Quote Originally Posted by Thistledown View Post
ok if that is true I have been tanking wrong for the last two weeks (which is the time that I picked up tanking). I've been doing BB>SP>BB>SP in most of my main tanking, with BB>SE>BB>SE in things like Titan's Heart phase to extract that little sliver of dps I can get. Otherwise it should be the party NIN's job (of which we have plenty)
If you have a NIN in the party you should prioritize getting up Storm's Eye for them. It is a substantial DPS increase for them and not a big deal for you.

Quote Originally Posted by Rbstr View Post
Path is a valuable tool. But, yeah, it's most useful against tank-killer mechanics. If you think about most raid-wide damage in challenging content that 10% is usually not all that likely to save someone from death (so much is insta-death when mishandled anyway) or result in the use of fewer GCDs on the healers' parts. There are certainly times where it can help a lot but 100% uptime is pretty much just wasted potency.

It's really only valuable if there's peoples' lives or healers' mana to be saved. If the 10% isn't going to be actually useful then there's no reason to use it. More DPS is almost always useful, even if the difference is small.
My argument is that 10% is a big enough impact on healer mana and Ballad up-time that its more valuable than the extra DPS. When you say its most useful against Tank-killer mechanics I'm not sure how that checks out - it has the same 10% effect on all damage. A 3k raid-wide is going to do 24,000 damage, and you will have mitigated 2,400. As opposed to something like Revelation that does 9000, you've mitigated 900.

I know its widely accepted to put it up before the big AEs like in T11, etc, but IMO it should be mandatory before Wild Charge, Heat Lightening, Prey, Cyclonic Chaos, and any auto attack, as its a free 10% damage mitigation. That's 1/2 of Shield Oath!!!!