Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
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.
The thing is though that there's fairly little mileage to get out of a version of DRK that's just as concerned with having a strict cooldown rotation as the other tanks. If TBN is designed such that it's not sufficient for mitigation on tankbusters and needs to be paired with another cooldown, you might as well strip it out of the game and just buff the standard mitigation toolkit until it's as powerful as a Warrior's - at which point you have two classes trying to do the exact same thing in the exact same way, and one of them is always going to be in the doghouse (and historically speaking, if you're a tank and you're gambling on "Am I going to be better or worse than a Warrior at doing the things that Warriors do?" you're probably walking away disappointed).

I don't think there's a problem with a design where DRK's defensive identity becomes "You can mitigate anything you want, as long as you have the resources to do so", with little to no reliance on traditional cooldowns. But to get to that design, you have to improve their active mitigation to the point where it's sufficient to mitigate basically everything in the game (so long as you can stay on top of your resource management*).


*The issue that's paired with that is, of course, that the same resource is being used for defense and offense. But considering that DRK has two completely distinct resources, there's a pretty obvious solution to that problem staring us all in the face.