Why not just make everyone a DPS?

[Sapphidia]

I think the problem with Alexander Savage is that it is turned higher than FCoB was in terms of DPS requirement but not the raid-wide damage. Which is why tanks spend most of their time in DPS mode. Even the busters are kinda weird, like in A1S, the buster literally does twice the tank's HP but it is spread so far apart that the tank just throws all its CDs at it and survive with over 50% HP left.

This, this exactly. The tuning is just -slightly- off right now. It's too easy to tank the damage whilst basically undergeared for the encounter, which means there's absolutely no incentive to improve your overall "tankability", if such a concept exists.

Obviously on ANY encounter when you start to overgear it then tanks will start using more dpsy gear, experimenting with single tanking or just DPS stance a lot more, that's how things go - once an encounter is beaten, you do everything you can to beat it -faster-. The problem is that there isnt really any need on the current Alex content to beat it -safer-. When that Hyper Plasma shot comes in on A1S you're going to pop the same cooldowns in i210 gear as you did in i180 and whilst you'll have more HP left it wont have made the encounter any easier really.

I'm mostly just surprised that so much of a focus is on the dps output from day 1 in crappy gear from a tank perspective. You're right about the spacing of the tankbusters. Heck, even on something as trivial as Titan Hardmode when it first came out and people were trying it in low level gear you wanted as much tank stats and health as possible because of the sheer frequency of the mountain busters comboed with the aoe stomps. The tank was always at risk of dying at any point and you really noticed the tank stats of the MT throughout the encounter. In Alex 1 you only notice the tank's toughness in the 1 second after the Hyper compressed plasma when you have a quick peer at how much health they had left before they're back to full again and probably swapping to sword oath.

The TLDR here? Tanks arent being tested in their ability to take damage in 3.0 content, so we're relegated to being tested purely in our ability to DPS as long as we can pop a cooldown every 90 seconds.