Quote Originally Posted by Lucidisomnis View Post

I don't trust most random tanks to be anything more than a mediocre meat wall that forgot what defensive skills are. I'm right 90% of the time and the whole run is a never ending heal spamfest.
I totally get what you're saying here, and it's one of the reasons I try to spread my def cd's accordingly. I think I do okay with them. My FC healers thank me for being "easy to heal" (whatever the hell that means), but I always worry about it, since I don't have a max level healer and have never really seen your side of the fence. I do, however, often wonder if healers have misconceptions about Tank dmg mitigation abilities.

Again, I have no first hand exp with it as a healer, so I don't know, but sometimes I see healers that seem to struggle with healing even when Def Cd's are up, and then have the gall to complain that I'm not using enough of my Cd's. It's like they think they're unlimited or something, and they don't seem to get that If I pop extra dmg mitigation skills in one fight then I risk having nothing up for the next fight. They also don't seem to realize that some of our Cd's are dmg specific. Bulwark, for example is a fantastic Pld Cd that boost block rate and, by extension, the use of shield Swipe. Instant boost to Def, Atk, and Enmity gen... but it only works on Physical incoming dmg. So, in fights like A4, for example, a Pld's shield is utterly useless. The only two Cd's they have that actually work on that boss are Rampart and Sentinel. Rampart is still (arguably) the best Def Cd in the game, but no matter how good the tank is, they can't have it up all the time. Yet healers frown at you for not having enough dmg mitigation.

Healers, at least, can "overheal" as long as they have Mp to use. Tanks, on the other hand, have a limited number of Cd's and can only use them when they're up. It's easy for everyone to point fingers at the tank (and a lot of the time they are right to do so) but sometimes there's only so much dmg they can mitigate without having to rely on the healer to stop whining and start healing.