DRK Grit Mana Cost Too High

Wanted to call out this out as this isn't something I specifically haven't seen called out as an issue by other DRKs, so I would like to see the opinions of other experienced DRKs.

In my experience as a DRK off-tank I feel a major issue with the class is that Grit MP cost is prohibitively expensive. I get that on paper the 1326 MP cost is designed to be in line with the double 884 cost of switching from Paladin Shield and Sword Oath and back. The problem is that mechanically it is far more taxing on Dark Knights to switch in and out of tank stance compared to Paladin and of course Warrior.

The first problem is that generally switching into Grit is commonly followed with a DRK being in damage mode meaning they had been fueling their attacks with mana. Staying above 1326 mana is critical in a lot of situations were you will need to quickly get into Grit to either take some damage or to quickly pick up and add or tank swap. The difficulty of this is just magnified with the constant MP drain of Darkside and without a decent buffer, you risk wiping the raid by not having enough mana for Grit.

The second problem is when you actually do switch into Grit. Much of the time you either need to move right into the power slash combo meaning you aren't making progress on restoring your massively depleted mana by using Grit. You can of course pop blood price but with a single target attacking you, you usually only get a little over half of the mana grit cost you to begin with in the 15s duration. This of course is the best scenario here. A lot of times you need to just pop on Grit and absorb some damage; orbs in Alex4 for example. It's just a huge overall cost of mana in this situation to try and dance in and out of Grit AND fuel your attacks.

I would really like to see the cost of Grit halved to closer to 600-650 MP at level 60. This would make Grit dancing a lot more viable and bring the switching mechanics in line more with PLD who doesn't have a huge reliance on MP to begin with and WAR which of course became stance switching masters post level 50. Keep in mind that when enabling Grit, it is still on the GCD and breaks combos.

Because se thought mp costs scaling with mp was a good iidea. Have 5k mp, spell cost 1.5k
Yeah baby!

Maybe SE wants DRK to stack Piety now? =.=

You could always just use Hi-Elixirs. It would allow you to gain 460/580 mana back when you use it.

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Originally Posted by The_Last_Dragoon

You could always just use Hi-Elixirs. It would allow you to gain 460/580 mana back when you use it.

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And miss out on 84 - 105 STR for 15 seconds.

At level 60, Grit takes 20% of your MP when used.

Or we were never meant to stance dance grit. If you're mt, grit is on and you're managing mp with cs, syphon, and ss. Maybe if there is a boss mechanic like ravex lib you can pop it off and use blood weapon. Other wise its staying on and worse comes to worse you take off dark side. Your mp will come back fast without the constant drain.

If you're ot you're not putting on grit till mt death or a swap. Dont know what situations you're in where you need to stance dance grit to the point you're mana starved. You mention a4. But you dont need to put on grit to take an orb or three. Shadowskin or shadowwall should be enough

take bismarck ex as a good example why grit mp costs and shared global gdc is crap by design :

first 2 adds. you tank one in grit while the other tank takes the other. your add dies first. you turn off grit to dps second add and then shell. then after returning to island after shell went down or not you NEED to retrigger grit. if you let grit on during shell dps youre lowering your groups chances at the dps check for no reason. sadly you need grit back on for the big serpent add. bye bye 1500 mana for no reason. this is punishment for the way a fight or skill is designt which is VERY bad design by itself to begin with.

grits mp cost shouldnt be that absurd. 500mp? yes totally ok. 1500 not. also it shouldnt be on a gdc. the other tanks stances arent either. some fights require stance dancing to put max out. even for drk. so your argument is moot mate.

You shouldn't be using your tank stance for the first add phase in Bismark Ex, no matter what job you're playing as. Also, PLD's stances are also on the GCD (not necessarily a good thing though).

That said, you're completely right about the rest. The opportunity cost of being on the GCD, combined with the insane MP cost attached is absolutely awful. Whenever I play DRK, any point in a fight where stance switching is required or optimal ends up feeling like an absolutely cringeworthy moment.

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Originally Posted by Bustaperizm

If you're ot you're not putting on grit till mt death or a swap. Dont know what situations you're in where you need to stance dance grit to the point you're mana starved. You mention a4. But you dont need to put on grit to take an orb or three. Shadowskin or shadowwall should be enough

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Having done A4 OT as both DRK and WAR, the ability to freely stance change on WAR without such massive costs attached is such a massive boon. It allows you to save cooldowns for Quarantine, it puts less burden on the healers, who are already spread pretty thin for that fight. It allows you to maintain a much higher reserve of HP if you get sucked into Quarantine before you have a chance to get properly healed. And the ability to eat an extra orb or two can mean a hell of a lot of the DPS aren't pulling their weight.

