Your thoughts on tanks trying to do dps

[Racthoh]

you should be able to tell if you need the extra dps. just tell them to stop. and give them a chance every once in a while to play an actual dps spec so they can get smoked and feel like they should just go back to tanking. lol.

and to all the dps rerolls out there, who just want to do more damage. that's fine IF you have a reason to be doing more damage. if you just want to shave 10 seconds off of a phase or encounter when you don't really need to, all you're doing is keeping the healers occupied. which some of them may enjoy. idk.

[clevin]

...The general idea is that a tank who is always on the cusp of death (but doesn't actually die) and deals twice the damage of a tank who is always solidly alive is worth more to the raid. It does take a certain amount of skill to ride the risk, but oftentimes the reward is worth it.

As long as healers are onboard and everyone knows what's going on, yes. But you're in a high skill guild. In situations like the OPs where perhaps there's more risk of the tank dying it might actually not be worth it.

In other words, whether a tank should go for more DPS is raid dependent and shouldn't be a tank just deciding to do it on their own. For first kills in marginal gear, every bit of DPS is needed. For kills where the tank's higher than average dps isn't needed to make a timer etc then it might hold them back (yes, you kill the boss 30 seconds faster, but if the tank dies you've just wasted the fight length plus regroup time).

If the tank is doing this, then the tank needs to be good enough to stay alive and the healers need to know wtf is going on and be prepared to deal with it and be comfortable with it. End of the day, the tank's part of a team. Get the team on board and you're fine. Freelance and say nothing and you're not.

[Inthislzon]

the tank's part of a team. Get the team on board and you're fine. Freelance and say nothing and you're not.

Couldn't have said it better myself. At the end of the day what matters is what bosses die and what bosses don't. If everyone involved (that is tank + healers) is ok with tank taking extra damage for increased DPS so be it, maybe it helps with some DPS check or whatever doing without warning first just for epeen sake... not cool

[Weightlifter]

Paladins gain literally nothing from mitigation stats, in fact they will actually lose survivability in doing so dodge/parry are basically useless. They should be using Haste trinket and gemming for Haste.

But was it intended? Prot pala tier sets have 0 haste, and you must set loot spec to ret to get any haste gear from LFR or coins.

[Deleted]

But was it intended? Prot pala tier sets have 0 haste, and you must set loot spec to ret to get any haste gear from LFR or coins.

Prot paladins are getting haste on T16 tier.

Also mentioned numerous times in blue posts that it was intended. Not like the accidently added CD and GCD haste scaling with the thinking "nobody is gonna use this", fairly obvious it was always intended.

[Deleted]

With reduced vengeance and riposte it should be closer dps wise, between avoidance and mitigation builds. Not sure how much closer, but I'm not sure any of us will take avoidance builds despite that. They either need to change the threat mechanics or active mitigation mechanics, think it's more likely long term if they just bin tank gear, there is no tank class taking avoidance stats at the moment, just remove them from the game.

Perhaps I'm wierd but I so prefer def rating pre-vengeance days, though active mitigation has improved tanking generally. I was admittedly slower than some swapping to blood on my dk, coming from a warr frost felt more like how tanking should be, but dw

[Gliff]

The first major conflict was on H Lei Shen, where the paladin died several times by being crit for his entire health bar while sitting down.

Stopped reading there. Your Paladin tank is a toolbag. Lei Shen is not a DPS check and there is no reason he should be risking a gib for higher DPS.

Gemming DPS and using DPS trinkets are not necessarily a bad thing.
Paladins best stat is haste for defensives and offensives.
Druids best stat is crit for defensives and offensives.
There is nothing wrong with them taking offensive stats as long as they are beneficial defensively. Getting crit on purpose? That's a different story.

[Raugnaut]

From what I understand, you are going on about tanks that A) seem to be gemming for "dps" stats, and B) Tanks that are dieing to attempts to cheese vengeance.

Personally, I believe that ALL tanks should soon be moving over to "dps" stats- GC has hinted heavily at the removal/revamp of Dodge/Parry. Bears are fine with crit/haste gemming, with some mastery builds. Monks are in the same boat- haste to certain amount, crit, some builds with heavy mastery.

