Minor Complaint/Mini Rant

[Sapphidia]

I fully understand what you mean. It's certainly natural as a good player to judge others silently (I know I always think badly of the ability of any player I see who has esoterics armor parts but a 180 weapon, for instance), though of course it's only being an asshole if you're rude about it to them. But yes, the tank issue is an extra layer of judgement.

We're judging people based on this strange tradeoff that the best tanks arent the ones that are maximising their tankiness.

I actually found myself thinking the same thing today... about -myself-, and it's something I now realise I've been feeling a lot recently. I'm not sure if other tanks have this experience, but it's something that happens in Pugs. As a Paladin, I'm nicely geared, STR spec, and have full Pentamelded accessories. When playing with my static group (currently on A3S) I try to maximise my DPS where possible, finding the points to use Sword Oath where it wont cause a tank splat.

When I run the Duty Finder though, I feel... torn. I ran a load of Alex Normal today to get some tokens for my alt classes. I found myself struggling to swap into Sword Oath at points I would have had no issue doing on Savage, because I felt that I didn't know the healers. It wasnt a physical struggle, my health wasnt dipping low... it was a mental struggle. I wanted to, but also didn't want to.

They'd likely have been fine of course, but I didn't want to push too hard if there was a risk of dying due to me not being in Shield Oath. It would have been -my fault- if choosing to go sword oath too often caused a death if the healers werent used to it. And because stuff like Alex Normal has really trivial DPS checks, there isnt as much need to minmax it. I do acceptable DPS with my gear level/pentamelds just doing dps-focused rotation in shield oath. But "acceptable" isnt -optimal-.

I never have this issue with any healers I know, but I'm always reluctant to go all out sword oath in duty finder groups unless i know it's going to be super trivial. I just don't want that potential back and forth bitchy argument about not being in the right tanking stance. And thus I find myself beating myself up over not being the best tank I could in these situations - technically I'm doing the right thing in these encounters by being stupidly easy to heal and making the success of the group more assured, yet in doing so I'm not doing as much DPS as I could with a little extra risk.

I -hate- this feeling of having to make specific tradeoffs and how potentially judgemental the community can be. It's a no-win situation.