4.11+ DRK Suggestions/Balance Changes from a "Hardcore" Player

[Lyth]

I feel like one of the main points of tanking is testing your understanding of damage patterns. If you're confident that TBN will break with just autos, it's effectively just infuriate. Also, if you want a tool that focuses on autos, then it needs to be longer duration (i.e. Bulwark, Dark Dance) or perhaps channelled. I don't think TBN is the right tool for this.

What makes TBN interesting is that it solves one of the main problems of tanking design in this game, namely that you generally only have one active tank at a time. So while you end up learning the damage patterns associated with your "parts" very well, the rest of the time you're effectively another melee dps. One way that they've addressed the issue is to keep tanks involved with raid mitigation even if they're not tanking. TBN takes it a step further, in that it doesn't really matter whether you're the active tank at a given moment or not. You can, in theory, mitigate every big hit on yourself and your co-tank and follow up on each with a counter-attack. It's a really cool idea, but it's limited by the fact that the devs have been overly conservative when it comes to the shield strength and Bloodspiller.

I think the reason why TBN needs to be paired is to ensure that you're still following a cooldown rotation. Otherwise, it just becomes an issue of hitting the correct MP threshold before the hit. Of course, that brings us into other issues with how the rest of our cooldowns are designed.