Dear Square-Enix: You Forgot About Buffs to Dark Knight's Off-Tank Utility.

[Brian_]

It depends on what skill you add the slashing debuff to. It potentially is a buff to DRK / WAR comps. If you just throw the slashing debuff onto Delirium, WARs can choose to maintain Path if general raid damage is just consistently high in new content without sacrificing as much DPS and aggro generation or they can just full-time BB for a gain in overall potency if aggro is not an issue (either because there is a forced difference in boss up-time or the WAR is currently tanking). I'm sure a lot of WARs would salivate at the idea of a full BB berserk window either for DPS or for opening enmity generation. If WARs are able to maintain path in their enmity rotation without losing eye they can drop Defiance earlier in the progression cycle if damage is too high otherwise. As is, WARs dislike putting path up outside of situations where it's necessary because it's a DPS / aggro loss.

Meanwhile, for PLD + DRK comps, it's only a gain in that you let the NIN AE instead of DE. Is that really a big difference from how much it benefits WAR + DRK comps? Probably not.

As for PLD + DRK, like I said before, they are the highest raid eHP set-up. You can have Reprisal, Delirium, a few extra SSs, and Divine Veil. That's 10% damage reduction, 10% stat reduction, a few 1k+ shields, and a what will be a 2k+ group shield in 3.2.

In a DRK + WAR comp, you will have 10% damage reduction, 10% damage reduction, and Delirium. This might look like more mitigation but Divine Veil mitigates more damage from a single attack than Path ever will. Elysium's world first A4S team was actually constantly asking themselves if they had enough raid DPS to carry a PLD and MNK to A4S because they really wanted Divine Veil for the bigger coordinated raid mitigation it provides (and the MNK was then mandatory for the INT debuff) for the 4th leg's Mortal Revolution.

In a WAR + PLD comp, without a MNK, you will only have 10% damage reduction, a few extra SSs, and Divine Veil. With a MNK you have the same raid eHP as a DRK + PLD comp but lose either DRG or NIN. We already saw this comp fall out of favor in 3.0 because of that sacrifice. The changes in 3.1 and 3.2 were targeted at bringing this comp back in line with the other comps.