Quote Originally Posted by Reynhart View Post
First problem with that. Nothing you actually describes as any real impact on how you tank. All of these refers to how do they do damage.
No, these refer to how they play and both Warrior and Dark Knight use those mechanics to help their survivability. Inner Beast is War stack use that mitigates the damage taken. DA+Souleater and DA+DD both impact how the Dark Knight tanks (though most Dark Knights miss it).


But, most of the time, they're still used in the same way and at the same time. And they don't really matter when you chose which tank you'll want in your party.
Which is intentional and a good thing. Tank selection should be "We have a player who prefers to play Tank A, lets find a player who prefers to play Tank B/C/D and then we will be good to go tankwise."

The "tanking" gameplay could be much more unique between the three tanks.
Bad idea. More unique tanking gameplay methods make games far harder to balance. Please remember that Warrior actually had problems tanking in endgame during 2.0 due to Paladin being the mitigation cooldown tank and Warrior being the self-heal tank. They fixed the problem by giving Warrior mitigation abilities.

Then you'll have people beginning to crunch numbers to determine which "party protection" skill is the best, depending on potency and CD...and then still choosing WAR
As a reminder, they already have a "party protection" skill. For WAR, it's called Storm's Path, and for DRK, it's called Delirium, since party wide AoE are frequently magical.
And Paladin's have Rage of Halone for reducing physical damage done, but Storm's Path, Reprisal and Delirium can not help when the boss becomes untargetable or the damage comes from a source that is not effected by the boss' stats.

Divine Veil, PvE Thrill of War and "Soul Anchor" on the other hand would be very good at helping the party survive post add phase LB attacks.
Not really. The imbalance comes from WAR's main contribution being offensive while the other two are defensive. Let's get real, no one cares what any tank bring on a pure defensive spot, since even the lowest defensive tank needs to be able to main tank anything. So, you have to design three ways of contributing offensively to the party.
Which is exactly what you quoted. Dps tank= offensive Magi/physical tank = defensive. Also Paladin's were getting left out of A1S to A4S progression parties due to the later fights being more magic damage heavy which penalized Paladins.