Suggestions for bringing DRK up to par, and QoL changes.

[Aana]

1. Warrior is not "the de facto OT" and hasn't been since 3.x

2. While the best strategy (and the current meta) is to do frequent tank swaps whether they're required or not, Warrior's time spent tanking is noticeably more sturdy than Dark Knight's or Paladin's on almost every single fight, because they're less squishy in their DPS stance than the other tanks

3. Neo Exdeath is the definition of a cherry-picked fight to make PLD look good, as there are no auto-attacks or standard cleaves - everything is either raid-wide damage or a tankbuster, meaning that Sheltron might as well have 100% uptime. This is not the case in Exdeath, Halicarnassus, Catastrophe, Alte Roite, Shinryu, or any phase of Unending Coil, which are all fights where Warrior is the sturdiest tank in DPS stance. And WAR is still on par or better than DRK in that fight

Any instance where the game doesn't 'force' specific tank swaps (A2 for example) with hard death mechanics and players get to choose, the default strategy is War pulls for agro, uses HG on the 1st available thing worth using HG on and hands it over. Takes it back when you can HG something later in the fight. The way players (when given the option) use war now is for agro and abuse of HG then hand the reins over to the other tank.

Pld has the obvious advantage over everyone for DPS stance tanking. They loose nothing at all. Passive shield blocks, shelltron, standard CD suite. Drk is a lesser version as it lacks the passive shield obviously and rides out TBN. The difference between Drk/War offense stance MT squishyiness is not nearly as drastic as Pld/War though. The only way war is superior in this regard is riding the coattails of TBN/Intervention. War is only a better MT in offense stance when the 'oh so bad' IB equivalents for Pld/Drk are used on war. But again, this is the nuanced way people actually play, not this BS sweeping generalization of "WAR OP". War by itself is binary based on defiance/deliverance. Deliverance war is ONLY superior to Pld/Drk offense stance mitigation USING pld/drk abilities.

But if war is only better working WITH another tank, but if there was no war, then the Pld/Drk combo could do the exact same thing and be even MORE defensive by combining TBN+Shelltrong/Intervention.

Just check FF logs. War is, most often, the tank that takes the least damage/boss time. I know because I was forced into MTing for my raid when we repped our Drk and the new tank wasn't very experienced vs me tanking since 2.0. I tried to find what 'mt' war damage was supposed to look like to see how I was doing by checking wars on FFlogs that MT. They are few and far between.