Quote Originally Posted by MerlinCross View Post
What do YOU want out of a tank besides a DPS that can survive a tank buster? I don’t understand why people enjoy being a meaty DPS.

To put it a different way; when it feels like tanking could be done with a well programmed bot, yeah it doesn’t feel important. Do as much damage as you can, do DDR, and hit your CDs at these fixed points.
Most any class in this game could be done with a well programmed bot. The thing is in MMOs mitigation is mostly passive. Defense is just a stat and depends mostly on gear. We of course have our cooldowns but that's still largely passive, the active component is mostly just knowing when to activate it. I mentioned Tera before, that's about the most active mitigation you could possibly get. It was cool but your primary rotation was just using damaging skills. That's just the way tanks work.

In terms of what a tank could actually do, well it gets complicated. Agro management is actually a healer and dps skill more than a tank skill. You could give them a rotation and the better it's executed the more agro they get but that's just dps by another name. If a dps can challenge a tank for agro then it mostly becomes about how finely they can push the limit more than how much the tank can generate. Most anything they could add to a tank could be done just as well by a dps. Can they not move? Can they not do a rotation to keep up buffs? In any mmo the only real difference between a dps and a tank is the cooldowns and passive elements. A tank has passive defense and defensive cooldowns, a dps has passive damage and damage dealing cooldowns.

The reason people are happy with tanks being heavily armored dps is because that's exactly what a tank is. In any MMO that's what they do. Their damage rotation generates agro and they have cooldowns for reducing incoming damage. Even in games with full active mitigation they still seek to maximize dps by doing dps rotations for agro and minimizing the uptime of their mitigation.