Quote Originally Posted by bokchoykn View Post
One ability I don't get is Awareness. Boss auto attacks have a less than 5% chance to crit. It will crit you once every 50-60 seconds. Awareness is more likely to do nothing than it is likely to do something. When it does do something, you are still taking damage from the attack so it might not even save you.
And, to make it even less sensible, I'm pretty sure that an attack that is parried or blocked cannot score a critical hit either. When you get down to it, the chance of an individual attack scoring a critical hit on you is almost entirely negligible.

Of course, the value of Awareness isn't so much in the fact that it mitigates your incoming damage as much as it stabilizes it; while Awareness is up, the maximum potential damage you can take over an period of time is capped out much lower. It's not going to do a good job of making you take less damage, but it will do an excellent job of making sure that your incoming damage is more predictable.

People were saying it at release and it still holds true now: the only way that Awareness is going to be anything more than the absolute worst tank CD in the game is if they create some specific boss mechanic that basically *forces* you to use Awareness, such as an attack that hits as hard as DS and applies a buff that causes the next attack to be an automatic critical hit (it would also be an effective way to force a tank swap since, if it happens every minute, you'd have to swap tanks because Awareness has a 120 sec CD) or a boss that has an increased chance to score critical hits that, every time it scores one, it gets a stacking buff that increases damage by 10% for 15 seconds (the only way to get rid of those stacks is to either get really lucky or to use Awareness to become immune to crits long enough for the stacks to fall off).