don't get a chance to be much danger.

Tank stance is perfectly fine on mobs, but if you're comfortable downing a pack in dps stance, it's a small plus.

[Nolagamer]

I would say that if the majority of advice is that tanking in dps stance is preferable to tank stance then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the gameplay in that department.

[Kalise]

I would say that if the majority of advice is that tanking in dps stance is preferable to tank stance then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the gameplay in that department.

Yeah, there's just a lack of compelling reasons to utilize Tank stance, given that both survivability and Enmity are such binary concepts. You either survive the tank buster (After which, you get healed back up) or you don't. You either have aggro or you don't (After which, DPS/Healers will just use a detaunt and drop their Enmity...)

While, damage scales infinitely. Every single point of DPS, continually adds up.

So, this combined with the fact that there's the two notable balance "Features" consisting of:

1) The vast majority of actually threatening damage, comes from Tank busters (Or Trash pulls) that coincide with a damage mitigation cooldown (Many of which, don't actually stack very well with 2/3 Tank stances...) so it's easy to just rely on popping a CD instead of having this constant defence.

2) Healing throughput is nuts. Like, it's expected that people should eventually not even bother using GCD's on Tanks and rely entirely on oGCD's, Regen and high potency Shields to sustain Tanks (Also, bypassing a Tanks need to do things like, have constant defences, use self sustain skills and use CD's on anything that isn't a tank buster)

That said, even if the above 2 points were addressed, people would still try and find a way to use DPS stances, because there's no downsides on them, only upsides. Unlike Tank stances which have that damage penalty associated with them...

[Ekimmak]

Playing the Devil's advocate here... Tankstance isn't ideal, but sometimes it's needed.

Yes. Sometimes you will need that extra aggro or extra 20% defences. Because sometimes, someone screws up and you need to compensate.

It's honestly all that needs to be said about it.

[Orbus]

I would say that if the majority of advice is that tanking in dps stance is preferable to tank stance then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the gameplay in that department.

100% agree with this, and squeenix is only further encouraging this behavior by raising the threat generation on everything that pulls additional threat to obscene levels and giving every single class threat reduction tools.
BLM SMN and RDM all get both presence of mind and diversion!
In what world are either one of these ever needed outside of savage content outside of having a bad tank?
Even in savage content, it's because tanks are encouraged to dps, dps, dps, not worry about threat.

[winsock]

The healer just has less to lose.

Here is an easy example to illustrate:
Let's say that we have a 1 second gcd and that the tank and the healer can do up to 100 dps with a gcd that does 100 dmg

We'll say the tank loses 20% of their dps while in tank stance, which means their max dps in tank stance is 80.

We'll say that when the tank is in tank stance, the healer must perform a heal every 5th cooldown, meaning their max dps is also 80.

If the tank drops tank stance their dps becomes 100. The healer now needs to heal every 4th cooldown, which puts their max dps at 75.

That's the gist of it. Healing 20% more is a smaller loss than tank stance. It's also worth nothing that in practice, the healer isn't necessarily needing to heal 20% more.

[DaulBan]

I would say that if the majority of advice is that tanking in dps stance is preferable to tank stance then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the gameplay in that department.

I mean we're the ones who call it 'tank stance' when really the term should be 'crutch stance' or whatnot. The game doesn't call it that, and when you read the tooltip it's up to you to decide whether or not you really think the penalties are worth the small bump in survivability and large bump in aggro. That's really where these entire conversations about whether or not 'tank stance' is appropriate or not fall apart; there are members of the community that insist it's mandatory because of a monikor we've given it coming from WoW or other MMOs, when the game itself doesn't really indicate that you absolutely should be using it. Tank stances are fine as is for people who cannot do the content without them, but they're not worth it to anyone worth their salt. It's not really an issue with tank stance, it's just something you take off your hotbar when you realize you don't need it anymore. Vercure isn't good on RDM because it doesn't do damage, you shouldn't use it, there is no reason to buff it because it isn't useful in most content most the time.

[ReiMakoto]

Imma be honest, but most of the tanks I know would quit if tanks dealt less damage and had to sit in tank stance. Tanks doing noticeable dps is what makes them more interesting and fun than tanking in other games, being forced into tank stance would make it was less fun.