Quote Originally Posted by Mikey_R View Post
While your shield may be bigger, you still take more damage at base, so it doesn't affect you except in the niche circumstances where attacks do a fixed amount of damage. I even done the math to double check for myself (20% damage reduction compared to +25% extra HP and healing, you need +25% healing if you want them both to feel the same) and irregardless if whether it was a shield based on the amount healed or a shield based on max HP (I actually made a spreadsheet to test this and it is the case).

So really, the only benefit is the flavour of the stance. They are both the same mechanically speaking, so you can essentially call them the same stance. There is no simplicity there, just the same thing in a different coat of paint.

Going away from tanks for a second and talk about healers. I will admit, I don't know what a healers mindeset is in high end raids, so I am speculating. I know healers know roughly how much their heals heal for. If they see tanks with differring HP amounts, would they then have to learn 2 different values for their heals and swap between them when the tanks happen to swap? I don't know how much of an issue this is, if it is even an issue at all. If it is an issue, then really you want consistency across the board.
In a bubble yes you would need to heal the Defiance tank more but that's not including things like the tanks tool kits which inherently adds to that mitigation and evens it more or less. ToB and TBN adjust your HP values. the idea I was proposing is tanking is like car transmission. Do you want Automatic (flat mitigation)? or, Manual (HP/healing manipulation)? There was never an issue with WAR having higher HP for 3 expansions. The real issue was that raid design pushed towards everyone DPSing and the tanks being forced into OT stance. For the most part WAR tanking in Deliverance so it used Defiance in the same way it used ToB but on a 10 sec cd with a damage penalty, but can negate that with Unchained.

Speaking from personal experience I swapped to Defiance during phase transitions for extra shields to spread during phases like GCO and Forsaken where extra heals and shields will help with damage or mechanics. You were more actively participating in the mitigation, which ironically the devs have decided to do in 6.0. So clearly they want tanks to be more active in mitigating and what more active than being able to manipulate your HP instead of having static values?

Everything is mechanically the same if you really want to split hairs and not look at the bigger picture. We are all dots at the end of the day so offering a different flavor is what keeps things fresh and different despite otherwise. As far as healers go, there was never really an issue outside of seeing bad tanks HP drop in an instant because of no cds compared to other tanks.