With WAR, I can eat 5-6 orbs, no problem, if I absolutely have to. With DRK, that's just not happening without some serious losses taken.

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Originally Posted by Windklinge

grits mp cost shouldnt be that absurd. 500mp? yes totally ok. 1500 not. also it shouldnt be on a gdc. the other tanks stances arent either. some fights require stance dancing to put max out. even for drk. so your argument is moot mate.

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Uh have you played any of the other tanking classes...?

Tank stance (and sword stance too, so take your spoiled DRK butt elsewhere...) takes a GCD AND wipes combo for palies. Thats 2 GCDs per swap.

Plus it costs less than palies does. Even OP acknowledges that.

I think the MP cost could be reduced to 15% base mp, maybe 10%, since MP is a resource for DRK.

At least you have a fallback resource. Ever tried to stun things as a paladin? Yikes.

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Originally Posted by pandabearcat

Tank stance (and sword stance too, so take your spoiled DRK butt elsewhere...) takes a GCD AND wipes combo for palies. Thats 2 GCDs per swap.

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If you want to get technical, you can simply drop Shield Oath and finish your combo, then Sword Oath after. You will have a slight hiccup of ~.5 second turning Oath off but it won't trigger the GCD and Sword Oath isn't needed to buff your combo.

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Originally Posted by SeraviEdalborez

If you want to get technical, you can simply drop Shield Oath and finish your combo, then Sword Oath after. You will have a slight hiccup of ~.5 second turning Oath off but it won't trigger the GCD and Sword Oath isn't needed to buff your combo.

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What? You can do the same thing for DRK, except it doesn't even take you a GCD to get into "sword stance", and it doesn't interrupt your combo in the least.

I mean, I get your point, but its not helping OP's point that DRKs have it harder.

WAR can stance dance all day long since their stances are free, while PLD/DRK have to pay MP for theirs. Pretty darn annoying.

Lower the MP cost so its equivalent to Darkside, and please take it off of GCD.

Grit shouldnt even have an MP req, it already uses a GCD we shouldnt be penalized for trying to be above average tanks and not your typical 1 2 3 spammers who sits in tank stance all fight, only does 300 dps and says "tanks dont dps"

They don't... they can *help* with DPS, but you're all not designed for all out DPS. No one in the group is going to give you crap for not out parsing a real DPS because...it's not expected(and says a lot of bad things about the DPS, if a tank does out DPS them, but that's another matter).

The fact that tank players lately have become more focused on their damage is worrisome. You all must play with some pretty bad DPS players.

I'm personally fine with it being on gcd and having a MP cost, PLD is in the same boat there, but yeah I agree the cost does seem high especially considering that it pulls from your main resource to do other job abilities and functions.

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Originally Posted by Twilite

They don't... they can *help* with DPS, but you're all not designed for all out DPS. No one in the group is going to give you crap for not out parsing a real DPS because...it's not expected(and says a lot of bad things about the DPS, if a tank does out DPS them, but that's another matter).

The fact that tank players lately have become more focused on their damage is worrisome. You all must play with some pretty bad DPS players.

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Like it or not, tank damage is now being considered more and more by the dev team as an important part of encounters. While you can't be expected to keep up with DPS (and aggro/survivability/utility always come first, obviously), you still need to pull your own weight.
Gone are the days where we could build up aggro and then take naps between tankbusters.

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Q5. As the level cap increased, our maximum MP also increased, but it feels like the rate of MP consumption has also increased. Will this be fixed as our item levels increase?

A5. Even if you increase your item level, this will not change. We plan on addressing specific jobs that are severely hurting for MP.

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My guess is that DRK and AST are 2 of the specific jobs that are 'severely hurting for mp,' if you consider the context of the question: the scaling of Spell MP cost..

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Originally Posted by Kiteless

Like it or not, tank damage is now being considered more and more by the dev team as an important part of encounters.
Gone are the days where we could build up aggro and then take naps between tankbusters.

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Where is it stated anywhere tanks dmg is being considered in balancing dps expectations in new content? I'd like to know. I have seen in the live letter QA that healer dps isn't counted in the balancing. So why would the other non dps classes be? Especially when they get no tp generation ability like EVERY other dps class that uses it.

