Strength Tanks

[Desudro]

I wonder if there are any DPS out there who switched to a Tank job after not being able to cut it as a DPS...

I have been, and always will be a "main" BLM...at least in my head. And I wouldn't necessarily say I wasn't able to "cut it" so to speak...but when you're a new father and averaging 3 hours of sleep at night, working 40 hours a week, and taking care of a baby until his bedtime, the type of maintenance that BLM requires is too much for me to focus on most nights. Not to mention, as has been brought up before, BLM feels different now than it did in 2.x content. I'm all for a little job complexity - I started off as a DRG and enjoyed the positional attack aspect before it got a bit better on weird mechanics fights - but BLM's focus shifted as soon as you finished the lv60 quest.

In the last several weeks, I've gotten my WAR to 60 and feel like I'm decently competent on it most nights lol! It's also MUCH easier to play when my 8 month old spends 3 hours screaming because he's tired but won't go the eff to sleep...but I digress...

[kensatsu]

Strenght vs vita tank ? Something may tell a strenght tank take more damage and is not easy to heal.
it's right anyway.
When a str tank only care about dps and sit on the defense CD, this tank should take a lot of damage and be difficut to heal.
But this is not true for every tank wearing str accesories, where is the trick?
Your str tank don't sit on defense CD and want to use it early to make it pop again sooner,
A war would use vengeance early by exemple. even if he don't realy need it, if he wait 90 sec before use it, he wast one vengeance.
And when this is realy damaging : the trick would be to use Inner beast (war) or Shieldtron (pld) just right before every cleave from the boss(it's a other exemple) (it mean also in this case you need to study the pattern from the boss, auto attack/cleave/cast ect, everything !)
A vita tank doing this ? this is safe, that's right, you better judge yourself if you need your vita it or not. if you are so safe with it, do you realy need it ? full vita or full strenght is not the question here, the question here is : i need at least this vita :it can be 20k HP for exemple, and the rest i can put strenght
It depend of of tank ability to use CDs and the healer.

[Judge_Xero]

In that regard it is a bit of a numbers game. In 2.0 being 50 DPS lower than another equally geared player sure didnt look as bad as now in 3.0 which would be the equivalent to say 150 DPS.

But like others have said those sitting at what was possible in 2.0.....well I still don't think they could handle what is required to put out good DPS as a tank. It isn't quite as easy as slapping on DPS accessories.

[Freyyy]

Yeah tanks' DPS rotations are quite basic compared to pure DPS jobs, but DPSing as a tank isn't limited to get STR and do 1-2-3-1-4-5-1-4-6-repeat. It highly depends on the encounter, the incoming damage, and how you plan on mitigating it. You cannot go nuts on DPS 100% of the time as a tank, and knowing when you can do it and when you have to mitigate is what makes the complexity of it. There is unfortunately plenty of bad tanks who solely focus on DPS and get destroyed (then generally complains about healing). These are people trying to DPS, but failing because they don't know how to mitigate while doing it. These people certainly know the DPS rotation of their tank job, but they don't know anything about aggressive-tanking. Proper mitigation is the key to achieve high tank DPS.

[Silenka]

As a healer, if you have trouble healing a STR tank who is properly using cooldowns then you need to l2p. You are doing something very wrong.
As a healer, if you have a STR tank who is not properly using cooldowns, it's not totally your fault if he dies, even if he says it is. (If you're good, depending on the situation, you can heal through it anyway).
If you have a VIT tank you should tell them why they're wrong.

[winsock]

As a healer, if you have trouble healing a STR tank who is properly using cooldowns then you need to l2p. You are doing something very wrong.
As a healer, if you have a STR tank who is not properly using cooldowns, it's not totally your fault if he dies, even if he says it is. (If you're good, depending on the situation, you can heal through it anyway).
If you have a VIT tank you should tell them why they're wrong.

^ pretty much this.

In the long run, if a STR and VIT tank used the same skills in the same order, the total amount of healing they require doesnt really change.

[Bobkitty]

I'd rather have a tank who takes on his enemies using muscles instead of relying upon his reservoir of body fat.

[Odett]

I've been doing more lv 60 content as WAR recently (I main DRK) and noticed that STR WARs better benefit from "risky healers". What I mean is that WARs have more burst self heals, contrasted from DRK's not-quite-as-strong but more steady and consistent Souleaters.

What I've noticed from this is that WAR's monster mitigation at full STR really required a healer who will trust their tank. Full VIT Equillibrium is a total joke, and a full STR Equillibrium heal that can crit for 12k is absolutely amazing. The downside of this is that it usually goes to waste because as soon as I use it, I'll see a Bene, Tetra, Dignity, or Lustrate cast on me. It's usually after a healer dies and they see my HP recover itself with BB+IR+Zerk, or Storm's Path, or IB that they realize just how little they need to heal me.

[Odett]

It may be that the community buzz about how fun tanks are (particularly all the fell cleave memes at the start of HW) has made these previously dps-centered players at least dabble in tanking.

There's also a point to be made in the fact that the skills HW gives tanks largely reward them for playing aggressively. Back in 2.x, I only tanked when I did Coils with my static, and queued up for roulette a as a DPS job, mainly because queuing up as a tanks and getting 2 bad DPS was a death sentence in boredom. Tanking at lv 60, parsing upwards of 1k DPS, and having boss mitigation is an extremely rewarding task that I have not gotten out of the other roles.

[Kazumac]

I find playing an aggressive tank rewarding like trying to maximize dps while healing. Also when I tank I try to maximize the dps output of my healers too but that's through proper cool down use, not vitality accessories:-p

If you can survive your big hits then extra HP isn't really helping too much on the healing side. Damage intake rate is predictable after a few pulls and that's what is important not how much extra hp bloat a tank has. Now tanking progression content? I haven't done that in 3.0 so I wont comment but like all things it is probably do what is needed to stay alive and put the rest in str.