Tank Stances.

[Zojha]

I think having frequent mini tank busters and possibly a bit of rng element involved might incentivize the use of tank stance.

Doubtful, because tank stance only really becomes relevant in terms of mitigation when the damage is so high it would otherwise one-shot you. When that isn't the case, healers can pick up the slack easily. Heck, A12S has been solo healed with a monk tanking one of the general adds - and that was BEFORE echo.

It's a different case if healers could go OOM from healing a tank that doesn't mitigate properly or couldn't keep up with the damage. But they can overpower most damage easily and for long periods, which makes more mitigation somewhat pointless.

[aleph_null]

Doubtful, because tank stance only really becomes relevant in terms of mitigation when the damage is so high it would otherwise one-shot you. When that isn't the case, healers can pick up the slack easily. Heck, A12S has been solo healed with a monk tanking one of the general adds - and that was BEFORE echo.

It's a different case if healers could go OOM from healing a tank that doesn't mitigate properly or couldn't keep up with the damage. But they can overpower most damage easily and for long periods, which makes more mitigation somewhat pointless.

That wouldn't work. The main problem is that heals are so ridiculously powerful you don't need mitigation. As it stands regens and embrace out pace most of the damage being done in the game. Or if not account for a significant portion of it. If a healer were going full bore healing they could probably output HPS(heal per second) at around triple or quadruple that of the incoming dps from a boss. A whm can use one or two gcds and do around equal hps to the incoming dps for 30 seconds. A sch has a no resource unlimited fairy doing around the same thing permanently. A single cure II can do nearly half of a tank's total hp. Basically to get tanks to use tank stance they would need to do a fairly massive heal nerf.

I was thinking about something like a8s phase 2, where the tank taking blaster/swindler/vortexer can't really stay out of tank stance through the whole phase without straining the healers too much. The mini busters (brute force) from blaster and vortexer, combined with the magic auto atk from swindler and occasional double buster or beta orbs from brawler make the phase chaotic enough. I think even in the a8s speedkill by angered the war had quite high defiance uptime (iirc only going deliverance when using berserk) during phase 2. From my experience nothing in creator savage came close to a8s when it comes to tanking/healing difficulty. I remember some people talking about t5 (twintania) having frequent busters throughout the fight, making it hard for the tank to stay out of tank stance, but back then tanks didn't have as many tools as now so it may not be relevant to this discussion.