The Bottom Feeders: Moves You Never Use and Why.

Paladin, again gonna agree with plenty of other folks...

Tempered Will - Great, but so situational its ridiculous. Outside of a couple knockback effects what is this ever used on?

Solution: Give it an effect, either a "Surecast" to avoid interrupts, a "cast while moving" or something else for it to do besides "Be lazy in regards to knockback mechanics on specific moments of specific fights"...maybe lower the cooldown as well.

Divine Veil - Great, but so reliant on others it loses a lot of its potential effectiveness. Using it for phase transitions can be a pain getting your healers to pay attention and notice that "Oh hey, he's got that thing on him, better heal", even with a macro poking them in party chat the ability is not under our control and that is such a pain.

Solution: Turn it into a buff, stores some of the incoming healing on the paladin for 10-15 seconds. Push the button again to distribute the shield for the amount stored, or 10% of the paladins max HP minimum. Gives us control, and a reason to "hold off" on using it sometimes. Lets us anticipate things, for bigger shields, or just pop it quick for a nice meaty one.

Clemency - Too slow, slowest heal in the game. Using it on others, 90% of the time just results in overhealing because a healer with a MUCH faster cast time got to them first. Great ability, thematic, wonderful...just too slow...too much "clunk" like most paladin abilities.

Solution: Lower its cast time, either directly, or as part of a buff elsewhere in the setup (Personally I'd like to see Royal Authority reduce cast time of paladin spells by 1-1.5 seconds. Gives us a unique casting style for future abilities, and solves the clemency problem of being slow.)

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Originally Posted by MrTherm

Awareness is.. meh.

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Amusingly, it's arguably more useful for warriors than for paladins.

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Originally Posted by Februs

One, CD should be much MUCH shorter.

Two, tether should be longer in my opinion. The proximity restriction tends to make the move even less useful, especially because, for some bizarre reason, a lot of healers I've covered tend to
run away from me. If you see a tether to the Pld, WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AWAY??

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I've seen people react the same way to MCH's Bishop turret. I can only surmise that they think it's a mob mechanic.

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Lastly, I always thought Cover needed a slight adjustment. Like a % of all dmg covered should be converted to Hp, or Tp, or have some sort of AoE effect or... something that has synergy with the other tank... just something. That way, we'd have a reason to use it besides actively looking for someone who is standing in stupid. I mean, as it is, if everyone is actually doing their jobs and not being idiots you would never have to actually use Cover. That's silly. I shouldn't have to go out of my way to make use of a CD. It's use should have a readily available use.

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I agree that it should have something extra that goes with it. As it stands now, it's really situational; basically unless a raid mechanic requires it (Akh Morn comes to mind, covering my OT while he Holmganged the space laser was always one of my favorite points in the fight) we only end up using it if someone stands in stupid one too many times and is about to die. Honestly, my static only uses it in A2S so we can be lazy and abuse the WHM's massive aggro generation to get mobs stacked up in the right place quickly for stuns.

Thinking about it, I have instinctively ran from Cover in situations where I was expecting a (bad) tether. There's also a few AoE Ninja (& possibly others) moves that in certain fights look a bit like a boss' move so I flee. I really wish they'd have made an easy way to tell if an effect is team or mob.

For drk least used is dark arts/dark dance version which had almost no place in the kit what so ever IMO. The dark arts version should just increase the parry rate further. The situation that this really makes any sense to use would be in large groups but pound for pound it would make more sense to Blood Price > DA/Abyssal drain and regular dark dance for random mitigation and a return of MP/AOEDPS/HP making the modified Dark Dance not even worth it.

As far as single target goes using DA on Soul Eater is wayyyyy better investment.

Why you would give a random evasion mitigation cooldown to a tank class that recovers resources by getting hit is beyond me. The parry I can understand due to the way blood price works, but evasion just doesn't make any sense and I honestly never use it.

I see a lot of people rag on awareness and while I admit it isn't really the greatest mitigation cooldown, I use it as a mitigation utility on drk. It's hard to observe results with it due to the way the damage is taken in this game but I think it's effective if you have synergy with another cooldownif the enemy can crit.
Combined with dark dance or foresight usually. On war I heard it could negate the rear crit but I don't know if they changed it.

Not something I use all the time but I pop it with other cooldowns usually.

DAD Dance is good, but only if they keep letting it work in raids. It's REALLY good in dungeons and it works on every add in A4S. It should work in A2 as well but I haven't checked. People always bitch about the non-synergy with Blood Price or whatever but who cares, just don't hit Blood Price until Dance is off. The defense it offers is really good and makes DRK easily beat paladin for dungeon pulls.

