Quote Originally Posted by Malthir View Post
snip
Just for clarification's sake, Dark mind was IIRC the only anti magic cooldown. Delirium slightly lowered the opponent's INT stat, which affected magic damage.

Shadowskin - Omni
Shadow wall - Omni
Dark Mind - Magic
Delirium - INT down (magic)
Dark Dance - Parry (physical), Evasion (DA power up)
Reprisal - Omni (required a parry to proc)
Low blow - stun (parry procs reset CD)
Dark passenger - Evasion (DA power up)

DRK's HW kit synergized more with physical autos & attacks than it did with magic, iirc. It just had a slightly better way of dealing with magic than PLD as a tradeoff for most of its physical kit being based around RNG procs. Grit also did cost MP to activate, but not to turn off (it also didnt trigger the GCD when you turned it off as well), which is what you might be thinking of.

If any identity for DRK was correct, it was the 'needs to MT or it loses mitigation & dps' tank, due to low blow, reprisal, blood price all requiring to get struck in order to proc their effects. Whether it was fun or not, even the HW version of DRK had a lot of anti-synergy between its abilities going on (Several abilities giving evasion as a DA bonus for one thing, when dodging hits prevents you from getting procs for reprisal & low blow, as a key one) and by end of HW's life, the defensive applications of Dark Arts were completely ignored in raid outside of niche use with DM due to the emergence of dps > all raid design.

Also as a side tangent, WAR was basically never the actual community standard MT anytime through its life until SB. PLD remained the defacto MT throughout ARR due to the stigma WAR had from 2.0, along with passive block & wanting block procs for shield swipe to slow their horrendous TP burn. DRK lost too much to not MT in HW, so the ideal tank setup was DRK tanking as long and as much as it could, with WAR only tanking when it needed to. WAR only started seeing MT usage around SB when it had the absolutely easiest time pulling and maintaining early fight aggro, before a brevity of shirks & vokes would prevent anyone else in the party from ever catching up again. But SB is also the expansion when they started dipping more mechanics & fight designs that blurred MT & OT lines.

As far as your point about the lack of care about tanks:

It's not that they don't care, it's that the devs have a very specific design vision for this game, and ARR/HW/SB style tanking isn't it. The devs have clearly stated with words & actions that they want jobs to be accessible, that every job will have a high skill floor and a low skill ceiling. The devs want tanking to be easy, they know exactly what they've been doing making it easier over the years; you just don't agree with it, it's not that they don't care. They want every tank to have the tools to handle any fight regardless of design, there'll never be tank niches, only slight variations on extra tools.