Mercy Stroke is a HUGE piece of SHITE

[Imoen]

hhahahaha, I can't breathe hahaha.

That was glorious.

[Brannigan]

Awareness is trash too btw.

[Jpec07]

Awareness is trash too btw.

You shut your mouth. On its own, Awareness might not be that great, but it has tremendous synergy with other abilities that makes it worth taking on everyone, because critical strikes cannot be parried or blocked. Awareness + Dark Dance = Many Parries (just don't do Dark Arts for it). Awareness + Bulwark = Epic Blocking. Awareness + Raw Intuition = 20% physical damage reduction guaranteed. Every tank should take Awareness.

EDIT: Let's also take a look at Awareness' base mitigation, because it scales with boss damage. Awareness nullifies the chance at critical strikes--let's give they hypothetical boss a 10% critical strike chance. This means that 10% of attacks will hit for (145+10)% damage, giving a total critical damage percentage of 105.5% compared to if they didn't have any Crit chance. This means that while it's up, for this boss, you'll be taking (5.5/105.5)% less damage, or roughly 5.2% less damage. And this doesn't calculate for additional mitigation provided by parries and blocks, which will have a higher rate without critical strikes in the mix (this means it works really well for WAR because of how Wrath works, and really well with PLD because of the shield). So even on its own, it isn't that bad. But as I said before, pairing it with the right other cooldown makes things epic.

It is a "white damage" cooldown, but it can also be stacked on top of tankbuster mitigation to provide an extra safety net. Long story short, take Awareness. Leveling GLD to 34 isn't going to kill you.

[Brannigan]

Boss autos have been castrated and tank busters generally do not crit. There are exceptions like the Gobcheese Zoomdoom Man (Savage) and that one add from The Good Set of Raids, but the fact that they have to force those stupid situations to make Awareness appealing should tell you it's bad. Of course you cross class it, because like with Mercy Stroke there's just nothing better, but it's a bad skill with an even worse trait and takes up valuable skill space on a class that people talk about being boring.

Oh yeah I forgot about the Trivial On Release Ice Woman (Extreme) and the add no one ever sees on Ratfinx.

Also if awareness + block/parry skills is "tremendous" synergy then what isn't tremendous?

[TomShane]

Mercy stroke is amazing. Learn the timing and take auto auto attacks and others attacks into consideration. Some times it needs to be hit at 15 % sometimes at 2% if ur looking for the heal. It proves invaluable for scenarios like tank jail in a7s. U can land a mercy stroke for for the self heal nearly every time

[Ragology]

You shut your mouth. On its own, Awareness might not be that great, but it has tremendous synergy with other abilities that makes it worth taking on everyone, because critical strikes cannot be parried or blocked. Awareness + Dark Dance = Many Parries (just don't do Dark Arts for it). Awareness + Bulwark = Epic Blocking. Awareness + Raw Intuition = 20% physical damage reduction guaranteed. Every tank should take Awareness.

As a WAR, I stopped bringing awareness since its recast didn't line up with Raw Intuition as well as I would have liked. I think its a fine skill though. It just makes my "defense rotation" a bit clunky in my otherwise smooth setup.

[SpookyGhost]

@ Mercy Stroke: It's free DPS, but yeah it's pretty Plain Jane since you'll only ever really see the heal on mob pulls in dungeons (and that can be a waste depending on when you get it). The heal also has some use in A7S but that's the only place I can think where it's worth saving and not just using when it comes up.

@ Awareness: Good for mob pulls in dungeons (especially for WAR since it lets you actually get some use out of RI, though as Ragology said the timings don't work out perfectly), but that's honestly about it. Obviously it has use against high crit adds/bosses but those are few and far between. A kinda decent argument for when it first started getting use in 2.0 was that you could use it in conjunction with other defensive CDs during tank busters to prevent an auto-attack crit after and it still serves that function, though it never really seems like bosses autos crit as much anymore - might just be me.