50 PLD - fill in cross-class abilities or go for 60?

[Fernosaur]

Foresight is a.. meh.. thing it's not really a powerful CD in any sense of the word so you could probably get away with not having it.

While Foresight by itself is nowhere near being good, it becomes quite powerful when you pair it up with Sheltron for physical tankbusters. The fact that Sheltron is only on a 30 second timer means these two "meh" CDs can become a good CD when used together instead of forcing you to use Rampart. So I would say Foresight IS mandatory on PLD.

[LilLemay]

While Foresight by itself is nowhere near being good, it becomes quite powerful when you pair it up with Sheltron for physical tankbusters. The fact that Sheltron is only on a 30 second timer means these two "meh" CDs can become a good CD when used together instead of forcing you to use Rampart. So I would say Foresight IS mandatory on PLD.

That's a fair point, though I don't think relying on just ShO/sheltron/and foresight to take any sort of tankbuster in savage content is a good idea unless you want to stress your healer, dungeons or regular a9-12 go for it, but if you're using your cd's right you should always at least have rampart or sentinel ready. If I recall scrapline in a9s does roughly 14k to me if I use ShO/sheltron/rampart (no sch shield), just relying on ShO/sheltron/foresight there isn't gonna do you much better than simply taking it to the face in ShO. In most cases you're better off simply using foresight to mitigate a bit of incoming damage over time, as opposed to weaving it together with bigger cooldowns for a buster

[Fernosaur]

Snip.

You're not really stressing your healer because we usually prepare for tank busters too, so unless you take one without any CD or in SwO without a big CD, there's really no extra stress there. If it's one of those cases in which the TB happens as a lot of raid damage is going off (eg. Flatten+Earth Shakers+Tornado in T13 or the Heavenly Heel inbetween Ancient Quagas in ThorEX) you usually save the bigger CDs for that anyways.

With ShO+Foresight+Sheltron you'd take around 16k damage, 17.5k TOPS from Scrapline, tbh. Tanks are currently sitting at 30k HP, so I don't see how being left with 40-45% of your HP is bad at all. I'd say being left with that amount means your mitigation worked, as you're probably gonna be tossed a Cure/Benefic II or Tetra/ED/Lustrate after it and quite possibly recover 11k+ just from one spell. If you're too worried about it, combine it with Convalescence. Or better yet, if you're doing Savage you're probably voice-communicating with your healers, so let them know when you're going to use a slightly weaker CD beforehand so they can Virus or shield you. Even then, 40% of your HP is hardly a dangerous situation, specially when the only thing coming immediately after are auto-attacks.

Not to make pointless comparisons, but remember back when Str tanks were the meta? You only brought what you needed for the fights. Heavenly Heel used to deal around 14-15k damage on tanks with 17k HP, and that was perfectly fine. The first Heel could be taken with Foresight and Sheltron with no problems.