Quote Originally Posted by Cessna View Post
Combining featherfoot with bloodbath and vengeance on adds is also a good idea since they all feed off on each other.
Featherfoot actually interferes with Vengeance because you have to be hit in order for Vengeance to deal the retributive damage (and cause Bloodbath to heal you for that little bit) and Featherfoot makes attack miss you (which renders any defense buff you might have active redundant). If anything, Featherfoot should only be used alongside Convalescence or ToB since those aren't reducing your incoming damage. If you explicitly *need* to use another CD on top of Vengeance for whatever reason, you'd be better served by using Foresight, ToB, or Convalescence.

I generally follow one of two mentalities concerning my tank CDs depending upon what I'm going to be tanking.

On tank swap fights, like Titan Ex and Ifrit Ex, where I can expect to be tanking roughly 50% of the time with a 30-40 active window, I'll use my CDs actively to make sure that I always have one up while I'm tanking (you've got 30-40 seconds of time on a regular basis where it doesn't matter if your CDs are up or not when you're not tanking so there's no reason to not get some use out of that time by having your CDs recharge). I use Featherfoot or Foresight right when I take over (because they're weak and you just want to reduce mean incoming damage to lighten healer load in the long term) and Conv/ToB/Vengeance when I'm 15-20 seconds away from no longer tanking based upon my tank buddy's remaining duration (since you really need the tank CDs when you've got 3-4 stacks of Suppuration on you, especially towards the end of the fight).

The general "rotation" for this is something like Foresight(20 secs)>Vengeance(15 secs)>Swap(~30 secs)>Featherfoot(15 secs)>Convalescence(20 seconds)>Swap(~30 seconds), which is a 130 second "cycle", allowing for a bit of overlap/flexibility, and keeps ToB in reserve for times when you're worried that you might drop through whichever CD is active (since it's only really effective for burst survival; the same applies for Holmgang).

On straight up tank fights, I'll keep my big CDs (Conv, Veng, ToB) in reserve but use Bloodbath, Foresight, and Featherfoot whenever I expect to be attacked for the full duration and I don't have another CD up at the time. Foresight isn't strong enough while it's active to really be noticeable as a tank CD in the short term and Featherfoot just isn't reliable, which is something you want out of an emergency CD. They're still quite nice because you can just use them all the time without worrying as to whether you're wasting them or might need them later on since you're not going to in either case.

In either case, I try not to layer CDs on top of each other unless it's a major emergency since I think it's something of a waste otherwise (stacking multiplicative mitigation buffs actually ends up diminishing their real value: reducing damage by 30% via Vengeance results in taking 70% of incoming damage, throw Foresight on top of it and you're taking ~63% for 15 seconds and 90% for 5 seconds; if you used them separately, you'd have gotten 15 seconds of 70% and 20 seconds of ~90%). ToB is something of an exception to this because all it does is increase eHP so it doesn't really have an appreciable mean contribution for you to worry about (it doesn't reduce incoming damage; it just makes sure you can survive spikes).