Quote Originally Posted by Brian_ View Post
On the flip side, there aren't that many mistakes that will punish a tank for not having enough persistent eHP. Having more eHP doesn't bail you out of many situations, either.

The balance between the two tanking archetypes exists within the tuning and design of the encounter. Currently, there is an imbalance in how impactful the two elements are on overall raid margins. You need to tune it properly so that the advantages of being tankier or having more utility are actually comparable to having more raid DPS.

Whether or not PLD is tankier or offers more utility is another issue entirely. But, to say the two archetypes cannot co-exist is wrong.
I'll agree completely with this, but unless you have a tank that has reliably higher eHP by nature of its passives and/or abilities, what you've mentioned here is more an issue of accessory choice than tank differences. The formula SE has put forward for tanks is interval mitigation--CDs and stack consumption--along with the occasional well-timed self-heal. Where the intervals cannot line up, one tank falls behind. Worse, where damage type doesn't line up, mitigation is often wasted. To say that a given tank can be "tankier" than its alternatives not only requires a change in the focus and tuning of fights (from where dps is your real lifeblood, rather than a safe margin of eHP) but also largely a redesign of the tank arsenal. PLD, with its added block chance, might end up with a generally higher eHP, but anything that depends on RNG is not going to be reliable eHP.

Even then, though, what such a tank would really be used to give is probably healer DPS. No more delayed DoT refreshes unless an actual tank buster is coming out, etc.