Diversifying Tanks

[Dzian]

Without trying to start an argument, but is part of this thread's purpose to discuss whether tank defensive abilities need diversifying at all? It seems like it would be nigh impossible to balance tanks effectively if they differentiate the defensive cooldowns too much, especially when it comes to fights like say, E2S. That fight (at matching ilvl) demands two defensive cooldowns for very similar defensive values per TB, or else one of the tanks just gets smeared and a healer has to cover for them. You already have issues like Vengeance for WAR practically forcing them (slightly exaggerating) to be MT or risk losing out on damage, in a role slot that already only has 2 per boss in your standard 8 man content.

Wouldn't it be easier to make them more diverse in their offensive abilities instead? Being a few hundred DPS behind the meta tank isn't even close to a death sentence, but if your mitigation isn't up to the task your class becomes an extra healer stressor at best and a liability at worst,

You could diversify the defencsive toolkits quite substantially just be emphasizing more the differences between physical and magical damage and varying the levels of effectiveness accordingly.

If you look back to HW Paladin was a rahter weak magic damage tank but a real strong physical damage tank. DRK was a rather weak physical tank but a real strong magical tank and warrior was kinda middle of the road with both. this worked quite well and was fine right up until the devs went and made an entire tier of content almost exclusively magic damage...

the jobs having different defensive capabilites wasn't a problem. the problem was the badly designed content.

had the content been designed better it wouldn't have been an issue. sure there would have been powerful magic damage attacks that would have caused a paladin tank some real pain and maybe taxed the healers a little bit more. but had that same encounter had some physical attacks of equal power that paladin tank would then have shrugged them off and granted the healers some extra breathing room. as such it would have balanced itself out.

Darknights would have been the opposite way around and warriors would have been more or less taking consistant damage throughout the enocunter.. thus every job despite having differing defensive capabilites would be viable..

not every job needs to be equally good at everything...