Tank Stances.

[SyzzleSpark]

yeah sure completely right - never said the opposite. and again, if you can deal with that its fine. although its not just deathflare vs. abysaal, there are baned buffed dots, painflare, dbl buffed enkindle, arealslash, shadowflare and bliz spam as well in burstmode... aside of this I just said to tell tanks its totally okay to go off stance is stupid. honestly if we break it down: DDs should deal dmg, tanks should hold the pack. if you can hold it without stance go for it. if the dds or healer have to suffer than just don't do it. - that being said there are many tanks out there who can't deal with that lately - and that sucks. giving those people the feeling they do everything right is just a thing I can't stand as main-dd.

Nobody said we were giving newbie/bad tanks carte-blanche on playing recklessly without knowing what they can and can't get away with. Literally no one said that. What we're saying is that it is possible and it is an admirable goal to experiment with and work towards. It is optimal, it saves time, and IF you know what you are doing, it is totally doable without losing hate or making a healer suffer.

What i personally can't stand as a tank main is when a DPS tries to tell tanks what goals and optimizations they are and are not allowed to aim for. "We're DPS, DPS is in the name of our role, only people with red icons like mine should be allowed to have 4-digit DPS... the rest of you just stand there and Medica 2/Flash while I solo these mobs."

Teamwork, yo.

I frankly don't know where DPS get this mentality that enmity and mitigation are 1000% the tank's responsibility when more than half the other jobs in the game have party-based mitigation and aggro manipulation tools. Like "oh, it doesn't deal damage, I don't need to use it". GTFO.

[Neela]

totally agree with you Spark that everybody should take responsibility for a smooth run (sadly on df runs you rarely see dds who use utillities at all .___.) . I play Drk as well on a decent lvl (not in raids though) but still at an ilvl 270 with Anima, its my pvp 2go cls. Just mentioned it for the fact that you know im not against tanks or offensive tanks at all. Like Healer dps I welcome tank dps as well IF the tank knows what he's doing. Sadly most of the ones I met the last 2 weeks had problems with aggro at all -> so out of my point of view: if I use a buffed finisher and the tank get in trouble with enmity it is indeed his fault as long as he is out of tank stance at that moment. on the other hand yeah true if im way to overgeared and he struggles with enmity staying in tank stance its on me to compensate enmity with utilities.

[Tint]

Again, Abyssal Drain spam(Tank Deathflare) on 2.1 sec recast, Salted Earth, and Dark Arts Dark Passenger. Oh and JOHN FUDGING MADDEN with the other oGCDs.

you can't bring Abyssal Drain to a 2.1 sec recast. all magic attacks scale from Spell Speed, but as DRK you only can get Skill Speed. so it's 2.5 seconds, 2.25 with Blood Weapon, wich would be a waste since you can't regen mana with magic attacks through Blood Weapon. Dark Arts btw has 3 seconds recast time, so you will lose damage while waiting for dark arts, or you will lose your mitigation, when you don't wait for Dark Arts, while spamming Abyssal Drain. waiting 0.5 seconds is btw a 20% damage loss. so in the end you will make more dps, sure, but i can't see the huge advantage wich is it worth to take all that risks.

[Hierro]

you can't bring Abyssal Drain to a 2.1 sec recast. all magic attacks scale from Spell Speed, but as DRK you only can get Skill Speed. so it's 2.5 seconds, 2.25 with Blood Weapon, wich would be a waste since you can't regen mana with magic attacks through Blood Weapon. Dark Arts btw has 3 seconds recast time, so you will lose damage while waiting for dark arts, or you will lose your mitigation, when you don't wait for Dark Arts, while spamming Abyssal Drain.

BW still works so long as you're auto-attacking while spamming AD. While you are right about not every AD can afford to be DA'd, every other can. That works out fine actually because ideally you'd toss in DP and sole survivor or other defensive CDs in between DA-AD. You're right that this will lead to a decrease in mitigation, but really, you only need so much and after you toss up shadow skin and conva, you're more than okay to drop grit and live off DA-AD and a few regens.

[Awful]

Snip.

You misunderstand me, what i'm saying is that PoTD doesn't teach tanks how to stance dance or the fundamentals of tanking the same could be said with any other class but that's a whole other beast. I did get your point of a string of Deathflares, and Fallen beat me to it by using Abyssal drain with it's emnity bonus vs Deathflare that is 600 potency for Abyssal, by the time you've gotten your next rotation out i'd already solidified a lead ahead of you.

Now if a SMN blows their load immediately once their in DwT then that's on them, so the argument is that it falls under the SMN at that point but if the tank can't hold threat normally in a normal setting of the SMN using DwT, Ruin III > Deathflare then it's on them.

and again, if you can deal with that its fine. although its not just deathflare vs. abysaal, there are baned buffed dots, painflare, dbl buffed enkindle, arealslash, shadowflare and bliz spam as well in burstmode... aside of this I just said to tell tanks its totally okay to go off stance is stupid.

Again you're wrong on this though a good tank DPSes and mitigates properly in conjunction with the team meaning a good tank knows what the groups capable of, pops the right CDs, can let the healer DPS while they DPS, in the end it's a group effort. If tanks were all hit your 1-2-3 and your AoE and do nothing and teaches players that turtling is okay then i'd tell DPS to keep their noses out of tanks business, honestly when I see a tank out of their tank stance holding threat, being a boss, and DPSing and striving towards their goals it's pretty damn awesome.

