Quote Originally Posted by Malthir View Post
Nothing changed fundamentally though, Warriors massive health pool kept them as main tank and you basically took a Paladin or Drk depending on content.

If they just buffed some numbers making Paladins and Drks more competitive with warriors things would have been fine, however that's not what they did. Instead they scrapped the idea of having any unique features to the tanks and gave them pretty much the same buffs, they removed the tank stance/damage stance feature of the tanks but seemingly forgot that they literally designed Darks and slightly less so Paladins around this feature. Paladins lost a buff and their identity as the physical block tank, Drk lost it's entire class identity, most of the debuffs from DA, removed the parry increase buff and reprise was given to everyone, just cause. Warriors weren't affected because they never really had a class identity outside of unga bunga hit things with axe (totally cool if you like that just saying they have always been simple). To be continued........
They removed it because for a vast majority of the game and the entirety of Dark Knight's existence, no one used tank stance outside of the first 4ish GCDs, barring weird exceptions like losing a healer and needing to stabilize until they were brought back up. The only tank who was reliably doing any "stance dancing" was Warrior, as DRK/PLD both lost a GCD and MP to turn it back on, and PLD lost that again to turn it off.

Grit had no interaction with your thesis of DRK being a magic tank. Speaking of which, they had only one ability that specifically mitigated magic damage, and three times as many that involved parry, but no one ever called them a "parry tank". Their defensive kit was not cohesive, but you definitely wanted them to tank over WAR back then, as WAR needed to spend their defensive abilities for their offensive rotation and DRK couldn't proc reprisal or low blow from an off-tank role.

I do not think anyone wants to go back to when there was a "magic tank" and a "physical tank". PLD was in a rough spot in savage back then, and part of it was due to a lot of the alexander raid tiers had unblockable magic busters.