Tanks, please use strength gear.. :(

[Sapphidia]

Bonuses multiply with bonuses, that extra 20% + the extra 15-20% you get from darkside and maim or the extra 30% you get from FoF makes a HUGE difference.

You're assuming that a tank with some Vit wont use Maim/FoF/Darkside. Of course they will. 15-20% damage from Strength accessories is 15-20% damage. Not more. The tank's rotation wont change. They'll still use those skills regardless of stats.

5 seconds is the difference between full HP and dead. Your full HP does not help

If the extra Vit you gain changes it from 4 seconds to 6 seconds that's a whole extra GCD of damage a healer could do from a quick swap to cleric stance. And you CAN use cleric stance on big pulls. I have no issue with tanks pulling multiple packs of mobs when im healing on scholar, with a prepull shielding you can easily get a quick rotation of DoTs to Bane. Unless your tank is toting 14,000 health.

I'm not advocating full Vit. I'm just saying that a LOW GEARED tank trying to make big pulls will be hindering things if they go purely strength and dont hit a minimum threshold of comfortable health that means they can stay alive for 5-6 seconds without heals rather than 3-4.

And on the subject of paladins, they have next to no useable self healing on huge pulls and do far less AOE damage than other tanks as most aoe enmity comes from Flash which does no damage. They only have a crossclassed Bloodbath and Flash of course wont heal them from this. Bar Circle of Scorn on a 25 second cooldown, paladin aoe damage is limited to just cycling single target attacks. There's a reason that in 2.5 most paladins doing speed runs in instances tended to stack pure vit for the gigantic pulls, because they did minimal damage compared to the AOE of the healer/dps, so may as well let the healer DPS more.

[Duuude007]

I'm a fan of the OP's suggestion. and I still get the occasional crap healers who struggle with half-pulls and blame me specifically because while I am overgeared, I prefer to use str accessories as a WAR. The horror.

There is no happy medium.

[Gooner_iBluAirJGR]

Str gives all the tanks extra damage but Warriors are the only one of the three tanks that get massive defensive returns from the added attack power i.e. 30 seconds of Bloodbath, Inner Beast, Storms Path, Eqilibrium, Berserk + all of those skills.

DRK doesn't have as many self healing options as the warrior so I can understand a DRK opting for more VIT gear. Same goes for PLD.

If you're wondering, I use 3 Vit / 2 Slaying on my warrior and paladin.

[Erit]

Str gives all the tanks extra damage but Warriors are the only one of the three tanks that get massive defensive returns from the added attack power i.e. 30 seconds of Bloodbath, Inner Beast, Storms Path, Eqilibrium, Berserk + all of those skills.

DRK doesn't have as many self healing options as the warrior so I can understand a DRK opting for more VIT gear. Same goes for PLD.

If you're wondering, I use 3 Vit / 2 Slaying on my warrior and paladin.

VIT is still a detriment for Dark Knights due to Living Dead. Enough VIT to not be mistaken for a DPS, and then as much STR as you can hoard after that is the optimal setup, especially in the context of AoE tanking. I'll see your Warrior Overpower spam with Bloodbath and Vengeance on, and raise you Blood Price plus alternating DA>AD and Unleash spams with DP weaving. Assuming all other variables normalized, methinks that situation works out to about the same amount of effort for the healer to carry you through, but I'll defer to the judgement of the people who know how numbers work on that.

[Gooner_iBluAirJGR]

I'll see your Warrior Overpower spam with Bloodbath and Vengeance on, and raise you Blood Price plus alternating DA>AD and Unleash spams with DP weaving.

Yeah the HPS / AoE dps from those combos probably end up evening out—you're right. Without doing any hard testing though, I'd like to think (or hope) Berserk and Equilibrium put Warriors AoE dps/hps ahead lol.

@living dead, you're right, having HP in the 18k range makes a full heal pretty difficult but from my personal experience with seeing the skill in action, benediction is always mysteriously available LOL.

[Erit]

Yeah the HPS / AoE dps from those combos probably end up evening out—you're right. Without doing any hard testing though, I'd like to think (or hope) Berserk and Equilibrium put Warriors AoE dps/hps ahead lol.

@living dead, you're right, having HP in the 18k range makes a full heal pretty difficult but from my personal experience with seeing the skill in action, benediction is always mysteriously available LOL.

Berzerk would push the Warrior ahead for that burst window, yeah, but unless you cleansed the pacification the GCDs spent downed let the Dark Knight mostly catch up. For any reasonable length of time they have about the same amount of sustain, that amount being "Enough to let the healer do something".

And the Benediction point is kind of... well, working against you, since you force a White Mage to burn their "Oh Shit" button to save you from your own, which is counter-productive (which it seems was the design philosophy for making Dark Knight: "How can we make a viable tank job that works against itself and everything around it as best as possible?") at best. Then again, Living Dead is a bad "Oh shit" button by the standards of Hollowed Ground anyway unless you're matching a master-class Dark Knight against a phenomenally bad Paladin.

[Sigodek]

ooooohhhh my MP RUN OUT and the battle take forever
it's the tank's fault

[Jpec07]

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So...I'm going to go out on a limb and agree with OP, just mostly not for the same reasons.

As tanks, DPS is not our primary concern, but rather an incidental concern to our primary tasks: keeping threat, and surviving. The first is a struggle for new tanks at the moment - it's only now that I have my Eso sword that threat isn't as much of a problem, but the latter is all about our CDs and abilities. The mitigation we get from gear is a pittance compared to what our actions do, so if a tank is doing their job right and using their CDs properly, they will be able to survive Fractal and Neverreap in the HQ questing gear (plus or minus some Law pieces).