Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
This.

Now if only the forums hadn't gotten up in arms that "You can't give HP-sacrificing mechanics to a tank cuS thEy'll dIe!" despite a tank being the only place to put an HP-sacrificing mechanic without it just turning into a seemingly overpower DPS that is nonetheless so dependent on HoTs that they have no actual rDPS advantage (despite feeling gimped as soon as they can't get sufficient attention from the healer)...

Sac HP for added (M.) Defense is still the most practical unique DRK mechanic and it was suggested as far back as DRK's reveal but has never even seen a dev comment, as far as I'm aware. Why?
T'would be a more interesting Blood Mechanic.

"Blood" skills reduce your maximum health by 25% upon use. Stacks up to 3 times.

The "Tank Trait" for Dark Knight would be, I don't know, Shadowskin, which ramps up mitigation as health is reduced. Mathematically speaking, to ensure that your 25% is worth as much as 100%, a ludicrous 75% total reduction would be needed.

(As a background change, we can probably just remove "Defense" as a stat, since we A) Have no control over it and B) it would make this all easier to napkin).

Instead though, if we consider TBN is "25% of max HP", then TBN could instead "Restore" that loss HP as a Shield, providing a shield equal to the maximum health clogged by the drain and removing the "Clog" when the shield breaks.

So for that matter, having effectively 50% of your HP (25% HP, 25% Shield), if we want the durability to be equivalent to your max HP + the shield, this means the damage reduction is a bit less ludicrous sitting at 60%.

Math: 50 / .4 = 125.

A Dark sitting at '3 Blood' (25% Max HP) is more akin to to another tank sitting at 62.5% HP then. You're encouraged to break your shield so you can use more blood skills.

Though if I'm being honest, this couldn't really happen without also including an incoming heal reduction. There's a lot of potentially busted scenarios that could occur from this.