The advice in this thread is very good and if you are new to tanking you should orientate to those rules. But I want to show you the perspective of a tank who does savage undergeared (with that I don't wanna say "I am the best fuck the rest", just as an info where I come from).

First of all parry is the most useless stat and should be removed from the game because it scales terrible. I did this before I started playing more serious and was confident that parry is the way to go as an MT, but its not.

Regarding CDs, I have/had for every hard content in this game a cooldown rotation. That means I use my defensive abilities so I get the most out of it. That does not mean I use them every time they are up. That means that I use the CDs in a way that I can survive every tankbuster for the whole duration of the fight.

In Gordias Savage dps was also an issue to be able to clear fights. That's why I was most of the time out of my tank stance and only used it to survive big hits in combination with defensive CDs.

So in savage fights I use my CDs only to survive big hits and I need to stack them most of the time, if there are CDs I don't need to survive I will use them to lower the overall damage from auto attacks. (But watch our some CDs are only useful for physical (Foresight) and some are only magical damage (Dark Mind))

The challenge is that every fight is different and you have to know what is coming next to make the most out of your abilities. In another perspective is a good CD rotation mandatory to be able to stance dance w/o pissing of your healer to be able to push dps.

My opinion/advise to content like 60 roulette would be to use your CDs one after another (big ones with short CD first) and use tank stance at large pulls. On dungeon boss fights tank stance is more than enough + as WAR you even have a lot of self healing.