What to manage as a tank?

[Terhix]

Yea the old design failed, specifically because you could simply avoid the problem, that’s what I want to change. Like I’m trying really hard here to explain that I don’t want exactly HW nor do I want exactly modern tanks but either I’m not explaining that well or you are taking my points way too literally. Imagine the old system but cut shirk, cut all agro management tools of the other classes and make tank DPS stance reduce agro generation by 30% then buff tank damage in a flawless dummy test to melee damage. Tanks then HAVE to use their agro tools as they simply cannot get around it. That doesn’t mean that their goal isn’t to max DPS but how they have forced interaction with their ability to maintain agro, this isn’t exactly what I want but a representation of it. FORCE me to interact with my ability to tank and control the encounter even if this interaction comes at the expense of my DPS

You will also need to remove Provoke from the game if you want it to work like that, and I'm not sure how you're going to do tank swaps without it and Shirk. I can respect that you have your own idiosyncratic vision for what you'd like the game to be like, but the point ultimately stands: if there is a problem with tanks not having enough to do, which I'm not 100% convinced there is (*), there are other solutions to that problem that don't involve "what if tanking but with DPS loss". Again, WoW doesn't seem to have this problem and it has largely the same principles for tanks, including passively doing less damage than a proper dps class.

And yes that’s my entire point, why am I playing a TANK if the endgame of my optimisation is playing my entirely disconnected DPS rotation that does enforced lower damage because their is no restrictions on optimising it to perfection. This is ironically something healers get right as a support your first priority should be performing your support role and this should at points come at the cost of your ability to do DPS. Modern tanks meanwhile sequester the two halves and then make the tanking half way too easy so the long and short of your optimisation is optimising an overly simply melee DPS with no positionals or uptime concerns

The main difference between healing and tanking is that healing is an active thing healers do, while tanking is an entirely passive act of being punched in the face.

*) OT doesn't have enough to do, but that's a content problem and to a lesser degree invuln problem, and making tanking itself more involved doesn't solve that.