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Yep, they do seem to require a lot more healing than other tanks. It's usually physick constantly with emergency lustrate and adlo. In fact physick is rarely on cooldown, just constantly hammered. I wish I knew what some DRK are doing that makes them squishy as others are just as hardy as WAR or PLD.
New DRK Go beyond squishy. They are splashy. Their HP drops faster than Icehearts knickers.
If they have grit up they literally only take about 5% more than a PLD does...and with Dark Dance (esp DA buffed) up they take significantly less damage (though prone to bursts).
Their cooldowns are almost identical to a paladins.
The rest may simply be
1. Gear. Leveling gear varies wildly. Simply upgrading my gear from lvl 52 to lvl 55 gear made me take 20-30% less damage.
2. Confirmation bias. You're used to assuming they're squishier.
Well my static's DRK is pretty great, I can leave him a bit to DPS and he won't die, because he know his job and CD.
Even newbie DRK are easy to heal as long as they keep their defensive stance...
...
But please, try to keep a WAR alive when he ONLY play in DPS stance...
It's more than a pain in the ass... it's horrible!
=> Not to say... this kind of WAR during Alexander -_- make me want to leave
part of it may be when leveling DRKs(especially ones new to tanking) get slaying accessories which, combined with armor that's inadequate for their level, would make them very squishy indeed.
I find most Dark Knights easier to heal than Warriors, but I'm only just getting back into healing (it's been a long time). Have been running Dusk Vigil the past few days.
I don't find it especially bad when I'm playing DRK, but then again I do keep up Darkside while tanking and rotate cooldowns. I've seen a few other DRKs do that really well, and it's never been a problem for them.
A bad DRK or WAR is worse than a bad PLD. PLD just mitigates more by default, the other 2 just have a lot more gimmicks, minibuffs, lifesteal and more complicated rotations, however, bad players won't make use of them. DRKs spamming their aggro combo repeteadly will considerably tank less than say a DRK that uses their souleater rotation and keeps weaving dark arts on it, the difference isn't small, in fact, it's huge. A good DRK can handle pulls of 2 and even 3 mobs with a fairy solo healing it with proper CD management and lifesteal tools. A bad DRK might not even handle 1 mob without a healer going out of cleric and manually pumping heals.
The only issue I have with darks is that they have made me paranoid with their living dead ability. I have tried to heal some darks through living dead by burning cool downs only to have them still die because I didn't hit the magic number requirement so not only do they die anyway but I have now wasted several of my emergency buttons that could have been used to sustain dps as I swift raise the tank. Doesn't happen all the time but when it does I hate it. They adjust that ability to not feel as white mage dependent and I'll have no issue with healing them. As of right now when I see a dark knight in the group I baby them with healing and find myself dpsing less in order to avoid having them feel like they need to trigger that ability.