You know what, I’m going to argue for standing in the fire / void / green / directly in front of the dragon.
No, my inner tank or healer has not taken leave of their senses.
So, go stand in something bad,and learn from the pain, how much pain are you taking, does it interfere with what you are doing (slow effect on casts, interupts, debuff on damage / healing being dealt)? Are you taking large amounts of damage which are causing the healer to stress, how geared is the healer. Is standing still in the bad causing the tank any problems?
For example, Keristrasza in the Nexus does a rather nifty stacking damage debuff which can only be cleared by moving. Tanks have varying strategies for dealing with this ranging from “run around lots”, “strafe a bit back and forth” to the “Tigger”. However from a tanking perspective one of the keys is to keep the boss as static as possible to allow the melee dps maximum uptime for spanking. The debuff with current gear levels is actually trivial, additionally it only stacks to a maximum of nine.
So, as a tank I take 900 damage per second once it’s at the maximum and have a slowing effect on attack speed, all of which is managable for the current duration of the fight. For the dps the effect is more critical not so much for the damage but for the cast/attack speed debuff, but there is no immediate need to clear the debuff by interupting a cast or two, particularly if there’s a rather tasty proc which needs using up.
I guess part of what I’m arguing for here is “know the effect of the debuffs”, “know when to move to minimise stress on other group members and to maximise output”.
Or alternatively “no pain, no gain”.