Tanks, please use strength gear.. :(

[Cooperal]

Vitality doesn't actually lower damage you take. Strength does by making the fight shorter.

Not that your statement is wrong. But you seem to have an unrealistic expectation of what sort of miracles a tank should be able to pull out of a hat when put into an average DF group.

Fractal has one much harder pull near the middle of the dungeon immediately before the chimera room. Neverreap has two, each before the first and second bosses. In all 3 cases, the difficulty of each are not determined as much by the tank and healer as much as they are by the two primary DPS players. These particular full-pulls can not be sustained at their maximum power for very long, and in most cases the difference between handling it or not is far greater than a few strength-buffed tank attacks. You'll die first.

When your DPS are still working up their Law gear (and that's a lot of them), it can be very hard to survive these pulls without splitting them up unless you have the greatest safety net possible. We can usually tell from earlier fights just how likely these pulls are to work. But it should be a no-brainer which one works out better:

-The DPS can place their AoE on 8 enemies at once while having a slightly weaker tank-dps.
or
-The DPS can only place their AoEs on 4 targets at once while the tank is doing slightly better, often single-target physical damage.

Suddenly the latter case is the one that safe and slow. The former is significantly quicker than any small bit of time you might lose on a single bigger target like a boss (especially that damn minotaur who cuts chunks of your melee time anyway by charging around and occasionally throwing out a 360 degree knockback). If you're rolling a party of veterans sure, but all too often I find that VIT makes impossible pulls possible. And hey, so what if the healer has to cast stronger heals, at least they have more time to act on it. Spare time is DPS time.

And if the healer has more DPS time, they will actually lower the damage we take "by making the fight shorter".

[Drtoxicmedica]

snip

Right but you're carrying them. Which still ultimately boils down to lack of dps to start with. Now in a perfect world everybody will be playing to there max however this is df. Demanding everyone play at an extreme level of proficiency is unreasonable. This is a game of many players of varying time skill and basic focus of play either to relax or play in a hardcore fashion. What I'm saying is just because you have a high dps tank doesn't automatically mean a faster run and tank strength gear isn't the deciding factor in dps output as a whole I've out dps'd warriors on my drk (while in mostly fending cause screw Marlboro pf groups) while they had full slaying simply because I knew better how and when I could drop stance. Not arguing strength isn't awesome I rock it all the time but it does not automatically equal faster or easier runs. This blanket statement is just bad for newer tanks which is in turn bad for df as a whole.

[Drtoxicmedica]

I want someone to actually carry this out as a scientific experiment, vit vs strength, and post YouTube video to compare the times on those runs. With same dps to control that variable. Who's willing to do the science?

With good dps it shaves off a ton of time along with healer dps you can't blow right through either of the 2 experts nearly twice before your protect falls off. The problem is when you have new tanks who think dps is everything and neglect there actual job rile as a result. Full strength is awesome saying it's the only way to play is just asking for trouble. Would rather have a bad tank stacked with vit then a derp of a tank with less hp then the brd.

[Dererk]

It's not very nice to contribute to the crusade of discriminating against Tanks who are wearing the Accessories that the game tells them to wear.

I wear 2 tank accessorys and 3 strength accessorys.

If SE wants tanks in full vit accessorys they need to do a few of these things.

1. Make vitality either do These things. Increase defense, increase mitigation.

2. Make parry more useful. Its too rng.

3. Put enough str on the gear so we can keep hate better.

4. Buff the frigin dps's dps I mean come on up their damage if you have to lower their defense enough so that it won't kill them on a raid wide aoe at about 85% hp and boost their damage.

[Shyle]

I have 2 sets, a STR set (which I consider my primary set) and a vit set (i'm at 21k in defiance with it). As for dungeons, I have yet to have any issue doing fast runs with big pulls in my str set in DF/EX. There are times it can get hairy due to maybe the healer not paying attention or maybe I just ran too far ahead out of range and had to use a few CD's, but in all I'm comfortable with 16.8k hp in str set. In Fractal and Neverreap, I only have defiance on during the first combo for the second boss, I swap to deliverance since the damage is all avoidable (and auto attacks are minimal at best).

It's all about how comfortable you are as a tank in the encounter. If you're learning, use vit, I would assume if you're in progression (savage), Vit or a mix would probably be preferred. I just had a "discussion" with a new warrior who said it's not their job to do damage, but "survive", I agree with the survival part, but I think if you're running into basic dungeons with 20k hp, it seems wasted to me. Of course this tank also didn't have provoke, or monk past lv. 11. and only did butchers block combo.

[LionKing]

I foreseen we will have a thread says:

Dear Healer please use Casting accessories as the mobs take forever to die.

MORE DEEPS...

Good grief, OP....

[VentiMocha]

I would rather have you doing more damage so the fights don't take forever and I run OOM. :'3

I would rather you learn how to conserve your mana.

[Galgarion]

On the note of strength acccessories: Sure, understandable.

any competent tank should be in DPS stance.

I wouldn't suggest that this is universally true. Even if equally geared and using strength accessories, there are going to be DPS players so good at their jobs that you won't be able stay in your dps mode indefinitely. Monks are gud now, y'heard?

[Mikedizzy]

This poster obviously does not play tank on any kind of regular basis because your opening post is total nonsense. Stay in your tank stance....what??? you should be only in tank stance when you absolutely need to and then dps'ing the rest. As far as telling someone how to spec their character that they paid money for is total garbage as well. They can be a full VIT tank if they want to. I go all strength but only because I am comfortable doing so and am good at it. Just for the record I can heal a tank just fine in any stance they are in and if you cannot then that says more about you then them. (I heal as Scholar and White Mage although WHM not to 60 yet). Come on man just leave these people alone and stop giving bad advice.

[Evanoel]

As a healer main, I'd rather my tank go full vit, thank you. If the DPS are rather lacking, I can help dpsing, not the tank.