what happens if second half of Alex is all physical?

[Syzygian]

I've tanked AS1 with DRK, PLD, and WAR. In tank stance and not in tank stance with PLD/DRK/WAR OTs. With good healers and with bad healers. First, enmity should not be an issue regardless of your tank pairing. Second, lazy tanking is not trying to maximize your class. And, in this meta, maximizing your class means maximizing your DPS as a raid unit. So, say what you will about relying on healers. If you are turtling it up then it's the healers that should be pushing their DPS. The risk in you dying is all the same. It's just a matter of you taking that risk or the healers taking that risk. And, it's much more practical for tanks to be the ones pushing their DPS because they have better uptime, meet the ACC caps without support, can better control incoming damage with the CDs, and can just focus on themselves rather than healing an entire raid.

This is debatable, as percentage gains to damage you're gonna be dealing one way or the other is wholly different from healers having to heal 99% of the time or getting off numerous whole GCDs worth of damage that otherwise would not have happened altogether. That having been said, I default to pentamelds and equip further slaying or fending gear depending on the fight and abilities of the rest of my party. Maximizing your own performance is great, and you should always be striving to do so, but as a tank you have a higher responsibility to facilitate max performance for the rest of the raid and if you're gimping your ability to keep the maintenance/support that you require at least somewhat low on the whole, you're doing an extreme disservice to your raid group. to say otherwise is putting unrealistic importance on your DPS in relation to the rest of the party, unless that extra DPS that you, special little ol' you, are doing is actually making the difference between enrage or a skipped phase...

Its been said in other threads, but it bears repeating here, that excess dps beyond what is needed to meet enrages or skip phases is just as fluff as excess mitigation beyond what is needed to comfortably survive outgoing damage, and we are nowhere near overgearing savage raids enough for either of those points to be pertinent ammunition for any argument. When you're pushing two plasmas in A1S then sure. That extra tank deeps is definitely pulling its weight.

There is no way for PLD to cast Clemency before a tank buster because it will get interrupted by an auto attack. The same goes for SS. And, SS can also get eaten up by an auto attack. Clemency and SS are only usable during down time.

You can find countless written guides (here's one example: http://suiko.guildwork.com/forum/thr...xander-1-guide) that attest to the falsehood of this statement. During/after the cleave that precedes this particular tankbuster you have more than enough time to do both of these things.

So, in terms of "way more utility." Halone is so insignificant in AS1 that PLDs don't bother. All it does is slightly decrease auto attack damage. Delirium and Reprisal on the other hand actually decrease important damage like the cleave and tank buster. Cover is useful for prey targets except with the way healers coordinate their healing for preys, it's not always good to randomly redirect prey damage to a tank. Also, because of the range restriction and CD on cover, you can't consistently use it. You also take damage based on the covered target's mitigation. Do you know what healers hate the most? Inconsistency. Stoneskin is nice during downtime but useless otherwise. Clemency is uncastable whenever it's actually needed. Divine Veil is nice but it's a weak shield on a long CD and requires an activator. HG is irrelevant because it's used in a PLD's CD rotation. So no, they don't have much utility at all. DRK and WAR utility both crap all over PLDs as things currently are. If you're a DRK that doesn't realize how much better than PLD you are, you need to be a better DRK.

Halone is absolutely insignificant in that fight, you're right. I don't recall ever playing it up in the post we're referring to. However, yes to everything else you said here. I pretty much said that PLD is unable to shine in the current raid meta because its DRK does better DPS and outshines it in magic mitigation, but that PLD still has way more utility from an objective standpoint, but none of the current content allows players to effectively take advantage of it. In fact you pretty much parroted back a lot of the things that I said using different words, so I'm hesitant to believe you both read and comprehended it all.

I play DRK because I enjoy it more, but in a vacuum, all the tanks have pretty equal degrees of mitigation that they have to work with, the difference is pretty solely in DPS and what they bring to the party in terms of raid utility. And as I said, as tank DPS increases, their utility decreases. I'd argue that Delirium+Reprisal is equal to or better than Path by itself, and PLD has a ton of extra tools in addition to rough equivalents of these abilities, its just that none of them are useful. You know what is? DPS. That's really all the difficulty in current content is about is DPS checks. Why do you think everyone is crying for their job to have more DPS, not utility? As I said, its a WAR's meta. Minimal mitigation/utility, max DPS. Until squeenix realizes that by continuously churning out fights where DPS is the only thing that matters certain jobs, like PLD, are gonna continue to get the shaft. The TLDR of it is, as i said, in a vacuum- DPS: WAR>DRK>PLD and utility: PLD>DRK>WAR. But no one cares about utility, what is important to clear these fights is DPS. DPS DPS DPS. We need a change in raid design.

And as for me being a better DRK being dependent on my perceived e-peen size in relation to people playing other jobs and whether or not they are capable as a player of pulling their weight, I prefer to respect other people and keep in mind that the current content just so happens to favor me and my job in a big way. Realistically speaking, we're probably heading for a dual-WAR raiding meta. I realize I do better DPS and have better magic mitigation than a PLD, among other things, but I also realize WAR can do the same thing, do more DPS, with literally no drawbacks or hurdles to deal with, basically telling PLD and DRK to git gud, whilst pretty much having the job that is the easiest to maximize if one has any experience playing a DPS job and maximizing a rotation. And as I've said elsewhere on this forum, squeenix has solidly put their foots in their mouths by saying that part of WAR's "utility" is DPS. Utilities are things that are nice to have, that you can do without. You can't give the single most important thing to raiders in this game to a job, a LOT of it, and call it a utility. The way they're designing raids, that's not utility, its straight-up making some jobs better than others.