Is not using tanking stances actually best?

[NikolasCalypso]

I've looked over some threads on this, and plenty of people seem to have an opinion, and it is overwhelmingly against using tank stances, but I haven't seen any numbers to back up those opinions.

Out of tank stance you are taking more damage, or taking less healing than if you were in tank stance; currently by 20% according to the tooltips. So rampart/convalescence will only give you the equivalent of being in tank stance for a short period.

What is the realistic trade-off for making your healers work 20% harder? How much more DPS does a tank put out? How much of a DPS loss do the healers take to make up that 20%? How much shorter is the fight?

It really seems like a middle finger to me to make the healers do that extra work when it isn't necessary. I'd like to see some numerical evidence that running out of tank stance is actually the best option for the group.

[Chrono_Rising]

The answer is difficult without getting really specific. In general this question breaks down to two parts.

Part 1: Trash pulls. This is healer dependent, but if being out of tank stance will cost your healer GCDs to heal you then it is probably not worth it to drop tank stance. This is because healers generally have better aoe than tanks. However, if being out of tank stance doesn't cost your healer any GCD's then it is a win win for both of you to output as much as possible. Generally people aren't talking about trash pulls when talking about being out of tank stance.

Part 2: Bosses. This is what people are usually talking about when discussing this topic. In dungeons, there isn't a single boss which requires me to heal with a GCD provided people do mechanics and the tank pops cooldowns at appropriate times. There is no benefit to the tank being in tank stance in this case, I'm not losing GCDs because healers have really powerful oGCD heals to keep tanks topped. I'm not a healer main, but this is very easy to accomplish when I do runs on healers.

Savage isn't really different, but to heal without using a GCD does take some planning, but it is also possible in a number of turns. This does takes planning and coordination. In general, taking more damage being out of tank stance doesn't directly translate to using 20% more healing GCDs, especially if people work together to keep damage down. Things like feint/addle/etc. exist to help with busters and mitigate fluff damage.

However, this all assumes a number of things: like your healer is actually doing dps and isn't pure healing and people playing their class optimally. Ultimately the questions will come down to how comfortable is your team with using their tools and how much do you gain while minimizing how much your healer loses. 25% penalty in tank stance is a lot of lost dps, but if your healer takes a 90% penalty when you are out of tank stance then this is clearly some things should be discussed.

[WhyAmIHere]

Tank stance is a learning tool.
You use it to say "okay, i'm going to be hit for this amount, and I can afford to mitigate it this much." Even then that only applies to end-tier raids and such, EX primals and whatever like that. But just doing dungeons? Eh. The "aggro is a tank's job" meme is a bad one and needs to go away. Yoshi himself stated that DPS should learn to use their hate tools, like Diversion and such. If they aren't and stealing hate from you? That's their fault. They get upset? They're just not playing the game as it ought to be played: as a team endeavor.

In PF/DF where you can't guarantee that the DPS know how to play their class properly, any and all DPS helps things go smoother.

But. You should only be doing what you're comfortable with ultimately.

[SargentToughie]

What is the realistic trade-off for making your healers work 20% harder? How much more DPS does a tank put out? How much of a DPS loss do the healers take to make up that 20%? How much shorter is the fight?

Just because you don't gain the 20% bonus mitigation from being in tank stance doesn't mean that the healer is working 20% harder. Speaking as somebody who's both tanked and healed content at every level in the game, there simply isn't anything in this game outside of Savage that can't be healed with OGCDs, the occasional shield, and regens. I've healed entire EXRs with Paladins that never leave Sword Oath, and Benison, Tetra, Regen, and Asylum carry me the entire way through while I just set up Aero III and holy bomb.

It's a matter of comfort and experience. And, yes, that does include going into your DPS stance once you've completed your hero pull: most of them aren't actually that dangerous as long as you're using your cooldowns properly.

[Izsha]

The simple answer is healers loose FAR FAR FAR less dps from a tank taking slightly more damage than a tank looses by taking slightly less damage. But for a quick and dirty, just go look at FFlogs and see how much damage people are actually doing. For a simple example, look at the 99th percentile for tanks and healers. I think its safe to assume anyone breking the 99th percentile is NOT using tank stance outside of an opener if at all. So, see how much tanks do, -20% damage (to pretend they swapped to tank stance even though each looses far greater amounts than that), then do the same for healers but assume (very wrongly) that their DPS would INCREASE by the same % (which it wont get anywhere near as outlined below).

Highest damage healers are Sch right now. So lets take 99th% scholar on Chaos as an example: 4250. Add 25% (tank takes 20% less damage means saving 25% heals in theory). 5312. +1062 dps.
OK lets take the LOWEST damage tank in chaos 99% (to make the point clearer) and reduce by 20%. Pld 5309. 4247. 1061 lost

So: The best healer gaining 25% damage matches the loss of the worst tank loosing 20% damage. Seems fair? Well it doesnt work that way. Those numbers are completely unrealistic and angled in the most extreme ways to benefit the healers.

