DRK and HP sacrifice

[Shurrikhan]

As a warrior main I also wouldn't mind even if they made DrK the HP heal tank, I never thought it fit the "berserker" fantasy all that well anyway.

To take ideas from WoW once again, I think something like Monk's Stagger mechanic make more sense.
You're not healing the damage, you're ignoring/delaying it because you're in a rage, full of adrenaline, and simply don't notice your injuries until much later.

To be fair, without external healing, (A) self-heals plus an expanded health pool and (B) experiencing that damage over time while able to purge portions of the delayed damage... have virtually the same features -- higher passive eHP and active self-scaled sustain (as opposed to enemy-scaled sustain per having only %DRs).

But yeah, I thought the same as far back as ARR. Though, at the same time, I'm not sure self-healing fits DRK, either, as they're not actually vampiric necromancers in this game, but more akin to heretical/unorthodox paladins who take dynamis so far that they substitute reality with their own rules (void and the dark/umbral elements being representative mostly of that unfettered freedom or declined external order more so than anything naturally evil or even naturally dangerous). We (used to) see this even with the color scheme of its abilities, wherein red-toned weapon skills ignored the weight of the blade (replacing that reality with their own) while blue skills simply drew in more force (as if from conviction). The red and all things void was very... "Transgressing"/"Transgression" (ignoring authority, instilling one's own) themed.

In an ideal scenario I'd say let the new tanks mess up and end up dying to their own HP spending. It will teach them to not do that in the future, valuable knowledge gained.
But those potential points of failure are clearly incompatible with the current design philosophy.

Same... ish. But mostly because they're both multiplicative anyways. If you keep the full health bar but didn't, back in the day, have the MP to multiply it via, say, DA-Dark Mind for massively more eHP vs. magic damage (67% more eHP at 40% DR, for instance), you'd screwed yourself just as surely as if you'd spent 40% of your HP right before a tankbuster. And if, say, it'd cost only 25% of your HP to apply a 40% DR for a few seconds, you'd still be better off until very low HP to pop the spender anyways and hope for heals to catch up soon enough after.

That said, I don't think it's any more against the current design philosophy than, say, the ability to spend too much Oath Gauge all at once, or to spend all one's MP on Edges before a necessary TBN.

[Absurdity]

That said, I don't think it's any more against the current design philosophy than, say, the ability to spend too much Oath Gauge all at once, or to spend all one's MP on Edges before a necessary TBN.

It's similar but where I think that it doesn't fit the "frictionless" design philosophy is that it would be a lot more punishing than those two. Even if you mess up your gauge/MP management you have fallback options that you would simply lack if you were to for example reduce your own max HP down to 20%.

If you spend all your oath gauge before a buster you can substitute it with other cooldowns, same for emptying your MP at the wrong moment.
If you reduce your HP to 20% right before a buster, only cleansable by yourself, then no amount of other mitigation options is going to save you, besides maybe your invuln.

[Shurrikhan]

It's similar but where I think that it doesn't fit the "frictionless" design philosophy is that it would be a lot more punishing than those two. Even if you mess up your gauge/MP management you have fallback options that you would simply lack if you were to for example reduce your own max HP down to 20%.

If you spend all your oath gauge before a buster you can substitute it with other cooldowns, same for emptying your MP at the wrong moment.
If you reduce your HP to 20% right before a buster, only cleansable by yourself, then no amount of other mitigation options is going to save you, besides maybe your invuln.

Fair. I guess I was thinking of it as either the HP spender producing sustain in other ways and/or one having flat fallback options (like Great Nebula, Thrill of Battle, or the Excog portion of Shadowed Vigil) atop them.

I suppose a useful 'foolproofing' limiter of sorts could be to just use a portion of current health or a certain portion of max HP being left untouchable. E.g., if one spends 25% of current HP, the amount they can spend at a time is quickly reduced from 25% to 18.75% (at 75% health) to 14.06% to 10.55%, etc. Or, if spending some 20% at a time but unable to drop below 50% health outside of Living Dead, that'd likewise limit the extent to which it can be "overly" tapped. Oddly enough, I'd prefer the first, mostly just in that it'd also mean banking health allows one to be burstier. Big heal, big spend, if going the vampiric route for some reason.