i've only ever tanked on mnk, but i was tanking a lot on mnk well before abyssea, and back in my HNM days, i tanked (intentionally lol) on sam a lot of the time. mnk was where i picked up all my ticks and instincts tho (sam was mostly "swap into arhats and hope third eye lasts more than 4 seconds").

the reason i try to keep as much DD gear on is because a couple of the whms in my shell don't play with blink-me-not, so if i really took it in the teeth from something, i stay in my MDT set for the 2-3 seconds to get cured up before blinking back to my full DD set.