The important part for most people is oGCD: turning it off.
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It's a bad design. Staggering CDs is NOT good tanking! It only shows how inefficient and ineffective paladins really are.
The GCD stances are the closest thing to a smooth flow we'll get. All of the oGCDs have CDs, which lock you in or out of the stance. Additionally all actions have an animation lock of at least .5 seconds, so it gets clunky, rigid and disrupts the illusion of fast pretty fast. So for healers & cleric stance, that's at least 7.5 seconds of not healing, 5.5 if your heal is instant cast. And since this system is based off WoW's, then 3 seconds could easily be killer. Warriors are stuck with what they got for 10 seconds. MCHs and BRDs riding the same boat for 15 seconds not that there's really any reason to turn it off.
With the GCD stances, you can turn them on and off anytime you want.
Also, no. You need Darkside to function for max potential. You don't need Grit for that. Making Grit the oGCD is a terrible idea because you are not a warrior and the only think Grit restricts is blood weapon, while without it makes soul eater useless without dark arts. There's no real situation to where you need .5 seconds to switch in and out of tank stance in this game. But for DRK and Darkside, yes there is a situation where you need darkside back on quick, which is namely all of the time!
Making Grit the oGCD would allow for smoother transitions from tanking to off-tanking, as well as minimal dps loss.
Having Darkside on the GCD only really affects the cases where you turn off Darkside.....which for A2/A3S is never and for A1S you will have time to turn it back on before you get hit.
Also, all actions do not have an animation lock of 0.5 seconds. Some more, a few less.
Making Grit/Shield Oath off GCD would mean that you could toggle it at almost any time for an instant 20% mitigation. With how scripted every fight is, that would be super strong. There needs to be a drawback to togglable mitigation, and losing a GCD is the drawback for PLD/DRK. WAR doesn't get healed for the HP it gains when you swap to Defiance, which is its drawback.
Opinions. I'd rather do that than be a meat shield that contributes nothing except being a striking dummy for the boss.
But you can argue for WAR coming out of Deliverance and going to Defiance, then instant oGCD Equilibrium and maybe using stacks on IB is a pretty good self-heal process. Combined with Berserk/IR and Bloodbath and holy moly. The job has the best method to self-heal on a whim while DPSing.