Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-4680574-20150312041242/@comment-4511886-20150312180133

It's a tough question. Defence was never bad, people just had their reasons to roll faster instead. Think of it like a video game meta, that is caused by player preference, rather than in-game changes.

PvP was (far) more common before the release of DaSII, and this rendered focused defenses near useless, as you never know who will invade you. A lot of fat rollers also ended up being hit, or even lagstabbed (backstabbing from a distance, caused by large amounts of lag), due to the latency.

Now PvP isn't as big of a deal, and defence is far more effective in PvE, where you can easily tell what defence you need. So now tank builds are more viable than they used to be.

In the end, tank builds worked before but were much weaker, especially against competent players. Now, they're far more effective, as PvP activity is lower and the game mainly focuses on PvE.