A complaint from a whiny healer

[HyoMinPark]

So what's the s the standard way? No tank stance? I'm genuinely asking as a new DRK. Thought big pulls necessitated grit. Guess not then?

It depends. In leveling dungeons, you should do trash pulls with your tank stance on, generally. Because leveling dungeons have far stricter syncs than the level cap dungeons (i.e., level 50 dungeons, level 60 dungeons, and level 70 dungeons), and the trash mobs absolutely truck in there. In level cap dungeons, I have seen a few tanks pull trash without their stance on, maintain aggro, and not be a royal PITA for me to heal—but these are also tanks that play at a high level, so they know how to manage their cooldowns and their aggro well. This will not work for inexperienced tanks.

My advice would be to stay in tank stance for most trash pulls, and drop it for bosses in most content—you will first want to generate enough aggro on the boss before you drop stance, so that it won’t turn around and smack a DPS. However, keep in mind that if you do lose hate, it may not be entirely on you. You can pop into stance if you feel like aggro may be slipping away from you.

[Iscah]

As an admittedly mediocre tank who only plays those classes to level them up, I've occasionally turned off tank stance for boss battles and it tends to go badly.

The damage boost doesn't seem worth it, for me at least.

[ReiMakoto]

As an admittedly mediocre tank who only plays those classes to level them up, I've occasionally turned off tank stance for boss battles and it tends to go badly.

The damage boost doesn't seem worth it, for me at least.

The extra mitigation from the tank stance isnt needed if youre using cooldowns properly, especially on bosses. The extra damage is absolutely worth it, especially on Drk and War, because they lose the -20% shackle and gain access to more powerful abilities. Boss autos will not hurt you significantly more without tank stance, and mitigating busters properly will make the damage gain more than worthwhile

[KatsuraJun]

So what's the s the standard way? No tank stance? I'm genuinely asking as a new DRK. Thought big pulls necessitated grit. Guess not then?

They don't in level cap dungeons. You have Grit on at first, pop sprint and pull everything, establish aggro, then drop Grit so you can use blood weapon. Why blood weapon? Because it procs off Quietus for infinite MP.
So basically you can rotate your CDs instead of having grit on and then spam TBN which fuel more quietuses for more MP, DA DP, and a DA Abyssal Drains for heals nonstop. You literally get more MP than you can spend like this.

This is basically only for level capped dungeons though, the lack of TBN among other skills would make this strategy completely ineffective if you get sync'd down and lose skills.

[Lyth]

...

At max level, you don't necessarily even need to use Grit for big trash pulls. The reason that you might want to do this is that Quietus has amazing synergy with Blood Weapon. Using the two together generates an endless Quietus loop and endless resources. What also makes this possible is TBN, which works together with Abyssal Drain, Blood Weapon/Price, Delirium, and Quietus to give you endless HP, MP, and blood while negating incoming damage. And you have all your other cooldowns available to soften the incoming damage during set up or at places where you might expect to lose some momentum. If you execute this correctly, your healer probably won't even be healing you. You do need to have a good sense of your cooldowns, BW's timer, and your resource expenditure, though, and be ready to swap back to Grit for safety if the pull takes too long.

If you want to try it out, I would suggest easing into it. The hardest part of the pull is going to be setting up. So you may want to start in Grit as you're pulling the trash packs and swap out of it when you've come to a stop and everyone is ready to start burning them down. Don't forget to roll your regular cooldowns before you swap in order to create some breathing room while you build up some momentum with this. You can also try it out with people you know first.

Is it a necessary to be able to do this? Not really. AoE tanking tends to have a fairly minor role in raiding. It might a handy skill to keep in your back pocket the next time that you do a local dungeon speedrun competition. It is fun, though.

Either way, it doesn't come down to being a "good tank" or a "bad tank", even in single target. What makes you a good tank is being able to predict the outcome of playing more or less aggressively, and having a thick enough skin to handle being wrong. But you can only make that call correctly if you've tested the boundaries and made some mistakes in a safe setting. Everyone has opinions. Learn to trust your judgement, learn to trust your experience, and most importantly, learn to trust yourself.

