Quote Originally Posted by Syzygian View Post
From what I've observed, people are stating that it just doesn't hit hard enough. But shit hits for 25-50K (tankbusters/cleaves anyway). Where does this school of thought come from? I raided on DPS for the most part in 2.x, was it not possible to stance dance in between TBs there? Why is there this attitude that Savage bosses hit like a wet noodle even though every single tank that has been in Savage has been 1-shot by each boss during progression and tank busters will 1-shot you if you don't mitigate them just like in every other raid?
This school is bullshit honestly. I was raiding as a tank (did both WAR and PLD in every fight, but WAR main) in 2.X, and FFXIV's bosses have always hit like wet noodles outside of tank busters like they do now. In BCoB it was kinda hard hitting, like T1 when the boss started to get very mad and hitting harder and harder, T4 where you had to be a turtle to tank Dreadnoughts, T5 where there was a tankbuster every 35 seconds (YES 35 SECONDS) with many hard-hitting cleaves and auto-attacks in between. SCoB bosses started to hit like wet noodles. And that's where I started to tank aggressively. Giving up Fending accessories, starting to stance-dance while tanking, I remember how Melusine was doing pityful damage on the MT, how T6 was a joke, how T9 was only scripted burst moments with a lot of possibilities to safely drop Defiance while MTing, only T8 was kinda brutal on the MT. Then came FCoB, which was honestly exactly like Alex Savage currently is in terms of MT damage. After having acquired some gear, you were able to tank almost 100% of the time without your tanking stance except for T13 (which was incredibly fun to MT as a WAR btw, it required a lot of skill to perfectly manage your stacks in order to IB every single Flare Breaths AND Flattens). T12 only hit hard during Bennu phase and that was mitigated a LOT when you started to have enough DPS to push 4 Bennus, and later 3, which literally broke the phase. Other than that, only needed Defiance once every 2min to take a Revelation. T11 was almost completely DPS-stance tank-able as long as you were managing your CDs properly. T10 was a joke.

Tanks being able to stance-dance that much and wearing a lot of STR because the damage directed to them is too low is absolutely not a new thing, in fact, hard-hitting fights have always been very rare in this game since SCoB. It's just that before 3.0, high tank DPS wasn't required like it is now, and aggressive tanking was a niche while the vast majority of players were full VIT tanks and still cleared the DPS checks without issue. But groups with high tank DPS were able to accomplish faster clears, faster phase-pushing, making all fights easier. That's the reason why Yoshi decided to tune Alex Savage with tank DPS in mind, and that led us to the current tank mentality.