Tanks loose more than 20% damage. Pld looses 50% of their auto attack damage from sword oath which is roughly another 10% damage gone. Wars loose 5% from deliverance and every inner beast is 200 potency lost over fell cleave. Drks loose access to a powerful haste effect. So tanks outside of tank stance actually loose around 30% of their damage.

Healers on the other hand will NEVER gain 25% increased damage because a tank takes 20% less because they dont just heal the tank. They heal the party, and regens/fairys/OGCDs tend to handle the tanks just fine in most cases. So swapping out of tank stance results in the OCCASIONAL need for a GCD physic/cure 1 etc throughout a fight. A handful of GCDs throughout a 10 minute fight will never be in the same league as 30% of a tanks damage.

The bottom line is:

*tanks natively deal more damage than healers to start with. So any direct % gains losses applied equally favor the tanks anyway.
*the direct % gains are far greater than what a tank stance tooltip says. 20% is just the beginning of what is lost.
*Healers do NOT gain x% dps for every x% less damage a tank takes because only a fraction of their time is spent actually curing tanks. They cure aoes, single target other players for single target damage, also DPS. What is left is on the tank and 20% of that isnt going to make a dent in their workload.

When you combine those points with the fact that it is not dangerous to drop tank stance (nothing in this game hits hard enough to 'require' tank stance anymore. Not like coil for example) then whats the point?

Tanks dont need stance to live, and the loss to tank damage far outweigh the gains of healers by miles. So theres really no argument for it in high level content where DPS checks actually matter. In any other content (dungeons, 24 mans, lv 60/50 etc) you can clear anything with any job combo with 0 healer DPS and full time stance, so this debate doesnt even matter there.

[NikolasCalypso]

Thanks for the replies, especially the ones that give more than a quick opinion. I think there are some exaggerations here, or I'd love to see a video or something because otherwise I must be healing wrong if for example I don't need to use GCD heals.


But anyway, here's a point that I have seen far less often.

But just doing dungeons? Eh. The "aggro is a tank's job" meme is a bad one and needs to go away. Yoshi himself stated that DPS should learn to use their hate tools, like Diversion and such. If they aren't and stealing hate from you? That's their fault. They get upset? They're just not playing the game as it ought to be played: as a team endeavor.

In PF/DF where you can't guarantee that the DPS know how to play their class properly, any and all DPS helps things go smoother.

But. You should only be doing what you're comfortable with ultimately.

Sure, everyone should be maximizing their performance by using tools like Diversion and such, but I'm curious how much you pull when running a dungeon. Hopefully we can at least agree that with 20% damage resistance it is possible to pull more (and not die) than without it. Do you find that pulling a bit less (say one group less) out of tank stance makes for a faster run than grabbing that extra group in tank stance?

[SargentToughie]

Thanks for the replies, especially the ones that give more than a quick opinion. I think there are some exaggerations here, or I'd love to see a video or something because otherwise I must be healing wrong if for example I don't need to use GCD heals.


But anyway, here's a point that I have seen far less often.



Sure, everyone should be maximizing their performance by using tools like Diversion and such, but I'm curious how much you pull when running a dungeon. Hopefully we can at least agree that with 20% damage resistance it is possible to pull more (and not die) than without it. Do you find that pulling a bit less (say one group less) out of tank stance makes for a faster run than grabbing that extra group in tank stance?

I mean, I don't really know what more you expect from me. I'm not gonna go and record video evidence of the fact that regens and Benisons are just about enough to cover 95% of situations that the casual playerbase is going to run into.

What I am saying is that you can have your tank and eat it too. I run EXR with a PLD every day that pulls as deep as the walls allow, and goes into Sword Oath for spamming Total Eclipse. Tank defense values, and healer tools are so overpowered for that level of content that the only danger comes from both parties being fully negligent.

It comes down to good cooldown management.

[Rongway]

Do you find that pulling a bit less (say one group less) out of tank stance makes for a faster run than grabbing that extra group in tank stance?

The problem with this is that doubling the number of pulls means almost doubling the amount of time it takes to kill all the things, because now we're talking about damage dealers losing DPS--a lot of it--because the tank didn't want to use tank stance (or wanted to use tank stance but didn't want to pull everything). It will take your DDs the same time to kill, say, 9 mobs as it would take them to kill 4. If you can survive pulling everything, it's a waste of time not to.

[Tsubaki75]

Do you find that pulling a bit less (say one group less) out of tank stance makes for a faster run than grabbing that extra group in tank stance?

As Chrono said earlier the main time tank stance use is dropped is after the pull on a boss, you can do it during trash pulls if you are good enough but it is perfectly fine to have it on for large pulls. Tank damage is negligible on a large (3 group) pull compared to the dps a healer would lose by keeping you up due to how fast they die, so if you need tank stance and a cooldown so your dps and healer can aoe spam then go with that.

[EusisLandale]

I'd love to see a video or something because otherwise I must be healing wrong if for example I don't need to use GCD heals.

It might not be you doing things wrong. The tank could be undergeared, not timing their abilities well, or even just standing in stuff they could get out of.