DKs are finding something similar- haste concentrated gear with mastery as secondary priority. Paladins, also- Haste with mastery secondary.

Warriors are the only one who go mastery-dodge-parry now, but even they get hit/expertise (Which used to be a 100% dps stat). This might be changing next patch with more emphasis on crit.

[Deleted]

Our paladin tank has ~80% of the dps we have on single target fights and he will usually top fights with multi-targets unless the multiple targets live longer than 30 sec (Combustion, Blade Flurry lulz). If he had gemmed parry/dodge/stam instead of hit/exp/haste, he would've done a maximum of 40% of our dps. Now, this may not seem like a lot, but his dps would go down by 100k some fights. That's incredibly good for a 3/13 guild like mine (10man ofc) and I really think that tanks should dps as much as possible as long as they don't die in order to cheese certain phases.

[Deleted]

I cant remember a single time where /sit / vengance whoring has actually killed me.
If your tanks isnt skilled enough to judge when they can cheese they shouldn't do it at all tbh.
More dps should ONLY come from tanks when they're performing their primary role close to perfect imo...

[Confucius]

as a tank (warrior) the "dpsing tank" is the worst thing that has happened to tanks... maybe ever.

[Roaktahl]

There is a balance between contributing more dps to your raid and effectively being an idiot and wiping your raid.

For me personally, I play a Guardian so crit has always been my primary stat, in the early days of ToT I had a lot more crit/stam gems and such to make up for having a lower ilvl as my gear has improved I use practically all straight crit gems (I also use the melee legendary meta). I do this because I'm comfortable with my survivability and know that while, yes more survival stats would help my healers, more dps is helping the group as a whole and not overly making the jobs of my healers too hard (after all, for me, crit = resource for my AM).

If my OT was getting 1-shot because he was trying to abuse mechanics, or stood in floor candy (pre-fix) and started dying because of it. I'd absolutely curb-stomp that behaviour. As I said at the top, there's a balance between squeezing as much dps as you can and performing your role as tank.

[Kortane]

I'd have to disagree about a "loss of mitigation" putting your tank at a risk of death. Nothing really hits THAT hard and if it does, a tank will learn to survive it. Yes, I remember our first few DA hc attempts and tanking multiple golems were mostly me dropping dead until I got every cooldown under the sun thrown at me so I could live and melt the mobs with 1.5million dps spikes.

And Lei Shen heroic... I assume your paladin tank eats Lei Shen's Decapitate with Ardent Defender, then spams /sit with Holy Avenger, Guardian of Ancient Kings up etc.

I'm trying to think of any fight where having more mitigation like mastery (boosts the strength of Shield of the Righteous) would have saved me from dropping dead... Maybe heroic Horridon progression 3 months ago?

Anyway, my point is that if your paladin tank is just dropping dead then he is doing something wrong, and it has nothing to do with his gearing strategy. Having more haste means having more Shield of the Righteous uptime. Very few things are going to make you drop dead when you are capable of having a physical "shield wall" that's up potentially 70%+ of the time. The main point of haste is that it smooths the damage we take. It makes it predictable, and easy for healers to foresee.

Also, do you blame a death from attrition on the tank? Or the healers?

[Deleted]

I play a bear tank. As much as it's cool to do crazy high burst and respectable sustained damage, that's not what a tank is for.

Tanking is for controlling the target and surviving it's hits. If I want to be a damage dealer I'll play cat, no problem for me.

[Deleted]

Calling crit scumbaggy for a monk is simply ridiculous.

Fair enough if you are going full out crit while lacking EH for the content you are doing, then you're as bad as the paladin described by the OP.

However if you don't require the EH, crit simply wins, it's not about the damage itself but what the damage gives you.

First of all crit is the best avoidance stat, perhaps avoidance isn't your thing but it blows other avoidance stats out of the water. Secondly the amount of healing a BrM brings to a raid, especially a 10m raid is important, this is boosted by crit in the form of chi wave crits, guards on the raid and GoToX orbs. As a tank you are bringing more dps to the raid and LOWERING the healing requirement. Unless you require more EH, going anything other than crit makes you the scumbag.

