Tanking in FF14 question

[ReiMakoto]

Yeah, gotta love the people who seem to think there was some kind of difference between turning stance on/off and today.

"REMEMBER THEM DAYS WHEN YOU NEEDED GRIT FOR THE FIRST UNLEASH!? I MISS THOSE DAYS!!!!"

......sigh.

Yeah, like turning Grit off after one Unleash was just awesome gameplay or something.

Meanwhile, newbie tanks who left Grit (or whatever stance) on got yelled at, scolded, mocked, etc.

I'm going to repeat that.

It was considered bad play to use your defensive stance as a tank because it did "less DPS". A whole 10% less. Not that tanks were ever anywhere close to the top of the DPS charts, and not like you didn't already have 2 other people there whose job it was to kill junk, and not like that 10% DPS really did that much of a difference in 4man content.

EDIT: And before anybody yells at me about OTs and everybody should do DPS, etc. For tanks and heals, DPS is a tertiary job. In 8-man fights (which I am not talking about here), the OT is a gimp DPS until or unless he is needed, depending on the fight or if the MT dies. Obviously. He should be doing whatever he can to do as much DPS as possible, because there's literally nothing else he can do. But in 4man groups, the tank's first job is to keep mobs on him and his second job should be to keep himself alive. This includes defensive abilities, including stance back when that was a thing. And besides... losing the 10% defense on the stance meant healers had to cast more heals and do less DPS as a result and if the tank mis-calculated how much threat everybody else put out, this was a further waste to the healer's time when other people need heals dumped on them as a result. I often questioned just how effective going without stance really was, considering these points.

My dude it was way more than a 10% difference. It was a 20% damage straight up penalty, and the stance locked you out of using certain abilities, in some cases your most powerful abilities. It was more like a 30%+ difference in dps, and trust me it was noticable as tanks could do up to 70% of the damage of a dps, potentially more in dungeons cos their aoe burst was so strong.

I dont want aggro back btw but you are seriously misrepresenting how it was

Edit: in some cases using dps stance over tank stance actually made you more tanky btw. As drk if you used dps stance you could become essentially invincible as dps stance generated way more mana so you could spam abyssal drain and blackest night infinitely making you almost unkillable, and warriors IR burst did so much damage than you could often kill the add pack before the whms holy stun resistance applied to the mobs meaning you took no damagem