just tried DRk, got some questions

so i believe drk is special because thye can use damage and tank stance together right?
but the damage stance (darkside) drains mp, so do you guys maintain that while walkigna round in dugneon or use it only for mobs?

Darkside is not their damage stance technically. Damage stance would simply be taking off Grit, much like WAR was before 3.0, where its damage stance was taking off Defiance.

Now for the main question, you can just keep Darkside up for mobs or leave it on the whole time, it is up to you really. Your out of battle mp regen beats the mp drain from darkside anyways

There are a lot of ways to use MP (mainly Dark Artsing things and the natural tick from Darkside) but there are also a lot of ways to get that mana back. Blood Price @ 35 will help a lot, especially for trash pulls as the more things that are hitting you, the more mana you get back, the more you can AOE. Starting out at 30 there aren't actually that many uses for your mana outside of trash pulls, though - once you hit 45 and unlock Dark Arts is when you'll really start chugging through it and having to worry about using Blood Price, using Delirium combo instead of DAing Soul Eater (this is @50, @45 you just don't DA Soul Eater instead), finding spots to come out of Grit to use Blood Weapon, etc. There's a song and dance to it but it becomes pretty natural over time, with a big pull and Blood Price you basically have unlimited MP which is pretty fun to work with.

The best way to look at it is that Darkside = Maim on Warrior. Its not a stance but a passive buff that you wanna have up 101% of the time that you're in combat and actively engaging the enemy. If you want to start looking at mana efficiency, you can turn off Darkside any time there is going to be >12s of downtime and see a net gain of MP through passive regen.

As far as an offensive stance, I like to think of Blood Weapon as our DPS stance, in the form of a cooldown. When you consider what it does it makes sense. Sometimes I wonder if the buffs of Blood Weapon were say, cut in half (+5% attack speed, -10% tp cost, about half the MP return) and it was given 100% uptime as a stance, if people would continue to clamor for the ability to use it in Grit... but I digress :P

u guys go full 35 vit? or str?

vit and str are both 0.45 in our ap and vit give us HP so vit is now our best chooice for far so go full vit and fending.

In the current meta, 35 VIT. Strength and Vitality scale the same post-3.2, and Vitality affords you more health at the same time as giving you identical bonus damage to Strength. It's silly not to spec Vitality now. Every tank should.

The most important thing to note, though, is that on any i220 or higher Vitality accessory, you should absolutely be melding Strength. It's far and away the best stat for that slot, since you can't meld on more Vitality, Accuracy exists in spades on tank gear, and every other secondary is strictly worse than Strength by a long shot.

Keep Darkside on all the time. It isn't just damage; it unlocks a bunch of your cooldowns, and gives you access to Dark Arts, which is the quintessential Dark Knight thing.

A few tips for dark side and mp management:

1. Remember that you can always click off dark side between pulls to restore MP.

2. At 35 you gain an ability that restores MP based on damage you take. One thing I will do in lower level content, is pull a bunch of trash, spam unleash with the mp restore ability up and by the time it wears off I have a huge threat lead. From there you can use do some Syphon Strike combos to restore your MP since you should have enough threat, of course check the enemy threat meters in case you need to do a threat combo instead.

3. Pre-35 you can play drk exactly like tanking on a low level pld. I.E. low level pld tanking is mostly just spamming flash for threat and using riot blade combos to restore mp. For low level drk you can spam unleash and use syphon strike combos to restore mp.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jpec07

Keep Darkside on all the time. It isn't just damage; it unlocks a bunch of your cooldowns, and gives you access to Dark Arts, which is the quintessential Dark Knight thing.

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Pretty much this. The only time I'd drop it is during down time when nothing is happening since it will just drain your mp. Also, mp restore effects will only work on you when darkside is off.

If your Darkside falls off, you aren't managing your MP correctly. You have plenty of tools to keep it up.