Unmend and Unleash, Do i use after Abyssal Drain is learned?

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Originally Posted by Nektulos-Tuor

At the cost of almost all your mana for a very little heal.

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Depends on how many enemies are around you.

At level 60 you can have some solo fun running through Haukke HM pulling the entire large groups and sustaining yourself both mp and hp with only BP+DA+AD. Probably other ones too, just that is the only one I tried lol for the lulz.

I'd only use AD if you're doing it for the heal, which you should only be doing if your healer is slow at healing you. May be good for pulling though, but honestly I never use it unless I have a healer that needs some time to heal me. Which is normally the case while leveling up and being under geared.

Use Unleash if your MP is limited and you need to establish aggro badly. Unleash is cheaper than AD but produces the same aggro, at the cost of DPS. If your MP is fine there's little point to using Unleash.

Also as mentioned, try not to DA AD unless you are possibly going to die without it, or the pull is so large that Blood Price is giving you an excess of MP. Very, very expensive for relatively small healing, and DA DP will be a much better use of all that MP cost.

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Originally Posted by Imoen

Depends on how many enemies are around you.

At level 60 you can have some solo fun running through Haukke HM pulling the entire large groups and sustaining yourself both mp and hp with only BP+DA+AD. Probably other ones too, just that is the only one I tried lol for the lulz.

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I have only found 2 instances where abyssal drain was worth using because blood price could maintain in current content: the final pull in the aery, and the first pull after the second boss of fractal.

...why does it even exist? it doesn't bring anything new to the toolkit, and is gimmicky like the rest of the 54+ abilities.

In the context of a big pull in a dungeon:

1. Unmend the nearest target
2. Plunge to the next farthest
3. Abyssal Drain on groups that are clumped together
4. Unleash on any thing that tries to run past you to the rest of the party that you do not have time to manually target
5. Pop BP the moment you have initial hate on everything
6. As everything gets in position, Unleash once or twice
7. Once everything is in position, spam Abyssal Drain for maximum DPS.

If you have BP up and are tanking a lot of stuff, the difference in MP cost between Unleash and Abyssal Drain is meaningless. BP can give you enough MP in a large enough pull to DA every other AD resulting in a 3-5K self heal depending on your STR and how much you're tanking.

In terms of utility, they both have uses:

Abyssal Drain:
1. Does more damage.
2. Has the range of Unmend with the radius of Unleash
3. Can be a potent self-heal if you are tanking a lot of mobs

Unleash
1. Requires no target
2. Does not interrupt your combos- good for maintenance aggro.
3. Is a pbAoE around you and not the target making it ideal while getting things in position.

You will almost assuredly never use either in a raid setting against a single boss so they are only relevant in dungeons/multi-target gauntlet-style raids (t4, a2s, etc.) They both do very different things, really the only similarity between them is that they are AoE enmity generating abilities, of which ALL tanks have 2 and no one else is complaining about it... So I don't see the point of doing it for DRK.

I am able to do all of this in a large pull and still have the MP to DA a DP and DD after BP wears off, between a couple of Syphon combos. Its not difficult to do, just requires precision.

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Originally Posted by Nektulos-Tuor

At the cost of almost all your mana for a very little heal.

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The MP cost is irrelevant when you consider DRK's MP sustain abilities which are second only to BLM and arguably equal since a DRK can literally sustain their mana indefinitely just as a BLM can. There is literally no such thing is mana-flooring for a skilled DRK.
The self heal can reach over 5-6K in a large enough pull with a decent STR value. Even without full STR investment AD can hit each target for 600-700 which means a 4.8K-7K heal if you're tanking 8-10 mobs, and with that much trash on you and BP up, the cost is almost moot. I've even been able to spam it in some cases.

I'd take that over something like Clemency any day.

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Originally Posted by saber_alter

I have only found 2 instances where abyssal drain was worth using because blood price could maintain in current content: the final pull in the aery, and the first pull after the second boss of fractal.

...why does it even exist? it doesn't bring anything new to the toolkit, and is gimmicky like the rest of the 54+ abilities.

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Confused on this, if you have high MP returns coming in then you can afford to spend it, AD has higher pot than unleash. Why not use it if you have the extra mp coming in? You are either using unleash or AD... AD is higher pot... again if you can afford it why not? You can use DP too, but that is a separate 30s CD. I don't know what kind of pulls you are doing but there is plenty of opportunity in Fractal for this.

Also why are you responding to me talking about solo fun in old dungeons for hp returns on that ability? I fail to understand.

Like Sleigh said above.

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Originally Posted by Sleigh

Use Unleash if your MP is limited and you need to establish aggro badly. Unleash is cheaper than AD but produces the same aggro, at the cost of DPS. If your MP is fine there's little point to using Unleash.

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