What do you guys think is the cause of severe lack of Tank users?

[Ultimatecalibur]

Let me get this straight: even if the damage ceiling has been continuously falling for the past couple expansions, we should be happy because the floor, filled with bottom-of-the-barrel tanks, has been raised to appease such players? I'm not sure what you're arguing here.

The Str Accessory Meta was never a case of skilled player versus non-skilled player. It was always only a case of swapping out Vit accessories for Str accessories to get a passive increase in damage dealt that inflated parses. Both Str Tanks and Vit tanks played identically. They would have pushed pretty much the exact same buttons at the exact same times (Only real difference would have been the amount of stance dancing which likely meant that the Vit tanks were potentially more skilled in their percentile). What the Str Accessory meta did was increase healing requirements and lowered DPS dps requirements.

Should tank players not be able to perform to the point where they can visibly make a difference in their party? Are you actively advocating for tanks that serve the purpose of an enmity punching bag?

No and no. I am saying that those HW tank dps numbers are inflated and use of them does not properly reflect the changes in relative dps output. If you actually use Vit Accessory users as the base line you will see that ShB increased tank dps by normalizing tank stance and dps stance damage to dps stance numbers.

The perspective of the HW vit accessory tank is invalid.

Not really. It gives the relative intended value of tank dps during HW which can then be compared to current relative values to show that it has increased.

I don't think that dps were slacking in HW. As much as everyone wants to forget about Gordias, which was tuned such that raid drops actually were a limiting factor for progression, everyone had to pull their weight. I don't think you can say that about Midas, either.

They were and it wasn't completely their fault as HW dps job design just wasn't friendly to many of them. Switching both tanks to Strength Accessories and limiting time in tank stance was just an easy way to reliably increase total party dps by about 5% or more without really changing how anyone played which was important in both Gordias and Midas.

Most of the changes both to tank stat progression as well as the push to simplify gameplay came after that, circa patch 3.4.

The Tank stat changes and role locked accessories occurred as a result of 3.0 to 3.3's Strength Accessory meta (Fending Accessories were in many ways considered useless drops and tanks, dragoons and monks were all fighting over Slaying Accessories).