How important are offensive skills.

[Randell44]

Just getting a general opinon.I believe offensive skills to be ery important though not as important as your defense.  Around a 60/40  or 70/30 for me in favor of defense.I jsut don't believe you can ignore your offense and become a tank bot.<div></div>

[Crim001]

<div></div><p>Well normally when I tank, depending on the group, I may go as defensive as possible and ignore dps, but if I'm solo, I tend to switch to offense....pretty obvious I guess.</p><p>I just keep a few sets of weps with me depending on the case. Increasing your main damage spells and perhaps your defensive stance may even it out a bit. It all depends on your gameplay, guards tend to be more defensive, but how defensive is all up to you.</p>

[Terron]

Not very has been my experience.I found a nice dual wield piercing weapon having neglected my piercing skill, which was 150 behind my slashing.I decided to use it against easy mobs to work up my skill, but found I was hitting just about as often as with the slashing weapon in my other hand, even when I started using it against stronged mobs.Perhaps there are circumstances where the skills are important, but I haven't found them.<div></div>

[DmZB]

<div></div><div>IMO, they are important in that they add to your ability to hold aggro.  Since LU13 when our aggro abilities were adjusted, offensive skills have become more important to aggro management.  Post LU13, my offensive skills were adept I and i had a terrible time.  But I spent many weeks upgrading all my attacks and stances to adept III, and it helped a lot.  I also find that tanking in offensive stance (obviously not on oranges/raid mobs/hard names/etc), if you have the heal, helps a lot as well.  Blues and greens cannot hit you nearly as much, so your HtL skill will not proc as much, so the offensive stance helps increase your damage (building hate) and reduces your defense allowing HtL to proc more.</div><div>Reinforcement + Tremor adept III is a nice ae (6 mobs blech) aggro tool.</div>