DRK vs. WAR: how do they compare?

[fulminating]

Absolutely cheesed by any tanks kit.

Eric was a joke with no one’s help
Hippo had some pretty wimpy tank stacks
Orange had Elmo/myta
Hesperos had a skippable demigod double if you brought war and an ignorable heartstake if you brought a true invuln job

Currently invulns are worthless for all but war’s harvest, hp mit is worthless and damage has gone from important to all that matters.

Inb4 “but warrior gets nascent”

[Argyle_Darkheart]

You use invulns in P8S Phase 2, where Holmgang has a clear advantage.

[Oizen]

Absolutely cheesed by any tanks kit.

Eric was a joke with no one’s help
Hippo had some pretty wimpy tank stacks
Orange had Elmo/myta
Hesperos had a skippable demigod double if you brought war and an ignorable heartstake if you brought a true invuln job

Currently invulns are worthless for all but war’s harvest, hp mit is worthless and damage has gone from important to all that matters.

Inb4 “but warrior gets nascent”

Not even about Nascent this time, its Holmgang. As you've said, last tier wasnt that hard so you really didnt NEED things like Nascent.
Holmgang's 240s Cooldown was centralized to the entire tier, and WAR would just scream back its health every time.

Erichthonios's tank swaps were basically made optional by Holmgang. Depending on the pattern maybe you'd see a breif swap to the OT, but largely Holmgang was up every buster.
Hippo's Tank stacks could quite literally all be handled by WAR with alternating Holmgang and Kitchen Sinking. Other tanks actually couldn't do this, their invuls just didnt come up in time.
Phoinix ELMO speaks for itself but WAR Could use its Invul earlier in the fight for a tank buster if wanted. It be up again in time.
Hesperos Phase 1 Tank Busters could be effortlessly alternated with Two Holmgangs and your OT's Invul.
Hesperos Phase 2's Tank busters are the same way, allowing your OT's invul to be used to cheese Heartstake.

WAR + Any other Tank can do this. But any combination of Tanks that ISNT WAR has to ususally do at least one of these things properly.

Its also pretty disengenous to say invuls have to place in this tier when they have application to every fight that isn't 8.
Just not to a hilariously cheesy way that the first tier of pandemonium had

[fulminating]

Scaligmone's bleed is made optional by shielding, it's also not worth the hassle
Forgot about p2 and 4p1.
What do you use them for in p5 or p6?
This seems to be more a 2 minute raid design problem than anything.

Also how do you rationalise the existence of dark mind?

[Oizen]

What do you use them for in p5 or p6?
This seems to be more a 2 minute raid design problem than anything.

Also how do you rationalise the existence of dark mind?

P5, you can use an invul to solo the spawn of the add, allowing the OT to act as a fill if exactly 1 person got clipped from Devour.
P6, You can use Invuls on Chelic Synergy to minimize the ammount of bleed your healers have to deal with, if you don't see the value in that I dont know what else to say here.

Invuls aren't worthless this tier, they're just not the insane centralizing force they were in asphodelos.

Also how do you rationalise the existence of dark mind?

Dont know what you expect me to say here, the real answer is that DRK has no longer design philosophy and is just a random assortment of buttons that ended up being more than the sum of its parts. Some of it is leftover from the original design intent that DRK was the magic tank, back when PLD wasn't allowed to block magic, Square Enix chose during the mass removal of DRK skills to keep Dark Mind.

Dark Knight is the only Tank that doesn't get an early version of its mitigation.
It doesn't get Raw Intuition, Sheltron, or Heart of Stone, or Camoflauge. There is no Proto TBN (anymore anyway, Blood Price was kinda close)
They picked Dark Mind. Its honestly near worthless at the level you get it, and then becomes stupidly good once you get to raid content.

Then for whatever reason, they introduced Oblation which basically has all the same upsides of Dark Mind being short CD raw mit, giving DRK yet another button to press.

So while the rest of the tanks get skills with 50 different "Additional Effect" texts. DRK gets another raw mitigation skill that isn't all that impressive on its own, but can be paired with everything else to get an end result better than those other Tank's Super Mitigation skills. TBN also plays into this a bit, as shield HP pairs really well with mitigations.

An Optimist would say this was SE's intent, for DRK's skills to be a sum larger than its parts. I think its more of an accident that just was an inevitability of DRK getting so many buttons and never giving upgrades to them, rather than new skills.

[Absimiliard]

I'd be real careful about reminding them Dark Mind exists if I were you. You never know when you'll log in to find it greyed out and realize it was given to GNB or WAR.

[RyuDragnier]

I'd be real careful about reminding them Dark Mind exists if I were you. You never know when you'll log in to find it greyed out and realize it was given to GNB or WAR.

Just like what they did to Low Blow, Dark Dance (Anticipation was what it became), and Reprisal...I still haven't forgiven them for gutting us between HW and SB.

[Undeadfire]

Just like what they did to Low Blow, Dark Dance (Anticipation was what it became), and Reprisal...I still haven't forgiven them for gutting us between HW and SB.

Not sure what you were expecting, Drk in HW was horribly broken it needed to be nerfed to the ground. War/Pld had nothing in comparison.

[RyuDragnier]

Not sure what you were expecting, Drk in HW was horribly broken it needed to be nerfed to the ground. War/Pld had nothing in comparison.

It destroyed DRK's entire identity though. 2nd combo was ripped, our DoT was ripped, our mitigations were ripped, we essentially lost our high risk/reward MP management and playstyle...DRK ended up in a worse place, and has only fallen to the bottom of the well. It's been trying to claw its way back ever since.

[Undeadfire]

If every job got their pure identities back, we'll likely end up with a meta issue again with some jobs being too crap/broken for current high end content tiers, or Savage/Ultimate becoming too generic and boring. What I mean is, some jobs will not be taken and SE wants to keep the vision every job needs to be clear enabled, it's difficult to do both with such a mass of jobs, either way people are always going to complain. It was a huge issue in HW, Pld vs Drk, and Ast vs Whm.

Sadly we can't have everything, I'm an omni tank so I don't really care which tank is meta I'll main the best ones.

Edit: Don't get me wrong I'll gladly take identities, but this would take insane levels of IQ to give every job one at this point of numbers.