What is the General Consensus?

[Luin]

Then why do people fight over it exactly?

Drk's only tank w/o raid mitigation. Only tank still eat resource from swapping stance (MP). Literally 2 unique cooldowns & one of them is magic-exclusive & the other is counterintuitive to Blood Gauge.

Can Drk clear? Yes. Holding aggro, cycling cd, that front all the tanks are basically copy+pasted. You could remove all 'unique' utilities & would still be able to have a tank clear most content. The problem is Drk as a job isnt rewarding to play. Anything Drk can do, War and Pld can do better & more.

Point is Drk doesn't reward the player. War has burst damage & strong self-cd, Pld has best raid mitigation, Drk has neither or the damage to make up for it. Drk *is* that copy+paste. And you don't want to play a copy+paste, because it's boring.

Most importantly, War is too strong. You can't do Pld/Drk, you lose too much dps during burst windows and on the pull.

Oh, honey.

TBN breaks even in its cost. To understand that statement, it means that whether that resource was used for your "offensive abilities" or on TBN makes no difference, the DPS will be the roughly the same. This means that DRK only stands to gain by using TBN so long as the shield breaks, which is no challenge on a 7 second duration. The DRK gains mitigation and keeps their damage. The same could not be said for WAR's Inner Beast. As far as damage goes, the point of showing top performance is what a job is capable of. Is it behind? A bit, but only a bit. Again, when you look at the facts objectively, the doom and gloom surrounding the opinion on DRK leads to people disregarding said opinions.

Your hyperbole has no meat, and I'm quite hungry.

This depends on Delirium. Because BS eats GCD you're pushing back SS and SE and losing blood and mp. Using TBN to proc BS is a DPS loss while not in Grit. TBN to proc Delirium is a gain.

As for using DA, BS should get priority because crits don't scale linearly so the extra potency goes further, but that's minor.

Also, Inner Beast isn't remotely similar to Bloodspiller. IB is used as a defensive cooldown, not necessarily for damage.