This mentality is why we can't have nice things.
In this thread: people who haven't tanked before. Effectiveness of STR attribute is amplified by our enmity boosting abilities. It's not that tanks want to take away dps's job, but we want to make your job easier by keeping enmity properly even when you frontload your burst.
Learn how to play War then come back to this, - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkUuBQ7VPug
Vitality is not everything for a War. They do more than just hold hate. Accept that the job can put out numbers while tanking correctly. Better yet, respect a War taking his effort and play to the next tier. You only need a base amount of HP, having 1200 hp will not help you clear any of the primals.
Shiva EX and most content is totally doable with full STR accessories, if the healers are having trouble keeping you up, it's either their skill that's lacking or something else you're doing that's wrong, the mitigation from the tank accessories doesn't have that big of an effect, the only thing that is different is that the lower health you have the more the healers have to keep an eye on your health. There are of course a few exceptions like T9 that requires you to reach a certain HP threshold to survive his attacks.
Also DPS that are telling tanks that getting STR is bad are probably just scared that they're going to steal their role. I've seen PLD do around 350 DPS on a training dummy in Sword Oath and full STR accessories, that's more than what an average DPS can do.
Shiva should be Ruby until you have a bunch of i130 left side.
If you don't have Ruby, get Topaz. If you don't even have that, well sounds like you have work to do.
Assuming i110 average, decent kill speeds and decent healers:
T1-4 and all HM Primals: STR accessories
T5-9 and all 2.1 EMPs: STR or Ruby. STR for when your healers are really solid or not DPSing, Ruby when they're good and/or DPSing as much as possible.
Ramuh: VIT if one tank strat, Ruby if two tank strat
Shiva: Ruby
T10: Ruby if OT, maybe MT
T11 - 13: VIT on PLD, VIT/Ruby on WAR with current strats.
virus and eye for an eye... I main blm and have both these on my hotbar.
I use virus all the time I can on bosses but never on trash. eye for an eye I will use on large pulls otherwise just bosses.
as for apocatastasis , I don't even have it on my hotbar right now cus I'm lazy, that being said if I was in a heavy magic damage fight like shiva I would re-add it.
the main reason I don't use it is because I'm seldom in reach of the tank to cast it on him/her, same goes for eye for an eye but obviously in shiva ex the distance isn't an issue.
sounds like you had bad blms in your grp.