I know you wrote a guide on turtling. The only problem with it is that it's full of your preconceived biases and is basically wrong on a ton of shit. You don't actually get how to do turtling correctly and you don't actually understand the true value and power of turtling. Turtling is how you clear end game content on a bare-bones possibly f2p grid (you do need a DC Hime to make it work though). You have a very linear approach to thinking and you just can't see the additional secondary effects that Damage Cut gives you, which is why your guide goes against the trifecta of secondary abilities - exceed, vigor, and ascension that are needed to make a damage cut team a meta race team. I agree all weapons should have assault on them for an end game grid. I absolutely can't find any real value in limiting yourself to Defender (and/or Pride) over Vigor and Ascension. Especially defender, it's a has-been skill and you should be happy when you have it, but you shouldn't rate it higher or better than Vigor and Ascension. Also, your comments on Defense being a useless skill is just flat out wrong. It's very valuable (and even more valuable in a damage cut build) to stack some as it's an additional (usually included or free) frame of damage cut. And yes you should turtle with dark because if you're a new player you don't have access to a hammer grid at this time anymore. The best option, if you have any of those himes I mentioned earlier in the dark advice section, is to build a damage cut build and clear content so that you can become stronger.
So let's see if I can try and help you understand (yet again) why you fail to see the value in certain skills. This is mostly your mindset and not a problem with the skills.
First things first, I currently have a Wind Damage Cut team that can near solo TRag (near end game content). I am not a Wind main (thunder baka instead). With just a second union member also using a wind damage cut team, we're able to open up a TRag nearly guarantee it being cleared. We mostly pub it to all, since that just brings the clear time to less than 20 minutes. Most players can only dream of reliably clearing Trags with just one other person. Our union has members that can solo and/or AAB Aratron, Ophiel, and Phaleg due to damage cut. Also, with the addition of Vigor to the frame set, we can actually use our Damage Cut / Drop Rate teams and still race with the best out there. Vigor and Ascension are what makes a Damage Cut build competitive with an Assault/Pride/Defender meta team. You absolutely need it to be equivalent. If you do get decent amounts of Vigor (and some Ascension) you can guarantee to have the high hitpoints to consistently have Vigor applied which gives you the ability to successfully race against an Assault/Pride grid.
Let's get back to the main issue or focal point of the discussion, which is damage cut. Damage cut (and its equivalents-elemental resist and reflect) is a true multiplicative skill in the game. It can take damage to zero and also give you 100% debuff immunity. All three stack with each other and their respective frames (for damage cut it's A frame and stacking frame, and for elemental resist it's A frame and summon frame) and psuedo stack with defense also (ignore for now, we'll get back to this at a later point). That is potentially 5 different abilities that can stack with each other and that can be utilized to achieve 100% damage cut for any single round or it can be staggered to give you constant damage cut for the duration of the fight (depending on how you need to clear content). Up to here we can all agree.
What it also does is that it massively helps both vigor, ascension, and defense abilities due to its multiplicative nature. Consider a team with 30% constant damage cut versus a team with zero damage cut. The team with the 30% damage cut takes 30% less damage which is equivalent to 42% more hit points (1 / 0.7). You can think of this as a hime with 10k hitpoints before damage cut now has 14.2k equivalent hit points. Another way the damage cut helps is that all healing is 42% stronger also (due to every hitpoint being 1.42 hitpoints prior to damage cut). If you have an ability to heal 2k hitpoints on a normal team, you can consider that to be 2.84k of healing for that damage cut team. Damage cut's reciprocal multiplicatively adds to any healing you bring to the team. It also adds that same amount to ascension weapons. If you have a base ascension weapon that gives you 24% more healing. On the damage cut team you actually have 1.24X1.42 = 1.76 or 76% more healing from a single weapon in your grid. Please note: This is 3x what the ascension weapon states in its base stats. This is where you go wrong slashley!! Decent ascension grids can get to about 100% additional ascension. A meta damage cut team can get to around 50% constant damage cut (with how I mentioned earlier). This gives you 400% equivalent healing. A single 2k heal is actually 8k for the damage cut team. With just this, you can now possibly AAB clear most content (even some Guardians) solo. The only downside is that it might take you 40 plus minutes to clear the content. You have two ways to solve this issue. The first option is to pub the raid to all. (Who cares who comes in; if they do any damage, they'll help with your clear time and you were gonna auto clear it anyway.) That helps with clear time. The other option is to start adding vigor to the grid. With the damage cut team, you can potentially overheal end game content, but the perception is that you'll have sacrificed damage capability for survivability. With the inclusion of vigor, that's simply not true anymore. A good damage cut team will have vigor up for the whole fight (you might lose it on a hime or two due to a high single target hit), but the majority of the team will have that additional damage to the end of the fight. This absolutely can make you a high damage meta race team. Without ascension, your vigor is usually gone after the first couple of rounds. With ascension, it can be there for the whole fight. That's a frame you get to utilize that other traditional builds don't get. Since there are strong diminishing returns to assault/pride, it absolutely makes sense to instead build vigor/ascension into the grid. At around 150% base assault each point of vigor is 2.5X more valuable than a point of assault. An additional 50% vigor is equivalent to 250% assault. The assault/pride team will be nearly dead before they get that much more assault. The vigor team might lose this additional damage, but if you're playing your damage cut correctly and have decent ascension/healing that should never happen.
That covers the basic damage cut (vigor/ascension) team build. Let's take about defense. I agree defense is a much less valuable skill set, but, yet again, with the inclusion of damage cut into the team it gets a significant boost in ability and helps your survivability. Cernunnos gives 40% defense and Joan gives 60% defense (4% stacking frame with a needed 10 or 15 turns to build this up). This is the equivalent of ~28% (1/1.4) and ~37.5% (1/1.6) additional damage cut. It's a little worse in that it's in a different frame than damage cut, but it still helps. For that original damage cut team (30% constant), with the addition of Cernunnos' defense ability you move from 30% constant damage cut to ~50% constant damage cut (0.7 x 0.72). That takes a single heal from 42% additional healing to 200% additional healing capability. That stacking defense frame ability is absolutetly worth it.
In fact, with just Cernunnos, Andromeda (w/ planet star) and a single On Element zero limit break Kaiser (30% Damage cut for 2/8T), you're looking at 30% damage cut 9/20 turns and you have a constant defense buff of 80% for 3/6T and 40% all other turns which is equivalent to 36.75% constant damage cut. This is equivalent to only take 54.7% constant damage or basically 47% damage cut. Congrats you're heals are now twice as strong and/or you have twice as many hitpoints. You still have a full weapon grid to do whatever you want with (I suggest dark guardian guns) and you can also pick the three baddest strongest himes you can find in dark. If you find either Nefertem or Pluto, you can drop the requirement for an On Element zero limit break Kaiser (and possibly move to Shingen too). But the fact is Cernunnos, Andro, and a single Kaiser (from the Eido shop) is a fully equivalent defense and everything else can be pushed to straight offense.
Dejnov.