Quote Originally Posted by CurlyBruce View Post
As for Awareness and Mantra, Awareness only lasts 15s on a 120s cooldown and there is no way to guarantee you would even receive a critical attack during the time. Its function is pretty much the same as Featherfoot only Featherfoot at least allows you to mitigate 100% of the damage should it grant you a dodge where as Awareness just lowers the damage by 50%. Mantra is only 5% extra healing for 15s on a 120s cooldown again. I'm not aware of the range but unless it hits all party members regardless of distance there will be many situations where you are the only one gaining any benefit from it.
Awareness isn't used to mitigate damage. It's to normalize your incoming damage to make it much more predictable than usual. Making incoming damage predictable is remarkably useful since it allows you to use the rest of your abilities more effectively over the duration of it. Yes, you can't guarantee that you could have gotten crit within the next 30 seconds, but you also can't be sure that you wouldn't get smacked by 2 or 3 of them.

For Mantra, the range is a limiting factor, but a *vast* majority of the time that big AoE damage happens, the group collapses to allow for Medica/Succor. Use it when the group is all nice and tightly packed and you're doing great with it (also, it's 5% below level 40, iirc; at 50, it's 10%).

A lot of it comes down to your tanking style and experience, methinks. I use and abuse my CDs by knowing the fights and using CDs proactively as well as reactively while having no issue with enmity, whether AoE or ST, or Pacification, which is why I like having 2 extra CDs rather than Flash and Provoke. The only time I'm going to take Provoke is for a tank swap fight; I'll never take Flash (unless they add some boss that hits the tank with Pacification right as adds spawn, which would just be a dick move on the part of the devs).