DRK needs re-tuning/buffing.

[Crater]

...

DRK isn't really any more well-suited to tankbusters than PLD or even WAR right now.

For Blackest Night to outperform Sheltron in terms of eHP, the PLD would have to be using a shield that only mitigated ~17% of the damage on a block, when an at-level shield is almost always at least 20% mitigation (meaning a 5% eHP advantage versus TBN), and can climb as high as 24% by the end of an expansion - at which point it's a ~31% eHP boost compared to TBN's 20%. So TBN only beats Sheltron for tankbusters in the event that A) The tankbuster is multi-hit and Sheltron will only catch one of them, B) Sheltron is mistimed and gets eaten by an auto-attack, or C) we're not talking about a tankbuster so much as about a "tankbuster" that deals such light damage that it makes an appreciable difference in DRK's favor that damage is applied to the shield before touching your HP.

And that's just Sheltron. TBN isn't really doing any more for DRK than Sheltron is doing for PLD, at least with regard to tankbusters, and in a lot of cases, is doing less. But setting aside role skills and invuln cooldowns (the former are by definition identical and the latter are basically well-balanced against each other and largely make their respective active mitigation skills redundant), PLD has two other Block-based mitigation cooldowns, both of which will solve Sheltron's issues with multi-hits and auto-attacks, they have Sentinel which is a strictly superior version of Shadow Wall, and they have Cover, which is fairly close to a second Rampart.

By contrast, DRK's only supplemental abilities (again excepting role/invuln skills) are Dark Mind and Shadow Wall. So a strictly-inferior version of Sentinel, and a good-but-ultimately-not-overwhelmingly-better cooldown which is useful on magic tankbusters and might as well be Shake It Off if all the boss's real tank-directed damage is physical.

On a fight with physical tankbusters, DRK is basically in a position as bad or possibly worse than the position that PLD found itself in during HW in fights like A4S or A12S.
On a fight with magical tankbusters, DRK carries a slight advantage over PLD, but that advantage is significantly less than the advantage that PLD had over DRK during HW in fights like Thordan, Sephirot, or A7S.


To give DRK that niche, the advantage they have against magical tankbusters needs to be significantly bolstered, and to avoid literally just swapping DRK and PLD's places from one expansion to another and repeating the same mistake of making one tank a gimp in fights that don't cater to their specific physical/magical needs, they need to be given equal capability versus physical and magical, much like they did with PLD.


If they don't give DRK that niche... Then we're basically waiting another two years and hoping that 5.0 gives DRK five new defensive cooldowns, because there's no way that they could get anything that would give them WAR's sustained mitigation uptime, or PLD's suite of party/target-other mitigation. And I really have no idea what's left, besides bumping Darkside up to +50% damage and then saying "now DRK is the halfway point between a tank and DPS".