Mercy Stroke is a HUGE piece of SHITE

[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.