DRK needs re-tuning/buffing.

[Lyth]

What's funny about Passage of Arms is that I'm pretty sure it's useless for Susano's mid-fight ultimate. I know the dev team mentioned how it was a really useful tool when testing out Omega, but I'm not seeing where as of now.

There are a lot of mechanics that we probably aren't aware of yet, but of what we've seen, Meteor is the obvious one. It hits hard enough in normal mode that I'd expect it to be a heavy hitter in savage, and having 100% block while it happens means that you don't have to worry about the follow up auto on the tank.

PLD has double the raid mitigation of the other tanks. In addition to Reprisal every 60 seconds, you have both Veil and PoA on a 120 second recast, letting you have some form of raid mitigation up every 30 seconds from the PLD alone. That's the same amount of mitigation that a DRK/WAR comp has access to combined, in the event than anyone actually bothers to run that comp. Even if you factor out PLD's dps advantage, you're still going to be seeing it locked in based on that massive amount of raid mitigation alone. It's kind of ludicrous.

...

I'm not really worried about DRK's personal mitigation. Most tankbuster sets can be mitigated with the level 50 cooldown kit of Rampart/Sentinel/Hallowed or their equivalents, as long as they're spaced a minimum of 35 seconds apart. Abilities like TBN are actually overkill, and the only potential problem that I can see is multi-hit physical tankbusters. There's no point comparing Shadowwall to something like Vengeance, as Vengeance is just flat out overtuned with Rampart available. The reason why I have an extreme dislike for Living Dead is because there's always at least one point each tier where you can't substitute in anything else, and it can be an unnecessary liability. A7S was one example of a fight where most people went PLD in spite of its dps disadvantage, in part because of the heavy physical damage, but also because Hallowed allowed you to completely ignore your tank for its duration. The tank invincibility moves are completely unbalanced, and have been for the past four years. Even if Hallowed was nerfed so that it only nullifies damage at 1 hp to prevent teams from cheesing stack mechanics, LD would still be inferior because of its arbitrary healer penalty. That's probably the single most longstanding balance issue in tankbuster mitigation.

Self-healing is a bit of a weird one. It's nice, especially if you're doing solo content like PoTD, but it's not mandatory to have this be perfectly balanced. I don't really mind if DRK doesn't have an equivalent to spamming 15k Clemency casts until they're at full health. Accessibility matters much more to me, and actually having some form of self healing out of tank stance, however small (like both PLD and WAR have) would be a good start.

With regards to dps, I feel like a lot of the discrepancy between PLD and the other two tanks was to ensure that PLD didn't get excluded for dps reasons alone. I expect that they were aiming for a marginally higher dps just to be safe, but significantly overshot the mark when players brought out the STR gear. I don't see them keeping both the massive utility buffs and the dps. The WAR/DRK dps balance is in a pretty good place, as long as they dial PLD back a bit. Besides, PLD has always had some fairly major advantages when it came to mitigation, even when they were viewed as less desirable. Perhaps this is an opportunity to properly re-balance it?