Dark Knight is playable, but BORING

[RadicalPesto]

Please see my sig, and stop thinking being good at raid content means you know a class.

I'd say the people who understand i from the ground up having played it through all those dungeons you seem to poo poo know the class a whole helluva lot better then the people spending all day in the boringness of EX content, which honestly boils down to stand here for X and kill in X order if titainia was any indication. The exact same as any dungeon, the only difference is the dps check, and the twitch required to dodge the aoes in places like Eden 1 savage.

Raid content actually requires you to plan out your mitigation, use tank swaps, understand positioning, maximize uptime while performing mechanics and know when its best to use group mitigation skills like Dark Missionary. Dungeons can be successfully completed without any major issues without a single press of Reprisal, a single use of Dark Missionary, without any minding to maintaining your DPS uptime (and it doesn't matter if you say "go play a DPS instead", because "tanks and healers should optimize their DPS while performing their role" isn't an opinion, it's the fundamental design of FFXIV), with completely random or erratic usage of your mitigation skills, without using any interrupts, etc. In fact, given the aggro changes in Shadowbringers, you can feasibly complete every dungeon in the game as a tank while pressing a completely random assortment of AoE skills, since any damage will be enough to maintain aggro.

When you say things like this:

A buster is a buster regardless of where it is.

You indicate that you don't understand why people ask for balance and design to be done around Savage raids. A tank buster in a late Savage fight will instantly kill you if not mitigated properly, and will likely spiral out of control into a wipe unless your team manages to pull off a quick recovery. Not only that, because Savage fights are around 10 minutes long, you need to make sure you have good mitigation for every single tankbuster throughout the fight (which may require strategic tank swapping, to make use of both tank's mitigation toolkits), and these will at times hit hard enough to require the stacking of two mitigation buttons (TBN + Rampart, for example) just to ensure your basic survival. A buster in a dungeon will, if not mitigated, uh, hit you for half of your HP, which the healer will immediately restore with an off-gcd, and will require at most a single TBN to mitigate, and you will see two or three of them in a boss fight meaning there's no need to plan for running out of mitigation. Dungeon busters and Savage busters are such a completely different thing that Dungeon busters seem to largely exist to give you a way to actually break TBN sometimes, because they practically never represent a genuine threat to a tank's survival.

Almost every balance thread has somebody like you drop their anti-raider manifesto and think they're unique for not enjoying Savage content, and its always full of comments such as "why should the classes be balanced around Savage?" and the answer is this: Because the alternative would be to bring every single 4 person dungeon, normal mode raid and 24 person raid to a difficulty level comparable to Savage, a difficulty level where a class bringing Divine Veil, or interrupts, or strong mitigation skills, or the best DPS actually matters. You can't balance around content where out of 30 skills you can easily clear every fight pressing only 6, and that means you have to either balance around Savage and Ultimate, which require you to use either all or a majority of your skills, or make the entire game as difficult as Savage and Ultimate, and I guarantee you that absolutely nobody in their right mind wants that.