Dark Knight : Just another mitigation tank

[Einheri]

The problem with blood/lifesteal/leech tanking is scaling. As it has been said leech tanks like evasion tanks come in two flavors under and over powered. WAR 2.0 suffered from raid bosses damage scaling higher at a much faster rate than the players damage.

WoW spent years balancing this. Now where blood dks heal scaled off damage received and evasion is spread between two attacks. Little more than flavor differences in mitigation.

All mitigation is increasing your effective health pool. Armor, health, dodge, heal, and shields all complete this task with very little difference. Armor is consistent. Shield are just a different visual of increased hp and heals are just the delayed form. Evasion is spikey due to probability. At the end of the day you can balance these if they all scale off either the player OR npcs. They are just different flavors that represent the same number of a spread sheet.

Now if you want to talk about making a class different you can talk about how the flavor of mitigation is obtained. Passive armor and health stacking? Reactive skill? Proactive skill? Maintained via a set of actions?

Arbiter in rift is one of my favorite tanks. Its gimmick is maintaining shields via depleteing and building its focus resource.

The dark templar from age of Conan was a bad ass life drain tank but wasn't great against slow but heavy hitting boss.

Black Orcs in war hammer used skills and damage taken to increase their healthpool.

You can also niche your tanks via the content they are strong against. Lots of little attacks? Big spread out hits? Magic vs physical? Single target v aoe?