I commend any tank that doesn't want to "take naps" between busters and "pulls their own weight" (other than already tanking the boss). But this elitist mentality that this is a necessity to clear content or a criteria for buffing a class is false.

I agree 100% with twilite's post. We can "help" with dps. We don't.."dps"

We're not a stance Tank. Its fine.

Blood Weapon should be able to be used whilst in GRIT.

The only thing that costs too much mana, is Dark Arts.

Dark Knight is a resource management tank, not a stance tank.

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Originally Posted by Kiteless

Having done A4 OT as both DRK and WAR, the ability to freely stance change on WAR without such massive costs attached is such a massive boon. It allows you to save cooldowns for Quarantine, it puts less burden on the healers, who are already spread pretty thin for that fight. It allows you to maintain a much higher reserve of HP if you get sucked into Quarantine before you have a chance to get properly healed. And the ability to eat an extra orb or two can mean a hell of a lot of the DPS aren't pulling their weight.

With WAR, I can eat 5-6 orbs, no problem, if I absolutely have to. With DRK, that's just not happening without some serious losses taken.

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The cost isn't a huge issue for me. If i'm stance dancing, that means I'm using blood weapon and I should be full before I swap back.

I really don't like that the ability is on the GCD. You can't even turn it off unless the GCD is completed (unless you want to click it off, not really an option on ps4). And when you turn it on, you have to wait a GCD to really attack anything.

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Originally Posted by Kiteless

Like it or not, tank damage is now being considered more and more by the dev team as an important part of encounters. While you can't be expected to keep up with DPS (and aggro/survivability/utility always come first, obviously), you still need to pull your own weight.
Gone are the days where we could build up aggro and then take naps between tankbusters.

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You better hope this doesn't come at great cost to tank jobs. SE isn't exactly known to adjust things in the appropriate manner(See BRD). And I'm fully aware of the importance of tank damage because aggro skills alone mean nothing.

The high cost of grit makes me almost kinda nervous to drop it sometimes, especially with the darkside glitch still in the game. Nothing is worse than having too little MP and being unable to get back into grit after a DPS phase such as the water phase or w/e in A3. Happened in Bismarck Ex the other day. I can't remember if it was just the darkside glitch alone or my own panicking when getting on/off the back and trying to max my DPS. In any case, I didn't have enough MP to get back into grit. That was almost a bloodbath.

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Originally Posted by Borascythe

The high cost of grit makes me almost kinda nervous to drop it sometimes, especially with the darkside glitch still in the game. Nothing is worse than having too little MP and being unable to get back into grit after a DPS phase such as the water phase or w/e in A3. Happened in Bismarck Ex the other day. I can't remember if it was just the darkside glitch alone or my own panicking when getting on/off the back and trying to max my DPS. In any case, I didn't have enough MP to get back into grit. That was almost a bloodbath.

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For the Bismarck Ex, I always start the fight withOUT grit. As the back is about to die, I pop Soul Survivor on the back before it dies and voila, I have at LEAST enough MP to go into Grit then some. The class is ABOUT MP management. Smart management (read: Knowing when to burn DA) is all it takes.

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Originally Posted by Bustaperizm

Where is it stated anywhere tanks dmg is being considered in balancing dps expectations in new content? I'd like to know. I have seen in the live letter QA that healer dps isn't counted in the balancing. So why would the other non dps classes be? Especially when they get no tp generation ability like EVERY other dps class that uses it.

I commend any tank that doesn't want to "take naps" between busters and "pulls their own weight" (other than already tanking the boss). But this elitist mentality that this is a necessity to clear content or a criteria for buffing a class is false.

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Just look at the new skills tanks got with 3.0, and the general design behind DRK. It's very clear that these were changes made with a great amount of thought put towards tank aggression and offensive capacity. Also keep in mind that, unlike healers, tanks are already assumed to always be attacking to do their job in the first place. Healer damage is a bonus, tank damage is something that already has been happening, and has been greatly expanded upon with 3.0.

Also, DRK is the only tank that actually suffers from severe TP problems while MT (PLD has issues, but they're manageable, while WAR has TP management that would make any DPS class jealous), and that's more to do with the class being poorly designed in general.

I don't agree that adding some buttons for pld to press and them happening to be dps focused and giving wars more of the utility they actually had before as an indicator to tanks being seen more for their dps capabilities. If that were the case they would have addressed the "tp issues".

Just my opinion. You do have valid points, but i feel its a leap in thought to fulfill dreams of being a dps that can stand in front of a boss. Or having a more active role.