Tank Stances.

[aleph_null]

I will say this once again, and this will probably be my last post in this forum, because it's become an echo chamber that passive aggressively drowns divergent opinion, so pay attention:

MAXIMIZING YOUR DPS IS AN INCIDENTAL GOAL TO TANKING AND SHOULD NOT BE USED TO MEASURE A PLAYER'S PERFORMANCE AS TANK. YOUR PRIMARY GOAL AS A TANK IS MANAGING INCOMING DAMAGE, WHICH IS PRIMARILY ACCOMPLISHED THROUGH KEEPING HATE, NAVIGATING MECHANICS, AND MANAGING YOUR COOLDOWNS AND ABILITIES TO SURVIVE THE HITS YOU ARE TAKING.

I respect your opinion but I won't agree with this. I try to measure a player's performance relative to the limit of the job's ability to contribute to the group, which includes any "secondary goals" such as high dps output, and/or ability to cover for other people's mechanics which may result in higher raid dps output (for example taking the dps jail in a7s, which isn't a tank's job per se). A tank who is able to keep hate, do mechanics, manage incoming damage, and contribute a lot of dps on top of those will be objectively better than another tank who is only able to do the first three while doing less dps. Same thing as a healer who is keeping everyone alive while outputting dps being objectively better than another healer who is only keeping everyone alive without doing any dmg.

I won't say a tank in 100% tank stance is performing 20-30% worse than a tank in full dps stance, since dps is not the only responsibility of a tank, but I do say that the latter tank is a better tank, if they're able to fulfill their other responsibilities well (mitigation, mechanics, positioning, aggro etc) while contributing more overall raid dps (not staying in dps stance at the cost of making the healers struggle and dps less).

Lemme rephrase then. This meta can facilitate toxicity by justifying people's nasty attitudes. There will always be shitty people, no doubt, but a meta can offer a justification for their awful moods and elitism.

That's mainly why the DPS meta can bother me (That's the part I hate) but also because tanking feels like a secondary function and damage is primary, but the role implies the reverse. It's why I dropped War (Really feels like a 5th DPS sometimes lol) and played Monk. Tanks can feel like they get hate as a by product of DPSing and them happening to generate more enmity, rather working to build it and working towards maximizing mitigation and easing the burden on DPS and healers. Or, ya know, being a tank.

But I love tanking at heart, so I'm leveling a Pld and Drk right now. Maybe I just didn't like War.

Meta composition will always exist, and people who follow meta blindly will also always exist, so it can't really be helped. The current "dps meta" in raiding is probably caused by the type of damage in raids. Almost everything is scripted, with little room for randomness, so you can script your actions to respond to that, which means that it's very easy to coordinate your cds (and the other tank's and healers') to cover all the big damage spikes without needing the extra cushion from tank stance (if I could stack 2-3 cds for every tank buster then adding extra 20% mitigation from tank stance won't do much, probably won't even save the healers one gcd). This game's raid encounters don't reward playing defensively as much as offensively (skipping phases, killing boss before the hard phases).

The devs can force players to stay in tank stance by raising the outgoing damage on tanks, but considering the skill gap between average players and the best players out there, if they make the best players need tank stance to survive, most likely the average players won't be able to keep up even in tank stance. On the other hand, whatever requires the average players to be in tank stance would probably not be enough to force the best players to go into tank stance.

One last thing I'd like to add, if you feel that war is like a 5th dps, you probably are playing it suboptimally (apologize beforehands if it offends you, but that's not my intention). If you (and your group) play optimally, at the very least you'll be pulling the boss, either with unchained or shadewalker, and you'd do several tank swaps to maximize mitigation while staying out of tank stance (for example: first tank buster war uses A, B, C, then drk provokes and uses D, E, F for the second tank buster since the war ran out of mitigation, similarly war will provoke again for the third buster since this time it's the drk that ran out of mitigation). The current "style" adopted by the vast majority of players is the MT-OT role assignment, where the OT (in most cases war) only dps and pick adds (if any), and that's extremely inefficient since the MT will probably have to spread their mitigations thinly to cover all the tank busters and cleaves in the fight. This is one of my speedkill attempts that I recorded, if you're interested you can check it out (or check the best speedkill groups out there like delete diadem or angered) https://youtu.be/P52pux8_0Q8.