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I haven't played my tanks a lot since ED, but in my limited experience in a team with my L31 Stone/Axe, my role has been to take the alpha strike, and then play scrapper. I can take an alpha strike, as long as the rest of the team immediately follows me in and takes some of the aggro off. I can push out the damage - not as well as a real scrapper, but with Axe my damage is respectable, and the knockdown helps too.
What I can't do any more is take all the aggro, all the time. And if we make a mistake and aggro a second group, I run like everyone else. Tanker's role? A poor man's Phantom Army, useful only for deflecting alpha strikes and doing mediocre damage.
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That seems to mirror my current experience in I6, although my Inv/Mace tank is only lvl.18 and should probably be asking for advice instead of giving it.
I can still solo, but took teleport foe to help in that regard. More than 5 minions or more than 3 Lts and I have to hit and run a lot and rest for endurance. TP foe lets me thin the herd before I run in, and sometimes I'll use it to pull minions for the team.
I have not been on a large team yet, just 5 and under, but what Ineffable_Bob said rings true. The one time that the team was able to take on large mobs (15-20) was when there were two tanks. We would jump in for the alpha and then the team would clean up, but we needed some heals to finish up the job.
I don't know if that is such a bad thing. It means that we have to watch our health rather than spam taunts aimlessly. I do enough damage to help out, and if things do go wrong and we have to bail, quite often it's the tanks that survive and get to hand out awakens to the defenders so that they can res the others.
I still get as many invites now as I did before, so as long as others show a desire to team up with me, I'll continue to play the role. My impression so far is that other heroes still expect the tank to tank. What happens at higher levels I guess I'll have to leave others to comment on.
