Tank Gearing help!

[Argyle_Darkheart]

In the systems currently running this game, the tanks have to deal damage because 1 damage = 1 threat and a tank who isn't currently tanking needs to actually be able to kill things.

No they don't; look at Flash. SE could of designed a tank that doesn't deal damage, but they didn't.

I'm saying that out of all the things a tank should be worrying about, "tanking" is priority number one and "maximizing damage" is the absolute lowest priority.

I agree, but not to that degree. I think you (and many others) undervalue the tank's ability to contribute damage and overvalue how much the tank needs to gear for survival. Let me be clear, I do not suggest prioritizing STR over VIT until you have enough HP to survive reliably.

The argument of "If that were the case, then it wouldn't deal damage." is empty.

Why? This doesn't mean anything. My point is that it's designed that way. It didn't "have" to be.

It supports a DPS healer too. They have damaging spells, so why aren't they DPSing? Because their job is Healer. In your post, you decried this very thing.

Because the opportunity cost for contributing damage on a healer is far greather than that of a tank's. My point was that damage occurs naturally as part of your job as a tank (it didn't "have" to; it's designed this way), but not as a healer. It's not like you deal damage when casting a healing spell.

The only reason Tanks deal damage is because damage = threat. If they were supposed to deal a lot of damage, they'd deal such amounts without having to rely on multipliers on their base damage to keep threat. Their "tanking" stances wouldn't directly reduce their damage. If the Tank's job was to deal damage, it wouldn't be called a Tank. It would be called a DPS.

The reason tanks deal damage is because they're designed that way. I never meant to suggest that this was their top priority. Everything else you mention is for balancing purposes; of course they're not designed to deal as much damage as an equally geared and skilled DPS. That would be ludicrous. Also, tying damage to threat naturally leads to the conclusion that the tank should optimize their damage in order to increase
their effectiveness. Again, I'm not suggesting this is priority one, but it's definitely there.

That little green bar is the only kind of mitigation a tank can fully rely on. There is no such thing as having too much of it. If you stay at the absolute minimum to survive and replace extra Vit with Strength, then you will likely be killed the second something does not go according to plan. I've lost count of the times I've fallen into double digit health values. If I had even 7 less Vitality, I would have died. But I didn't, and we went on to win.

HP is not mitigation; stop saying that. And there is such a thing as too much HP. Every time you didn't "go into double digits" is an example of when you had too much HP. I never said HP buffer isn't useful (quite the opposite), but there is definitely a point of diminishing return (practically, not mathematically). Now, where you draw the line depends on a case by case basis, and there is a time and place for having a larger HP buffer. But that often comes at the cost of a higher potential DPS. Whether that's more or less valuable at any given time needs to be evaluated at that time, but more DPS always makes a difference. Still, I firmly believe that nothing in the current end-game content requires, or appreciably benefits, from such enormous amounts of HP.


Let me be absolutely clear, VIT > STR up to a certain point. Once you can survive reliably, any extra HP you can achieve won't make that much of a difference in your tanking capability. I'll concede that there may be situations in the current end-game content where enough of an HP buffer may allow healers to DPS, but asking your healers to DPS can, and often will, be very risky. But, really, healer DPS comes down more to player skill and incoming damage frequency, rather than "500 more HP" on the tank.