Tank Gearing help!

[Donjo]

I don't understand why some people continually insist that it's not the tank's job to deal damage. If that were the case, then it wouldn't deal damage. Instead, damage occurs naturally while tanking (as opposed to healing), and in considerable amounts. The main tank will generally deal 40-60% as much damage as an equally geared and skilled DPS; that's not negligible.

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. In a party, a Tank needs multipliers on their threat in order to keep the attention of enemies. I'm not saying that the tank shouldn't deal damage. Their damage counts somewhere. 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. The job is called Tank, not DPS. The argument of "If that were the case, then it wouldn't deal damage." is empty. 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. 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.

In my experiences, a tank smacking something in their tank stance will deal only about 25-33% as much damage as an equal DPS. A tank who is not in their tank stance gets closer to 40-50%, and a tank fully specced into strength will creep closer to 60 or possibly even 70%. A tank is built to be able to do good damage if and only if they are not tanking in a party environment.

I think most tanks grossly overestimate the importance of VIT past a certain point. Maybe their healers really suck.

Let's split max health into chunks of, say, 500. If that tough boss' auto attack did about 500 damage per swipe, then every 500 health means you can survive one more. Every 500 health is one mistake the healers can make without getting you killed. Every 500 health is one heal the healers can spend on a hurt DPS instead of you. Every 500 health is one spike of unexpected damage(ie. critical hit, accidentally didn't dodge that AOE, etc.) that you might survive. 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.