Quote Originally Posted by Februs View Post
I really wish people would stop saying this, because it's not true. The best mitigation in this game is actually mitigating damage. Plain and simple.
Except you're talking as if proper mitigation and good damage are mutually exclusive actions. A good tank uses cooldowns properly and delivers good damage, the best mitigation is killing whatever is killing you as fast as humanly possible but that does not mean you're not going to be using cooldowns effectively. Enormous pulls in dungeons only get dangerous if said mobs take too long to die, to the point where the healer runs out of MP and/or you run out of CDs to use against the mob onslaught, one of the key reasons why doing humongous pulls as a PLD just isn't worth it with their non-existent AOE damage.

Thordan is also an excellent example of this, Good DPS means you can skip phases and you can reduce the overall damage the tank is taking. You can skip the tank buster in Phase 1 with good damage and imagine if DPS was so slow during the Knight Adds phase that they managed to Holy Bladedance 4+ times (exaggeration, DPS has to be horrible), no amount of CDs would make up for the onslaught of damage tanks would be suffering. Killing them during the first (or second) Divine Right drastically cuts on tank damage. The final phase before enrage is also healing intense to the point that it's MUCH better to just skip it and tanks contribute significantly to the raid damage.

The same stays true to every trial out there. The faster the damage source dies, the better. So even if tanks are adjusted or whatever, people will continue to stack as much damage as humanly possible (without getting killed as tanks).

This is the main reason why PLDs are, currently, considered the lesser tank.