Tank IDENTITY

[Shurrikhan]

Sure. And what is the lore mechanism by which a non-magical Warrior heals themselves on every attack?

The "too angry to die" thrill of fight / battle-lust -- given repeatedly throughout its lore.

But ask yourself then, what is the lore mechanism behind Second Wind?
Heck, what is the lore mechanism behind Souleater? What part in the DRK quest turned that into a blood-drinking vampiric blade? How does drinking deep of the damaging (in the quests) aetheric soulflame heal you?

If you don't want to create the impression of a vampiric Warrior

They haven't created that "vampiric Warrior" impression, though. Who else is having this fixation that "if it has non-spell self-healing, it must be a vampire"?

They have conveyed that alternate explanation through the animations and effects. It may be watered down by now, like so much else, but your %healing was directly related to Wrath stacks and each of 5 stacks had an augmenting animation. The lore is there. The animations are (were, more so) there.

Even take something standard and mandatory like mitigation. Mitigation doesn't always have to be fixed %DR. Perhaps excess healing over cap gets converted to temporary HP. Perhaps you have a flat damage shield barrier. Perhaps your %DR ramps up as you take more damage. Perhaps incoming damage gets delivered in a delayed fashion by being converted into a DoT. If you come up with something fun, why not make it a theme across the whole job? Shadow Wall, TBN, Oblation, and even Dark Force have a running visual theme across them featuring magical bubbles with inscriptions on them. That's great, but what if it was a consistent visual signifier of something like 'absorbs flat damage'?

Going in a different direction, the first DRK quest carries a vivid description of a Dark Knight, armor soaked in their own blood as well as the blood of their opponent, transforming itself into a twisted aura. Could you create a tank mitigation theme around that? Absolutely. Just develop it and expand on it in a consistent fashion through the skillset and animations. But when you start throwing in random vampiric effects, random barrier effects, random %DR effects without any real consistency, then there's no coherence to the job.

Agreed. Visual-to-effect coherency and consistency are vital. And I do think each of tanks could use a degree of sanding disjointed edges, re-fleshing out what fits best, and polishing the result.

I just think you've gone well out of your way to ignore WAR's or to judge it only by its latest expansions, which makes no more sense than to say that DRK has to be a flat shield tank just because TBN was added.

There's no single fit nor theme for a self-healing-with/from-offense. Nor is there any more inherent of a lore explanation to "My sword drinks blood by... converting soul-mass(?)... even though I have zero actual enchanting magics, only a manifestable disturbed/doubled psyche and its energies..." than "The intensity of the fight keeps me in the fight; I live or die by the havoc I wreck."

It's no tragedy that WAR was made the high-HP, high-self-healing battlefield juggernaut, while DRK instead took on the most bastardly and tactical, wider-ranged, no-holds-barred feel instead. They both need work, but they don't need to be randomly flipped on their heads.