Foe Sirvente and useful situations

[Kisetai]

As with anything in this game, Sirvente and Dirge are situational. I personally have my group 2 merits invested as 3 Dirge, 1 Sirvente, 1 Nightingale and 1 Troubadour and wouldn't change a thing. I almost never need to reuse Nightingale and Troubadour as soon as their recasts are up, and honestly don't get all that much use out of Sirvente.

Maybe it's just because I have Gjallarhorn but often when I use Dirge it's enough to turn the mob away from the person it was attacking and back onto the tanks, I've had a lot of mages thank me for using it when they pull hate and no complaints yet. One situation I consider Dirge very valuable at is JoL where we have our kraken drks use souleater one at a time. If the drk doesn't pull hate and die by the time their round is over giving them Dirge at the end allows them to go sit out and wait for their next turn while their enmity degrades faster, or if like at our last JoL where we only had one drk attend it allows them to switch to scythe and melee while still keeping their hate down.

Sirvente was a big disappointment to me, it was one of the first things I merited when the new merits came out and our tanks were unimpressed with its results. Like it's been said it's nice for kited situations where it can be a pain to land aoe songs on a tank, for mixed type tank parties, and for when tanks have buffs or hate stripped, but overall I'd consider this the least useful of the four merits.

[Bakthi]

It seems likely that Sirvente and Dirge are probably both kind of uninspiring when merited only one level. I have sort of the counterpart to your merits (1 Nightengale/Troubadour/Dirge and 3 Sirvente), and while I don't use Sirvente a ton, tanks tell me they can notice the difference when I do. Especially on kited or semi-kited stuff (we kite Temperance when in blunt mode), or something like a NIN tanking Faust. I do tag people with Dirge if the mob takes a special liking to them, and it does...seem to help, but I'm sure the effect is much more noticable at level 3. My line of thinking was that I'd rather Sirvente one or two people than maybe want to Dirge a bunch of them. I think either is probably fine.

I understand the people who like level 3 Troubadour for ES+Elegy rotations, but I'm not in that situation at all, as far as camped HNMs go. For Omega, I wouldn't want to give up the utility of /WHM even in a large group, but again, that's me. Oddly, I'm pretty pro-/NIN for (most) merits; go figure.

[Marcicus]

Tanks could have used it today when I hit KB with 2k Cannonball. :[

[Geneyus]

To Wop: My post was in response to someone saying tanks losing hate with 3/tick or 9%. The OP said Gjallarhorn only, I do believe.

Our tanks mostly prefer to play pld or rdm so double ballad is the way to go for us, and with gear swapping to drop hp and raise it back up (ala sorc ring or I have it to just change hp lvls on other jobs) tanks have an endless amount of hate.

I really don't like dying on blm.