[Ventura_Highway]

I want to reassure people that you aren't a bad tank if you have to use tank stance on bosses while leveling up.

You're a bad tank if you lack control over the fight, if you ask me. Maybe that requires tank stance occasionally, especially if you're like me and the DPSes you're playing with have better gear and are constantly at your throat in the aggro race. I suppose this goes for everyone, but I'd emphasize for tanks that it's important to constantly evaluate your own performance and figure out where you can improve.

Could I have handled more packs at the same time? Did I use too many cooldowns? Could I have done/prevented more damage? I keep asking myself these questions, sometimes I reach a conclusion, and maybe that conclusion is wrong and I get everyone killed because I can't actually handle that many mobs, or because there's more mobs than I expected. That's okay and I'll improve in the future.

I suppose the question that needs to be solved with a dialogue between healers and tanks, is "When do we consider the attack effectively mitigated?"

For what it matters, I took SCH and AST to 60. It is a little uncanny how hard it is to level 30-50 Dark Knights alive.

[OcieKo]

As someone who plays all the tanks and heals, i find DRK to be the most commonly odd squishy. All tank jobs have players who are oddly squishy but DRK makes it seem common. You can even notice it with comparable gear/no-low CD usage, it's odd as hell but w/e.

[Ventura_Highway]

I can account for Paladins at least, shields do good work in dungeons, but I'm not sure yet why when I play a healer, I see a Warrior and go "Well that's fine," and then a Dark Knight comes in the next run and I think "This is really going to suck!" They have no shields and just about as many defensive cooldowns both.

[OcieKo]

I've gotten randomly squishy PLDs before but the chances of random squishy tanks definitely goes up as you go from PLD to WAR to DRK

[Phoenicia]

I can account for Paladins at least, shields do good work in dungeons, but I'm not sure yet why when I play a healer, I see a Warrior and go "Well that's fine," and then a Dark Knight comes in the next run and I think "This is really going to suck!" They have no shields and just about as many defensive cooldowns both.

I've gotten randomly squishy PLDs before but the chances of random squishy tanks definitely goes up as you go from PLD to WAR to DRK

It's not really that "DRKs are commonly odd squishy" and WAR's aren't. Out of tank stance and no-CD-usage, all 3 tanks take the same damage, except PLD has a random chance to not be as squishy thanks to their shield and Flash.

What you two are experiencing with DRK is that it's cool and edgy, and as such attracts the bad players (kind of like how DRG attracted many bad DPS players in ARR and HW) and what you see is those players that have no idea how to tank playing on a tank that actually requires knowing how to press buttons and in what order. What happens here is a player that has no idea how to tank sees the cool and edgy tank and gives it a try and you end up seeing this paper tank running in and taking ridiculous amounts of damage.

I've seen it happen to all tanks tbh. DRK running in and using Unleash out of Grit? I mean if you're dropping Grit, at least know which AoE is the one that does damage. From this DRK I do not expect them to know that they need to press rampart if they didn't know that AD > Unleash.

Heck, I've seen WARs stay in defiance, pop IR and spam Overpower of all the buttons they chose. Forgoing the increased damage, enmity and sustain from Steel Cyclone for example. I mean the button lights up when in IR for crying out loud.

On the other hand, "bad play" on the PLD tends to be sitting in shield oath (and sword oath being a joke in AOE anyway), they just go in, and spam flash and sit in the middle of mobs as they get tickled. Hence non-tank players get this perception that PLD takes less damage than DRK and WAR. And if this PLD isn't doing that, he's probably still taking less damage than DRK or WAR since he wouldn't be getting hit at all. lol

TL;DR: Because "playing bad" in PLD actually reduces tons of damage (from both, the monsters and the PLD lol), as opposed to "playing bad" on WAR/DRK which hurts both their DPS and mitigation, less knowledgeable players think DRK/WAR are squishy.