Tank Balance

[Ivellior]

this long post[/URL].

That cooldown usage is not optimal for Savage 1. You will never waste both Rampart + Sentinel on that tank buster, especially since only the later is enough and the healers will be on full healing duty due to all the aoe and damage during that phase.
PLD will go: Sentinel => Hallowed => Sentinel => Rampart + Awareness + Drac Pot of Vit + Stoneskin + whatever the healers can throw on you to keep you alive.
DRK will go: Dark Arts + Dark Mind + Shadow Wall => Living Death + Benediction => Dark Arts + Dark Mind + Shadow Wall => Dark Arts + Dark Mind + Rampart

It's more efficient (for both tanks) to use Rampart/Shadowskin after the bombs and use convalence + tank stance when the boss starts casting the missiles. If you are able to time the living death properly you can get mitigate more damage because the effective duration but we will just assume it will be used for the tank buster.
As for the benediction, it really shouldn't be a problem since 99% of the groups doing savage have SCH + WHM combination for healers. In the rare case that you don't have that combination you can just have WAR spend some of his self healing cooldowns to help the healers that have to top up DRK.
If you have a WHM using Benediction it is a no brainer since the healers can focus on WAR after Holmgag and just throw you the benediction a few seconds before the timer runs out.

Also while the 4th tank buster should no longer be an issue now with the items people have from tomes, it was something that people would face, especially in the first weeks.
However since the enrage timer was very close to the tank buster a lot of time it was simply preferable to just use the cooldowns earlier and just let the pld die so he could use a STR pot earlier rather than save the cooldown for the VIT pot on the last tank buster.

Not to mention Delirium in as well. So in that fight DRK not only mitigates more damage but is overall more efficient because he does more damage.
On Savage 2 PLD will mitigate more damage, but since PLD has not real aoe damage to speak of, it's still more efficient to use a DRK, since you can "mitigate" more damage by simply killing things faster.
On Savage 3 most damage is physical but the orange tethers are magical tank busters (The first hand is somewhat of a tank buster. You can cheese it using your I wont die button but you can always just turn it around and share damage with the group).
Whether you want to use PLD or DRK here depends on whether you can pass the dps checks, which are plenty and tough. Haven't cleared this, so I can't comment on 4.
WAR is a must have on all Savage raids because it does more damage.

The problem is the current META (because tanks need to be a beefy dps now) and the way savage encounters are designed. To make it short because DRK deals more damage and the raids have a lot of magical tank busters it's more efficient to use a DRK.
And because WAR deals the most damage it's a must have.