I frankly don't know where DPS get this mentality that enmity and mitigation are 1000% the tank's responsibility when more than half the other jobs in the game have party-based mitigation and aggro manipulation tools. Like "oh, it doesn't deal damage, I don't need to use it". GTFO.

Couldn't like this enough honestly.

[Kaeoni]

Well we're coming up on an entire year this 24th of May and I believe It's high time the Tank meta changed. I'm tired of seeing this Paladin ass Reinhardt in every match. You want to complain about Lucio being in every match, no one slams their dick in a door over the Reinhardt Meta! Orisa? More like Borisa, amirite? god damn barrier watch messin up my steeze.

Oh wait...

[Yorumi]

To me I kind of have a problem with the way we tanks talk to other tanks. We always hear about how it's bad tanks that use tank stance, it's the good ones who dps and all that. No it's excellent, well geared, high end tanks that do that. Good tanks keep all the enemy attention on themselves, use cooldowns regularly, and don't put undue stress on the healer. Should a tank be pushing to keep their tank stance off? Sure, but you can only really do that when both the tank and healer are overgeared for the encounter, or you're in a premade group. We do present this very elitist front acting as though even fairly decent tanks suck because they're not tanking 40 mobs at once without tanking stance and maintaining dps levels withing 1% of a real dps.

I play healer too and my god the number of times I've seen tanks not use tanking stance, rush in pulling way more than they can handle, and then die in less than 2 gcds is astonishing. It's worse still when you're leveling as a healer and thus not level synced and massively over geared for the encounter. Maybe they can survive a few more gcds but heals just simply can't keep up.

It's fine to inform people how to play a class to the best of it's ability but the way we go about it is just so wrong. This attitude that it's the most awful thing in the world to have tanking stance on really shouldn't exist.

[Lyth]

It's not bad to use defensive stances. It's bad to not try to minimise them.

Defensive stances get used a lot in progression, regardless of skill. This is in part to offset a gear disadvantage, true, but it's also in part because we don't yet know the fight well enough to predict how much damage is going out. But you have to be willing to experiment with it to get better. The problem is that there are a lot of tanks out there who are absolutely petrified at the thought of ever leaving defensive stance when tanking, and it completely hamstrings their ability to improve.

It's a bit like teaching someone to swim without a flotation device ("But I'll sink!") There's a point where to you have to take a leap of faith and just try it. There are points where I wish that I could, when teaching a newer tank, just secretly turn off defensive stance on their behalf. I want to show them, just once, that they don't instantly lose all their enmity and spontaneously combust, destroying the entire raid and intensely stressing out their healer in the process.

Will there be wipes? Yes, but that comes with playing a lynchpin role, and it'll happen regardless of what you do. If you run out of hp on a dps role, it's called a death. If you run out of hp on a tank, it's called a wipe.

The problem isn't that there's undue pressure on tanks to play aggressively. The biggest barrier to entry is that most players generally don't want to invest time in your learning, even during progression. That ice mage in your party with 100% brink of death uptime doesn't mind when you outdps them. They only mind it when you happen to die without defensive stance on, regardless of whether it would have made a difference or not. They're here to learn, after all, and any wipes that you cause waste their time. So please, play defensively until they can get their clear. They'll need it to get into farm groups with well geared, high skilled tanks (who don't use defensive stance).

[ErikMynhier]

You're joking right? Do you play Drk at all? You realize that with a Shadowskin and spamming Dark Arts + Abyssal Drain not only makes AoE groups die faster, but actually healing me taking stress off the healer? And if the healer is DPSing while i'm doing this then they have to heal less more DPS > ends the trash faster thus requiring less healing while I can sustain myself and have Sole Survivor up healing me for another 7.5k. But yeah they're totally spamming Cure IIs :P.

And that's all I wanted clarified from the OP, I disagree with increasing the damage in the stance then what's the point in leaving the stance if the damage has been buffed? The only changes really needed are changing Oaths for Paladins because it takes a GCD, same with Drk activating Grit, if all the tanks activated tank stance much like Warriors could then it'd be easier.

There's nothing wrong with not using your tank stance because the good tanks know how to juggle CDs to smooth out damage and increase their own DPS.

Added to what he said, with Grit off you can double up or stagger Blood Weapon and Price, with that endless MP Abyssal Drain's HP regen is more then enough to keep you going with only a simple REGEN and a minor top off of cure 2 here and there. When we do stuff as a group my RL wife heals and she has no problem keeping up. We bring either 2 SMNs or a BRD and SMN and I pull from mini-boss to mini-boss with GRIT only on for like the first 5 seconds of a boss fight just to lock down the hate and give me an agro cushion to work with.

If the healer is sweating either the DPS is taking to long and its stressing the engine, or they aren't an efficient healer. They may be good, but maybe not efficient.

[Valenth]

Personally I usually keep the tank stance up for the most part on bigger pulls. I'd rather have that my healer can sneak in more Holy/Gravity/Banes and (probably) more then make up for the amount of dmg I could do more if I was in DPS modus. On a single target or small group I will keep tank stance for initial agro grabbing, then go into DPS mode. I just prefer to play it safe like that especially in roulettes. If I notice the healer is able to keep me up easilly I'll probably dabble a bit more into DPS'ing.