Tanks, please use strength gear.. :(

[Freyyy]

That was not especially directed to you. It was just to compare the fact that you think you're only here to tank (basically being an attention-whore with the mobs) with an actual portion of the playerbase. Sorry if I offended you. It was not intended at all, I in fact even wanted to make some humor out of that. I'm not mad. Just sick of all these debates about STR and VIT on tanks and tanks thinking that they are only here to have an enormous chunk of useless HP just to take damage and nothing else. I want people to understand that VIT is like accuracy; once a certain cap is met, it's useless to go any further. You can invest the rest in more STR and use all of your job's capabilities to help your party at maximum.

And for

I wondered how long it would be before someone used that. No, i haven't been into alexander savage yet, however i have been into all the other savage modes pre nerfs, on all of the classes i have available. I know how an enrage timer works.
Once again, i say: If your raid is failing because your tank isn't putting out an extra * amount of damage, the issue isn't just your tank.

*sigh*. Does my nut in when people throw that crap around.

It's a new thing in Alexander Savage. Old 2.x raids didn't need tanks to put extra DPS. But from 3.0 Yoshi himself said that they were this time calculating fights to require healers and tanks to DPS as much as they can while performing their roles at their best and it's true. Alexander Savage DPS checks are no joke at all. You cannot clear them with tanks just tanking and healers just healing.

[Divine_Intervention]

Fair enough. Based on that information, i'll give savage a go on my tank (once i finish it with my healer main of course), and reserve my judgement till then.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not *entirely* disagreeing with you here. I believe all roles are capable of a little extra damage here and there, but i do feel that in something as my first time for example, i won't be focusing on pumping out damage as a tank, i'll be focusing on learning how to tank it.

As for earlier content, the same principles apply really. Was it made easier by tanks dpsing where they could, yeah. Was it 100% you're going to fail if they dont.. no.

[Freyyy]

Fair enough. Based on that information, i'll give savage a go on my tank (once i finish it with my healer main of course), and reserve my judgement till then.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not *entirely* disagreeing with you here. I believe all roles are capable of a little extra damage here and there, but i do feel that in something as my first time for example, i won't be focusing on pumping out damage as a tank, i'll be focusing on learning how to tank it.

As for earlier content, the same principles apply really. Was it made easier by tanks dpsing where they could, yeah. Was it 100% you're going to fail if they dont.. no.

Of course you have to first focus on learning the tanking, it's your role after all. That's completely normal. But once you get how you must tank a fight, finding how and when you can dish out more damage is the best thing a tank can do. As well as figuring out how much HP he's comfortable with before going STR on the rest. Tanking is always the priority as a tank. But it's not all you have to do.

[JMadFour]

So basically, we're DPS who just happen to have taunts.

yes? that's the mentality I should play with?

No, I haven't done any Savage anything, I'm still leveling.

after reading a couple of different threads like this, I decided to go ahead and switch all my points to STR, and swap all my accessories to STR ones, and just get used to tanking with minimum amounts of health now while I am leveling, so that when I get to max-level content, I won't have to hear anybody whining about it.

[Freyyy]

snip

If you intend to get into end game raiding, it's pretty much this. In this game, all jobs are damage dealers with characteristics that make them a tank, a healer, or a DPS.

Basically it is how jobs are built :
Tank = Damage + tanking
Healer = Damage + healing
DPS = Damage + more damage

But it's more accurate to say it that way :
Tank = Tanking + Damage
Healer = Healing + Damage
DPS = Damage + Damage


Tanking will always be the first priority of a tank as well as healing for a healer. But all jobs have high damage capabilities and it's not here for nothing. It's how this game's meta works currently. It may change in the future, we don't know. But the holy trinity is not as limited as in most other classical MMOs.

[TouchandFeel]

So basically, we're DPS who just happen to have taunts.

yes? that's the mentality I should play with?

Not exactly, you are first and foremost a tank and should behave as such.

Basically for me Tank priorities are as follows (not including encounter specific mechanics).

1) Aggro control and mob positioning/placement.
2) Mitigating damage, dodging stuff, not dying.
3) DPS.

After becoming familiar with tanking and the content, 1 and 2 sort of become second nature and you just start doing it without really thinking too much about it, which leaves you more room to focus on improving your DPS.

[Freyyy]

snip

^ this, it's a better way to explain it

[Yorumi]

1) Aggro control and mob positioning/placement.
2) Mitigating damage, dodging stuff, not dying.
3) DPS.

While this isn't wrong I think it's a bit misleading. In most games, 1 and 2 tend to take a lot more effort than they do here. So it leads tanks to feeling like they're just a dps. For example in this game on a single target dps really can't generate the amount of hate a tank can, it's not really even close. Contrast to something like WoW or swtor where dps are actually capable of challenging a tanks hate level. Sure a good tank won't lose it in those games, but the dps are capable of riding right on the edge. So tanks need to put far more thought into proper aggro management. Likewise they have a lot more active mitigation from buffs, debuffs, stacks, triggers etc that arn't present in the game game. And fights tend to be balanced more around incoming dps than scripted tank busters. That tends to make mitigation in this game be "press button when tank buster incoming."

In short, it's a lot easier to trivialize 1 and 2 in this game than other games leading tanks to not really feel like tanks.

[Freyyy]

snip

That's why we talk about the "tanking meta of this specific game"

[Yorumi]

That's why we talk about the "tanking meta of this specific game"

Well of course, but the specific problem is that tanks in this specific game don't feel like tanks they feel like dps. That's why I said it's a bit misleading to suggest the focus of a tank on dps is 3rd. Tanking in this game is more like 90% focus on dps, 5% focus on aggro, and 5% focus on mitigation. In this game, outside of savage, if a tank focused entirely on dps and totally ignored mitigation(and the only reason it needs to be considered at all in savage is that you need cooldowns to survive the busters) he would be considered a better tank by this community than one who focused on mitigation and let dps suffer.

You can imagine it makes tanks a tad but upset when they're told they're bad for focusing on tanking.