tanks not using cooldowns?

[Ashkendor]

Or... You can just heal... My cooldowns are for when you go stupid and I'm getting dangerously low on HP and you're still DPSing the mob instead of doing your job and healing me. If this game wasn't so obsessed with the DPS that tanks and healers do, then we'd be more willing to cycle our cooldowns to make your job easier. But the problem is that half the healers don't heal. My cooldowns are for emergencies / HUGE hits from bosses, not so that you can dps an add. Sorry, bad healers ruined it for everyone.

This is so wrong on so many levels that I don't even know where to start with it. So... first off, if your healer is just healing, what's the point of even using cooldowns? Healing is a snoozefest in 90% of this game's content. I'd probably fall asleep if I didn't DPS in dungeons, not to mention it can really help if you land in a group that has awful DPS but a healer that knows how to kick ass and keep everyone alive as well. Even if you're at the minimum item level for the content, you don't need to mitigate anything if you're being cure-bombed into oblivion. Each tank class has exactly one 'Oh shit' button. The rest should ideally be used liberally to mitigate damage during trash pulls so that your healer can DPS as well because they do more DPS than you do.

Boss tankbusters are usually very predictable, which makes them manageable with only a couple of your skills. So what, the rest of the time you just leave your cooldowns sitting unused on your hotbar? Part of tanking in this game is trusting in your healer. Sometimes you get a shit healer just like sometimes good healers get shit tanks. Most of the time though, you get someone that's decent and you need to be able to trust them. Try tanking some raid content sometime. It'll get you used to seeing that HP bar drop below 75%, get you acclimated to last second clutch healing, and hopefully knock some of the fear out of you.

I'm not completely self-sufficient without a healer, that's the reason we have them. With a known healer, yeah, I'll cycle cooldowns, because I know he's not going to let me die. But I've had way too many deaths where I didn't watch a single heal get cast at all. I need my cooldowns for those idiotic periods, with a healer like that, my cooldowns are wasted during the time they actually know where their heal buttons are.

If you get a healer that repeatedly lets you die despite cooldown use, then kick them because they're bad.

Don't engage in bad play because of them.