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Originally Posted by Freyyy

If other DRKs are losing enmity to you, they either were using less STR than you, or just didn't SPAM the move but just used it very VERY sparingly.

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Firstly, thank you for the insight on the enmity generation. I'll be less concerned over using it now.

In terms of my example, it was actually the opposite. HE was spamming, and I was rotating combos in-between my unleashes. The guy flatlined his Mp in under a minute trying to keep aggro from me, which is why I got so confused. I figured he would be generating WAY more than me, but I kept everything (and it hurt). Maybe the difference was because of Power Slash, though, not unleash. I'm pretty sure our gear was mostly the same, but our rotations were different. My rotation went something like:

Unleash > T1-Hard Sash > T2- Spinning Slash > Unleash > T3 Power Slash > T3-Hard Slash > T1-Siphon Blade > Unleash > T2- Soul Eater> Etc. The exact positions of the unleashes might have been a little different, but same diff more or less. Basically, I used an Unleash after every 2nd to 3rd combo strike.

So, from what you're saying, I can only assume that the enmity gen from Abyssal Drain is not enough to trump a Hard Slash/Unleash combination... Which leads me to another question. Wouldn't that make Unleash a better alternative anyway? I'm basing this question off of the sheer fact that Abyssal Drain kills your combo, whereas Unleash does not. Obviously, Abyssal Drain still has it's perks, and I typically use it when I have 4 or more targets to hold enmity on (for the benefits of dmg + Hp regen... though only if I have a way of gaining back the tremendous MP drain it does when under DA), but if holding enmity is your primary concern, or if you need to mitigate using mana regen (siphon blade) and hp regen (soul eater), wouldn't unleash be more useful?

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Originally Posted by Arannon

Solution: Lower its cast time, either directly, or as part of a buff elsewhere in the setup (Personally I'd like to see Royal Authority reduce cast time of paladin spells by 1-1.5 seconds. Gives us a unique casting style for future abilities, and solves the clemency problem of being slow.)

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That's an interesting idea that I don't think I've heard before (adding effects to the suspiciously vacant Royal Authority is not a new idea, mind you, but I've never heard this one). As it is, I really get my money's worth out of Clemency during Tank Busters and Raid AoE dmg, but something along these lines would grant it (and stoneskin) more utility to be cast while in the heat of the conflict. Interrupts would still be an issue, but that would just ensure it wasn't too easy to abuse.

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Originally Posted by Dante_V

I see a lot of people rag on awareness and while I admit it isn't really the greatest mitigation cooldown, I use it as a mitigation utility on drk. It's hard to observe results with it due to the way the damage is taken in this game but I think it's effective if you have synergy with another cooldownif the enemy can crit.

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I actually get a lot of use out of Awareness when coupled with those two moves. Using it with Dark Dance, in particular, increases the parry rate by eliminating the chance of crits. It does not allow for the same amount of mitigation as using Dark Arts with Dark Dance, but it's pretty decent. The Cd timer ensures that you can use it with every second Dark Dance. So, what I typically do, is:

1st: DD + Awareness (maybe coupled with Foresight/Convalescence if I'm expecting a LOT of Dmg, but that would have to be a pretty huge pull to justify this much mitigation), and then rotate my Soul Eater combo for additional HP regen, as well as Blood price for additional Mp Regen.

2nd: DA + DD while Blood Price is on CD.

Repeat. Basically the first use of DD is my MP conservation/generation combo, whereas the second is my MP expenditure. It's a bit of a pain to work the timing on, and I still need to figure out the best way to optimize my hotbar, but it has been working out pretty well so far.

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Originally Posted by Februs

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The weapon also does a lot. If the guy had a weapon with 5-10 ilvl less than you with the exact same gear everywhere else, it's normal that you kept agro. Maybe he wasn't using Grit either and his intent was just to do pure AoE DPS ? There is a lot of factors that can come to mind. But anyway, keeping aggro in this game is incredibly easy and shouldn't be your primary concern anymore once it is established. Spamming AD generates more than enough enmity to keep aggro against any big AoE DPS jobs in the game WHILE being the best AoE DPS rotation you can do as a DRK. The only combos you have to rotate as a DRK in AoE situations are Syphon Strike combos when Blood Price is down and your MP starts to get low after some neat Abyssal Drain spam (when BP is down, you should be able to use DADarkPassenger + DADarkDance, drop Grit, use Blood Weapon, and start single targetting till you're back at full MP, do some extra ADs, put Grit back on when blind + Dark Dance falls off, BP will be up again by this time if mobs aren't killed, that's the ideal unlimited-pornstar-AoE-DPS-tanking rotation for DRK).