Cooldown combos?

[Cabalabob]

Generally you don’t want to combine cooldowns, mitigation is multiplicative not additive so the more things you stack the less it reduces (e.g. sentinel + rampart is not 60% mitigation it’s more like 52%).

There are some exceptions to this like awareness and convalescence which aren’t directly mitigation and so can be paired with other cooldowns to make things easier on the healers.

Generally you want to combine convalescence with lower end mitigation like rampart, things like sentinel you can use on its own because it’s already hefty mitigation in its own right.

Awareness is best used in conjunction with things like anticipation, bulwark or especially raw intuition. Crit is checked before block or parry so if an enemy attack crits you can’t block or parry it even with a 100% block rate like sheltron. So awareness means more blocks and parries.

In the same vein as the above you can’t block and parry the same attack, so don’t use anticipation and bulwark at the same time.

Finally a major thing you DO want to pair is your quick mitigation tool with a stronger cooldown for tank busters (heavy hitting skills that would kill you without mitigation). Quick mitigation is things like sheltron on PLD, the Blackest night on DRK or inner beast on warrior. You want to pair these with major cooldowns like rampart, sentinel, shadow wall or vengeance to reduce those heavy hits.