They can't balance the tanks around PLD being the one with the best mitigation and WAR having highest DPS, with DRK somewhere in the middle. It sounds good on paper, but in reality, PLD will still be the last choice for any group, since the other two tank still have to be able to survive the content and they do higher damage and gives better raidwide effects. The only way to make PLD mitigation actually matter would be to increase it so much that either it being next to immortal or the other two classes not being able to survive encounters.

They could have the current system of the tanks having about the same survivability, if they balanced things around something else. Maybe they could do something with how the agro works in the game? Cause right now, it's almost a joke how easy it is to maintain and hold agro on mobs, not to mention bosses. If they made threatgeneration actually matter, they could balance the classes around this, having WAR still being highest DPS but causing lower hate than the other classes, with PLD doing the lowest damage but causing the highest hate. If they mate hate matter, then the amount of hate a tank generates would limit the output of the dpses, moving the focus for tank away from trying to do the highest dps, to more "tanky" activities. This would also allow tanks to dps if they're good enough to generate high enough threat to make it safe to do so, or when running with dpses who are less geared than them. But in my opinion, a tank who runs with about equaly geared dps, should have the focus of maintaining agro. Would give dpses something else to think about as well except "Rotation, rotation, rotation" when they need to keep an eye on how much threat the tank has and adapt their output to this.

Also inbefore "DPS = Threat"... Rage of Halone and Flash says hi ^_^