Edit: Also noticed the "crit is bad while the other tank is tanking". What is better? If you're not the active tank, you can still benefit your raid with chi torpedo (if you're not taking a scumbaggy dps talent?), healing sphere, or simply some dps on the boss to proc more (possibly vengeanceless) guards.

I guess there's a possibility that perhaps haste is more useful for healing spheres, I haven't really checked the math on if crit or haste is superior HPS for those although it's a moot point.

[Orion Antares]

Edit: Also noticed the "crit is bad while the other tank is tanking". What is better? If you're not the active tank, you can still benefit your raid with chi torpedo (if you're not taking a scumbaggy dps talent?), healing sphere, or simply some dps on the boss to proc more (possibly vengeanceless) guards.

Taunt for Vengeance. Make sure you and your co-tank work that out and it ups your raid contribution even more.

[GatorAJ]

Calling crit scumbaggy for a monk is simply ridiculous.

Fair enough if you are going full out crit while lacking EH for the content you are doing, then you're as bad as the paladin described by the OP.

However if you don't require the EH, crit simply wins, it's not about the damage itself but what the damage gives you.

First of all crit is the best avoidance stat, perhaps avoidance isn't your thing but it blows other avoidance stats out of the water. Secondly the amount of healing a BrM brings to a raid, especially a 10m raid is important, this is boosted by crit in the form of chi wave crits, guards on the raid and GoToX orbs. As a tank you are bringing more dps to the raid and LOWERING the healing requirement. Unless you require more EH, going anything other than crit makes you the scumbag.

Edit: Also noticed the "crit is bad while the other tank is tanking". What is better? If you're not the active tank, you can still benefit your raid with chi torpedo (if you're not taking a scumbaggy dps talent?), healing sphere, or simply some dps on the boss to proc more (possibly vengeanceless) guards.

I guess there's a possibility that perhaps haste is more useful for healing spheres, I haven't really checked the math on if crit or haste is superior HPS for those although it's a moot point.

It's possible you missed one of his later posts, but that is the monk tank from Midwinter and one of the more active theory crafters on the ElitistJerks thread. A bit after that post, it was agreed that crit is possibly the best progression stat, especially for 10 man raiding, but is NOT a better avoidance stat for monk tanks. Going a full avoidance build will result in a greater TDR than going crit, even with the benefit of crit bringing charges of EB. That being said, its agreed among virtually all tanks at the progression level that a TDR build that contributes low DPS is much less helpful to a raid than an AM build that contributes a lot but may not reduce quite as much.

[Erous]

I'm from the olden days where tanks needed to AVOID or ABSORB or MITIGATE damage and keep threat...not compete with other dps, or be required to dps to meet boss enrage timers. I think the whole idea of tank dpsing is ludicrous and really goes against what tanks are meant to be. Take tank dps out of the equation and you won't have this problem...they can focus on being a tank.

[MoanaLisa]

I think it depends on your raid group and how the healers feel about it. If they're up for it and it seems to work then no problem. If it doesn't and the tank refuses to change strategies then problem. Some raid groups are a little light on DPS due to comp or gear so if the tank can make some of that up without wiping the raid or repeatedly dying for no good reason, what's the problem?

It's not a thing that there's only one right way. It's whatever works for your group.

[Deleted]

The BrM t14 2set certainly does increase the value of crit. Not so much that it makes crit a superior survival stat, but it makes it 'less bad'. A large part of why mastery is strong is because it can mitigate the BIG hits that you'd usually CD through. But if you're able to 2set at those times to survive then the extra mastery as a stat loses a big chunk of why it's useful (talking about surviving, not taking the least amount of damage). I'm probably going to be running a mastery + haste build for next tier due to losing the current bonuses.
I'd also say that's been true so far since BrM being introduced. All the stats are obviously useful and pretty much the gearing choices have been defined by the set bonuses (or lack of)