I don't know about you, but rolling vit str on mimir and the toughest tank on that server atm. I'd say tank build is quite sufficient. Sure it takes a little longer to solo, but with the right defense things hurt you so little, regen about covers a good amount of the damage. This of course doesn't account for vvvs damage taken as those always require a few pots. Frankly if you wanted dps, you should have gone mage. At least that way you won't get hit by close aoe's and waste healer heals on you because your hp and defense is pretty much nothing. As long as you have decent defense tank build wasn't slow at all. I found it fairly sufficient well up to around 35 where it started slowing a bit because of needing more party instance groups. When normal mobs you farm hit you under 40 damage theres about no downtime. Grinding past the uneasy quests was a cakewalk since there was almost no need for rest and more so about never any need to waste any potions saving me more zeny to burn on compounding cards to try to get more 300 hp dark lord cards or trying to craft more vvvs gear for even more defense.
More so the original post was talking about a TANKER build aka with shield sword. Some people just enjoy 2 handers for pure damage which is in itself fine as well if they want to be glass melee. Which makes things annoying for acolytes because of how squishy they are in instances. So if you are talking about a 2 hander build specify. However for tanker builds, vit or vit str is the way to go. It would just be silly to use a shield sword and go high str. Both because, you lose a lot of damage if you aim for dps by using shield, and that a shield with mostly dps skills and stats won't give you much bonus to defense and subtract from your dps which is unadvisable.
The bigger issue as a melee in a party for healers is not really our pdef or neutral defense resist, but rather out mdef. Which is what half the time the mobs in mino instance cast. With low to no vit, you're just making things hard for your party and healer & tank for that matter by wasting extra heals on you. Mind you, sure you may survive one vvs or vvvs instance monster, but when you get swarmed by two or more by the poor monster pathing. Low vit won't survive two skill hits from those monsters. That more so is a problem especially if you have more than one swordsman at some point. Until a healer gets sanc, they are going to end up one target heal spamming which makes things tough for them in parties that way when more than one swordie gets instagib to almost 0 health by magic strikes.
Sure, you can pump up and max out bash and such early on. If you focus on that and ignore your passives or if you are a 2hander and don't need defense skills sure you may have decent skill points to throw around later on. If you're a tank however, you don't have that luxury as you need your shield passives for endure and mastery buff as well as some attack skills for the few times you may end up soloing. If you don't mind to buy reset capsules for later on then sure disregard all of that and do whatever you like, but if you party a lot. You don't need high melee damage. Just vit and good def gear to take any hits coming your way so your mages can nuke them all out. You would eventually need more than level 1 of provoke as well for aggro management and keep mob groups off your healer and mages in emergencies as well.
All in all, unless you plan to buy rests you may want vit or vit str. When you're about 40, most of the mobs you want to farm is in mino instance since mino exit has nothing past 33 which are horrid for exp. Having a tank setup benefits your party for that. Save your healer some mana potions big time by not being so squishy.
