Healing DRK tanks sucks.

I levelled AST to 50 with a DRK and two MCH friends using dungeons exclusively, can honestly say I never had an issue.
We wiped TWICE in that entire time- once was an accidental pull of additional adds that took us by surprise, the second was a purposeful over-pull trying to test the limits.


But hell, besides that it seemed really darned breezy. I've loved every second of it and am determined to main AST.
All these horror stories are likely due to terrible DRK players who rolled DRK coz "omg greatsword emo darkness saahhhhh kewwwllllll". They're also probably using Darkside and not bothering with Grit coz "ermagerd it decreases my dee pee essssss".

Aside from that- as mentioned above, it's likely a lot of people aren't using Essential Dignity as frequently as they should. Instant cast, OGCD- and a CD of only 40 seconds. This spell is friggen amazing. It heals for a tonne as an emergency heal- but that doesn't mean you should hold it exclusively for that. If using it earlier prevents your tank from ever NEEDING the emergency potency- you've still done your job.


These new jobs are only a couple days old, give it time. There are a lot of people who have never healed or tanked trying the new jobs and being thrown in the deep end, have patience.
There are also people who levelled the new jobs to 50 by FATE grinding and haven't had any real practice with the job- please look forward to meeting these people in 50-60 dungeons. :3

As a old pld main, now playing DRK because riding the emo wave.

Our two main cooldowns give us parry(and evasion) or mdef up, so in some instances when we guess the damage type wrong we're like paper. Then we have rampart(shadowskin) and crappyVengeance(Shadow Wall). SS is the level 20 skill and SW is 44ish? on a way longer cooldown than Vengeance. Then we have convo. We don't have reliable physical damage down and magic down is on the end of the regen combo.

So sorry for that.

As for healing, I feel very, very squishy as a Drk. Squishier than a War or a pld (at level 50 with full dw gear and ilvl130 wep). So it may not be you guys. Learning which cooldowns to use is going to be quite the task, as they can be amazing in the proper situations, but when our main physical reduction cooldown is rng based......yeah. Sorry.

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Originally Posted by h0tNstilettos

When I was closer to level 30 the healing potency of AST seemed much lower than when I was there with WHM. But after getting beyond level 40 and finally to 50 the heals seem really strong, especially the emergency burst heal.

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Haven't tried it yet but could that be due to around level 40 AST gets nocturnal sect that increases healing pot

While healing as ast I noticed many DRK not using grit or dropping it for some dps cool downs.... this is a terrible idea unless over gear for the content. Which no drk will be yet or for a long while, if you choose a tank then fing tank your few dps cool downs out side of grit wont help the party.

So far, all DRK's in Raid content have been terrible and unable to complete the raid. The one I did get in hard roulette was fine (AK-hard) and that was after the previous PLD basically didn't know what he was doing combined with DPS who were new.

yeah I blame them for not being expert at that job release 2 days ago

The biggest thing to take into account is that the majority of DRK players have no idea what they're doing.

I leveled with a DRK as AST (currently lvl 54) and I have zero problems.

It's not unmanageable, but landed a pally instead today and it was a world of difference. Hopefully drks just a late bloomer that relies heavy on skills they don't have at the lower levels.

What it feels like to heal a DRK (in my perspective):
30-35 is like healing a new Warrior
40-45 is like healing a new Paladin (they get their "Sentinel" ability around this time)
46-49 is like healing a lvl 50 Paladin
50-54 is like healing a lvl 50 Warrior with the mitigation of a Paladin (when their CDs are down, they do take a bit of extra damage)

Probably a lack of gear more than anything else. With the inventory system the way it is, people can't afford the luxury of keeping old armor sets. Dedicated tanks probably threw out their old leveling gear long before the expansion was ever announced. I'm lucky enough to have a complete set of cavalry armor on hand, so I'm covered for the lvl 30-40 bracket. Past that I'll need to farm up some better gear.