Mitigation
Living Dead - After many years of dying if we got healed too early or if we weren’t healed enough or given a benediction by the WHM, we finally got a buff to Living Dead where we can heal ourselves if we play our cards right with our weaponskills. However - if we are still unable to heal ourselves, we still die after 10 seconds. Sure, people can claim “skill issue” but other tanks do not have the issue of dying if something unfortunate happens in solo content or if there’s downtime in a mechanic and there’s no healer to heal them.

Dark Mind - This mitigation is a relic of Heavensward to be blunt. I understand that back in the day there was a need for Magic resistant tanks as thats what DRK originally was, but with this push for homogenization, Dark Mind needs to be reviewed.

TBN - I have some heated opinions on this that not everyone will agree with. TBN in Shadowbringers and Stormblood was insanely good. The benefit far outweighed the negatives, ie the possible loss of 3000 MP, but over time, with release of new expacs, other tanks have gotten insanely good mitigation, ie Holy Sheltron, Bloodwhetting and Heart of Corundum. These massively outclass TBN. They give massive short bursts of Mitigation before trailing off to a lower percentage, eg: Heart of Corundum (15% Mitigation for 8s + 15% for Clarity of Corundum for 4s). All TBN gets is a 25% of max HP shield which is always used with Oblation or some other form of mitigation.

Dark Missionary - Make this unlockable at level 70

Oblation - It’s hard to figure out where this sits. Oblation on it’s own does not have that much of an impact. Yes you can give other people some spot mitigation in the worst case scenario, but it’s most likely not going to amount to much without TBN, which then runs the risk of not breaking and being worth due to the loss of MP..

My suggestion:
Living Dead - Keep it how it is but remove the ability to actually die if you’ve not been healed for the maximum total HP. (Yes, I know it’s in the name but DRK does not feel good to play in solo content with this invuln)
For those who need convincing - Picture fighting an enemy solo. You use Living Dead and it procs. You then end up killing the enemy before you can finish healing, leaving you in a situation where there’s nothing around you to kill. Then Walking Dead timer ticks down to 0 with you having nothing to attack, ending in your death. Try this as any other tank and you will live.

Dark Mind - Make this a general mitigation instead of a magic only. This would allow us to make better use of this mitigation in more than one current raid tier fight (M4S). To balance this, lower the %mitigation down to 15% from 20%.

cont.