STR Tanks. Bad Tanks. Different things. Often the same.
Ok, so to preface, I was, and still am, an adherent of the 'max my group DPS' school of thought while tanking and healing. This post uses the word 'us' to represent the tanking community as a whole, and not any given individual.
That said, I am impossibly glad to be seeing the back of the STR tank meta. Because it was corrupted and festering.
Before 3.0, the aggression tank meta was about balancing survivability with damage output. The guidance was 'start with VIT, and then move to taking as much STR as you feel comfortable sacrificing your survivability for', not 'stack strength'.
Somewhere in Heavensward's early days, we forgot situational awareness and started treating all dungeon runs as having damage profile equivalences to Savage fights. We stopped caring about DF healing output profiles because we were used to our static's healers comfortability with our damage intake and ability to clutch heal us back to full with incredible regularity. We forgot that a dungeon's worth of trash wailing on us makes our health go down continuously, rather than in predictable spikes. We got arrogant, and we got sloppy, and rather than thinking, and caring, like we used to, we blamed our healers and DPS. The good name of aggressive tanking got lumped in with the turtles, because instead of teaching new and inexperienced tanks how to be aggressive tanks we gave them the easy answer, and then took complaints about their poor performance as an attack on ourselves.
I will still love swapping to Warrior and melting faces. My melting will be slightly slower tomorrow than today, but oh well. I will still be an aggressive tank. I will still push my personal DPS. But maybe now I'll remember the aim behind the aggression isn't to rub my ego, but to make my runs as fast and smooth as possible.
But for now, I'll raise my glass to the loss of some of the complexity in the aggression tanking meta, and celebrate the death of the STR tanking horror.
tl;dr: ding dong, the wicked witch is dead but her magic lives on
Posted Feb 23, 2016, 12:31 AM UTC
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
"We" didn't do any of that shit.
If there's one thing good about VIT being the ez mode best stat for tanks, its to stop hearing this tired argument. The tanks that stacked STR and knew what the fuck they were doing were better than tanks that stacked VIT and knew what the fuck they were doing. Bad tanks are bad tanks and suck.
/thread
While I won't argue with any of your points, I will say that the Shitty tanks who stacked vit weren't good but the shitty tanks who stacked strength because the forums told them to were WAAAAAAAAY worse.
I think I pretty much agree with this. People are going to stop being able to say "BAD TANKS. IT WAS A STR TANK UGH STR TANK" and it's going to go back to the core, bad attitude.
Bad players playing as tanks and being bad.
[deleted]
I agree with bad tanks are bad tanks, full stop. But (as someone who almost always heals dungeons) bad tanks who listened to forums and stacked strength without knowing how to tank were definitely worse than those who kept their Vit without knowing how to tank. In a way it shows at least somewhat of self-awareness that they need to give space to healers if they're not confident on tanking themselves.