A complaint from a whiny healer

[Phoenicia]

I can account for Paladins at least, shields do good work in dungeons, but I'm not sure yet why when I play a healer, I see a Warrior and go "Well that's fine," and then a Dark Knight comes in the next run and I think "This is really going to suck!" They have no shields and just about as many defensive cooldowns both.

I've gotten randomly squishy PLDs before but the chances of random squishy tanks definitely goes up as you go from PLD to WAR to DRK

It's not really that "DRKs are commonly odd squishy" and WAR's aren't. Out of tank stance and no-CD-usage, all 3 tanks take the same damage, except PLD has a random chance to not be as squishy thanks to their shield and Flash.

What you two are experiencing with DRK is that it's cool and edgy, and as such attracts the bad players (kind of like how DRG attracted many bad DPS players in ARR and HW) and what you see is those players that have no idea how to tank playing on a tank that actually requires knowing how to press buttons and in what order. What happens here is a player that has no idea how to tank sees the cool and edgy tank and gives it a try and you end up seeing this paper tank running in and taking ridiculous amounts of damage.

I've seen it happen to all tanks tbh. DRK running in and using Unleash out of Grit? I mean if you're dropping Grit, at least know which AoE is the one that does damage. From this DRK I do not expect them to know that they need to press rampart if they didn't know that AD > Unleash.

Heck, I've seen WARs stay in defiance, pop IR and spam Overpower of all the buttons they chose. Forgoing the increased damage, enmity and sustain from Steel Cyclone for example. I mean the button lights up when in IR for crying out loud.

On the other hand, "bad play" on the PLD tends to be sitting in shield oath (and sword oath being a joke in AOE anyway), they just go in, and spam flash and sit in the middle of mobs as they get tickled. Hence non-tank players get this perception that PLD takes less damage than DRK and WAR. And if this PLD isn't doing that, he's probably still taking less damage than DRK or WAR since he wouldn't be getting hit at all. lol

TL;DR: Because "playing bad" in PLD actually reduces tons of damage (from both, the monsters and the PLD lol), as opposed to "playing bad" on WAR/DRK which hurts both their DPS and mitigation, less knowledgeable players think DRK/WAR are squishy.