Four Ways to Die - why the Tank Meta feels "off".

[Ralvenom]

As a (former) Prot Warrior whose class was ruined by Active Mitigation, I am intimately familiar with it. WARs have it, DRKs have it (a little less), and PLD doesn't really have it at all. It is a design that works for some classes/jobs, and for WAR and DRK, I think it functions very well.

But the point is that they aren't using it.

Apparently, you went and forgot how it works. Or you hated how it worked for prot warrior (and therefore didn't understand how to use it for prot warrior). Either way, there is no active mitigation for warriors or dark knights in this game. If you think there is, you need to go back to WoW and play a Monk, Blood DK, or Prot Paladin sometime.

inb4 you try to tell me Inner Beast is active mitigation...It's not. Sorry. Not the way SE implemented it to work.

Not this old canard again. Having more HP does decrease the burden of healing, assuming a rhythm in which the healer caps off the tank and then does something else (usually DPSing). A higher HP total means the healer has more time for other tasks, whether DPSing, avoiding mechanics, or healing other members of the party before needing to refocus attention on tank healing. That makes the healer's job (healing) easier.

That's not how that works. It NEVER even works that way in MMORPGs where all healers do is heal (like WoW). Unless the meta was changed so that having a massive health pool was all tanks did (in which case, healers would have to have infinitely regenerating mana pools), then there's literally no reason for increasing vit over increasing str. All it does is make you a sponge that soaks up the healer's mana.
Don't believe me? Ask a healer how fun it is to heal a full vit tank in any savage run. Their answer? It's not fun at all.

On my DRK, I go from 12796 HP with STR accessories to 16240 just with i170 Fending. That's almost 4k right there (and I'm not VIT spec'd either). Surely i190 or i200 Fending accessories would provide more.

Wow...good for you. Talk about vit when you actually are in i190, i200, & i210 gear. You know, the gear people use to tank Savage in...