Dark Knight Megathread

[Archwizard]

No. If it absorbs more damage, you have to heal less damage. Period.

It's not a matter of how much damage they are taking or negating! It's about how easy it is to heal the person receiving that damage, how much time you buy for that damage to realistically be healed.

We're not arguing about a tankbuster every 10-20 sec, we're talking about the equivalent of one every second, from crowd damage.

If a character is receiving continuous damage spikes over a length of time (say, 10-12% of their health a second until mobs start dying) but can take the edge off all of them the whole time (reducing, say, 15-30% of the damage for 8 sec before moving on to the next DR), that grants time for HoT and leech effects to do their job, for oGCD charges to come off cooldown, or even for hardcasts like Pneuma to execute if need be.
And the fun thing about the 82 abilities is they not only bump up that mitigation, but add to exactly those healing effects. A healing effect given under the effects of mitigation is multiplied EHP.

If a character is receiving those same damage spikes over the same length of time but can negate 25% of health in damage outright... you've frontloaded all that value and bought a single GCD, during which the healer will probably continue attacking (and in all likelihood if TBN was the first thing you hit because it's the lowest CD, any healing you do get while it's active would be overhealing).
Meanwhile the backend of that damage will still be a giant unlubricated spike.
And while you can still stack other sources of mitigation on top of it and are still wont to alternate sources of mitigation as they become available, the fact is that you will burn through them more quickly due to the lack of barrier uptime.

... And again, DRK doesn't exactly have a lot of useful mitigation skills to go around in the first place, looking directly at Oblation/Dark Mind/Living Dead.

The issue isn't "TBN is bad, uniquely and individually." The issue is "TBN is insufficient to hold up the weight of everything DRK is giving up to have it."