How tanking feels post ShB patch

[Nyxheart]

Logically speeking on a fundemental level if there was a stance that increases your roles abilities you should want to be in that stance. Healers for example. You want to dps cause you dont need to heal? Be in cleric stance. Youre healing? Dont be in cleric stance. Same for tanks you want to tank? Be in tank stance. You dont need to MT and should focus on damage? Be in dps stance.

But that wasnt the reality. No. Tanks wanted to be in dps stance to do more damage while being MT. A "good" tank didnt need tank stance to tank. So what does that encourage players trying to get good at their tank jobs to do? Not use tank stance. And if their not good at it? Well lets just keep it off and "get good".

I feel thats been the mentality since HW. Weither you agreed with that playstyle or not, it wasnt going to go away.

Now lets look back at balancing that. If tanks are going to find whatever means not to use it anyway, its useless. However, theres still skill gap and few enough tanks that theyll still be in need when the hype of a new class to level goes away. SE shouldnt want to scare players new to tanking away from the job or feed a bad atmosphere of "get good" anymore than it necessary. So how could they address it? Usually you only really notice/get infurated with a bad tank if they cant do the most fundemental thing, holding hate. Sure, you notice more if you pay attention, but enmity is what everyones going to notice. So if emity is a must and we go with stances, there needs to be one for emity. Oh and youd want to go with stances because emity combos would increase button bloat as anything they had would needs be equivelent in final damage or they would pick whichever caused more regardless of enmity.

So, if tanks should use tank stance lets take away their reason not to use it. Result? No more dps stance and no reason not to use tank stance. Its to balance the way players wanted to play. Theres still a skill gap, which you need otherwise why bother, but its not so bad as to really encourage a negative atmosphere.

Good bye blue dps. Now theyre just like every other tank using tank stance... Unless theyre refusing to use it on princable which would be pointless.

Enough players have shown this is how they want to play, so I believe SE balanced the game with that in mind. 5.0 may have made tanks feel more like dps, but I feel its only another responce to how many have appeared to act like they were dps since at least 3.0.

I dont like it either. It feels like a cop out but its not like its the first time theyve seemed to tryed to address the matter. Like the breif period when damage came from vit, the removal of bonus attribute points or locking tanks from dps accessories. As a former str tank I disliked all of those changes too. However I love being a warrior more than I dislike all the change that have happened and I can be satisfied with that. It sucks but I dont see it changing back this time.

[Valmarus]

Logically speeking on a fundemental level if there was a stance that increases your roles abilities you should want to be in that stance. Healers for example. You want to dps cause you dont need to heal? Be in cleric stance. Youre healing? Dont be in cleric stance. Same for tanks you want to tank? Be in tank stance. You dont need to MT and should focus on damage? Be in dps stance.

See that seems like the proper way to handle it to me, off tank DPSing while the main tank, you know, tanks. I'm not averse to tanks doing DPS, in case I never made that clear. Stance dancing I'm fine with and putting focus on a system where the main tank has to tank stance and off-tank can DPS stance is really the route they should have taken. What I don't like is that they FEEL like a DPS.

As for your later comments about bad tanking, the only issue I ever had with that is if they were bad at tanking and then didn't listen to polite instruction. I don't expect a tank to know how to tank from the start, and I get annoyed with people who treat low level tanks poorly without attempting to tutor. And that's the thing. The only people who came out of Lvl 15 dungeons as bad tanks were lazy ignorent fools. 99% of the tanks I met who couldn't tank those dungeons to begin with were tanking perfectly fine by the end of it. And they were grateful for the advice. That goes a long way of showing how low the entry level skill for hate management was, so nobody should find it intimidating. The Intimidation comes from poor players.