is WAR the best MT now?

[Yitan]

Holding aggro is actually easier than before - as long as you do your tanking in the tank stance.
Stance dancing does not seem to be something that you are actually supposed to do while tanking.

Exactly. I'm still scared to tank everything in deliverence, but you actually can, at least in A5S, which is the only one I tried so far. You only need to do a BB combo with Defiance at pull and then change. Hardly anybody will take aggro from you.

[Reynhart]

If only we didn't have an "enmity combo" back in 2.0, none of this debate would have made sense.
A damage combo, some buff/debuff combos, and a really HUGE enmity boost on our tank stance...there, problem solved...as long as tank stances were given to classes at early level.

And it would have made OT as a PLD easier in 2.x since spamming RoH over and over wouldn't have resulted in too you much enmity.

And for DRK, power slash would be the damage combo, Delirium, a debuff combo, and SoulEater a leech combo (With only increased leech under Dark Arts)

[HoodRat]

ive been playing War since 2.0 so........

what you are saying is. " i cant just dps and keep hate anymore!" you're a tank, your core job is to hold threat for your group not try to push DPS. this way of thinking started with Alex savage having such high DPS needs to clear,

Except back in 2.x, plenty of tanks were tanking outside of tank stance to increase dps. And if you can increase raid dps without causing an enormous burden on the group, why not?

[Bjorn_Ironside]

Except back in 2.x, plenty of tanks were tanking outside of tank stance to increase dps. And if you can increase raid dps without causing an enormous burden on the group, why not?

i cant remember ever tanking outside of tank stance pre-deliverance. if its no detriment to the group and you are still holding hate just fine i dont have a problem with stance dancing hell i do it sometimes. i guess to put in more simply i'm saying that you cant really complain about them nerfing dps on a none dps job since your primary goal is threat management.

at one point all you had to do was swap into tank stance on a pull establish hate and then swap to dps and you were good to go now you cant really do that anymore and there are so many people complaining about it that it just gets old. in the end we all have our own tanking styles, just because i like to keep my tank stance up and manage my cool down so that my healer can DPS to their little hearts content does not mean its the only way to go about or the "right" way to go about it my OT loves to DPS and ill admit it looks a Little more exciting. lol

i might just be jaded about it now lol i can understand what you are both saying though. also depending on what im doing the comfort of tank stance isn't all that comfortable. lol #tankbustershurtmyface

[SpookyGhost]

Priority list:

1. Hold hate.
2. Stay alive.
3. Contribute to gDPS.

There are many ways to contribute to gDPS, and they all have their place. There is nothing wrong with stance dancing as long as you're making up for any lost healer DPS as well as maintaining your first two functions. If you see that you could possibly lose hate, then it is well worth the decrease in damage to use your aggro combo to maintain hate. Having a solid opener or having a WAR pull with their ridiculous threat gen opener is a solid way to maintain your first priority easy, and focus on the other 2 more instead.

I think "That's a DPS' job" is a bit silly, though - it is their primary job but we still need to contribute to the overall number to make the boss transition/die faster. Any tank who just cares about priorities 1 and 2 doesn't care about their group succeeding and is just hoping they can get carried through by everyone else putting in the work for them.

That said, contributing to gDPS is your 3rd priority for a reason. Learn how to do 1 and 2 before you even think about 3. In progression it's better to play safe (outside of DPS checks) to see as much as you can and then, once you reach a DPS check or you're hitting enrage, you can look into how you want to contribute to DPS. You can work this in along the way as well, pull by pull, but make absolutely sure you're able to live and hold hate before you do.

[SpookyGhost]

The only way you can stop tanks from thinking about their contribution to gDPS is by literally making all their skills do 0 damage and just have +enmity or +debuff or w/e. I'm fine with them making it harder to stance dance, which they really have (stuff hits like trucks now) but you're never going to get a job that has to actively hit the boss to not think about their DPS... unless you do what I suggested... which would lead to a lot of people not playing tanks most likely.

[Reynhart]

The only way you can stop tanks from thinking about their contribution to gDPS

3.0 and 3.1 were far past the point of just thinking about their contribution to DPS

Look at the recent threads...
Some people would go as far of stopping playing a tank before considering doing slighty more enmity combos or staying longer in tank stance...

[Nathair]

3.0 and 3.1 were far past the point of just thinking about their contribution to DPS

Look at the recent threads...
Some people would go as far of stopping playing a tank before considering doing slighty more enmity combos or staying longer in tank stance...

Pray forgive me, but we must draw a clear line here.
There's a difference between tanks knowing their job and stance dancing to be efficient, speed stuff up/help the raid dps (and because it was fun), and tanks that never questioned why people said to tank in STR, why and, above everything, how to stance dance.
Someone said "tanks should go with STR and tank in DPS Stance now!", and half the tank population just followed without knowing how to even properly tank.
We're talking about competent people that know their job inside out VS people that just did as someone said with no questions.


I believe you're talking about the latter category, because in no duty, ever, when I had a good tank I felt somewhat burdened by their being in DPS stance as a healer or offended as a DPS.
There's no way ever a competent tank is going to focus solely its DPS and forget to do it's primary job.

But I really liked my Fell Cleave crits

The only way you can stop tanks from thinking about their contribution to gDPS is by literally making all their skills do 0 damage and just have +enmity or +debuff or w/e.

Please don't give SE ideas.
They might think this is actually viable.

[Reynhart]

We're talking about competent people that know their job inside out VS people that just did as someone said with no questions.

Problem is, the forum is not where "bad tanks" or "good tanks" spend their time. It's where "vocal tanks" do.
And wether or not you know how to play, resigning from tanking because they decrease your DPS is a really weird mentality.

[TouchandFeel]

I'm honestly okay with the design and concept of Butcher's being the emnity combo for WAR as it works with their general feel and combos to build up stacks mechanics.

I feel the issue is that DRK and PLD don't have strong enough equivalents within their own mechanic niches .

DRK has DA+PS but the increase to the multiplier is imo too low and so it doesn't quite justify using up a DA for it. If the DA+PS multiplier was higher and it got a bit of a potency boost too, say 360 so it's still lower than DA+SE but helps alleviate the MP->DPS loss from DA and no Syphon. Essentially make DA+PS a better spike agro ability to help make it more on par with the consistent build of agro from Butcher's being used so that DRK's will want to begin weaving it in more during fights.

As for PLD, that is a tougher one since they don't have anything working off their mechanics niche that could just be tweaked to bridge this gap. I'll just throw out some random ideas, some of which have obvious flaws but maybe someone could build off one. Maybe make it so blocks generate agro (obvious weakness in magic heavy fights, potential huge boost in AoE agro in speed runs/mass pulls). Ooh, here's one I like, make it so Cover reduces the emnity of the targeted party member and generates emnity for the PLD sort of adding a "emnity leech" utility to it (along with this, Cover still needs a shorter cooldowns and greater range imo).