Warrior pretty much the Go-To tank for now.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Fell cleave has 200 more potency than IB.

The ability to ignore Defiance's Damage penalty makes it an effective 400 potency attack.

[SirTaint]

The ability to ignore Defiance's Damage penalty makes it an effective 400 potency attack.

Isn't it the opposite.

Instead of being 240 potency attack due to defiance it is a true 300 pot attack.

If there was no defiance penalty it would be 300pot vs 500pot.

[Nomad-phx]

as a pld, id say we both have our respective places in raids: us plds can provide defensive/healing support where needed and y'all WARs can provide extra beat-down sauce for dps checks. parties with either 2 pld or 2 war dont seem to be as efficient for progression as when Axe and sword combine their might.

[TouchandFeel]

^
That's how I see it as well.

Both PLD and WAR bring strong benefits as either OT or MT, its just one is more heal/defensive support oriented and one is more extra beatdown oriented. In the end though they both kind of result in the same thing, an easier time and more dps with the WAR providing the dps boost themselves and PLD lightening the load on the healers so that they can assist in dps'ing as well.

Although I think there may have been a few oversights that led to WAR dps being a little overtuned, but I'm sure it as well as other things will get tweaked and smoothed out more.

[JayCommon]

More generally about DRKs:
At level 60 in ilvl gear, it seems there are a select few that can really output a chunk of DPS. I would expect them to outdo the average duty finder DPSer, but these are not average tank players it's coming from.

Yeah I off-tanked a Ramuh HM for my trial roulette yesterday and out-DPS every single DPS in there. Like you said, none of them were even above average players, but DRK can definitely put out some respectable DPS however it comes at a cost. Extremely high TP usage. Blood Weapon increases our attack speed by 15% and lets us generate MP with every physical attack. It lasts for 20sec, and has a cooldown of 45sec so you can use it quite often (and should for higher DPS). This literally allows you to spam Dark Arts for every Souleater (and weave a Carve and Spit/Dark Messenger) for the entirety that it's up.

But (using the same instance), Ramuh HM has almost no down-time if you never get targeted by anything (Chaotic/Rolling). I got targeted for Rolling once in the later part of the fight, and I even helped clean up some orbs in the first phase because ranged weren't doing it and by the time the adds spawned I was TP starved. The only way I have found to regen the TP is by switching to MP usage moves, but that is a huge loss in DPS. It's better than standing there doing nothing, but not much...

I love watching the GCD go as fast as a monk in GL3 while I'm off-tanking, I just don't love it 4min later when I look at my TP and realize that I switched from playing the worst TP job for all of 2.0 (BRD) to the new 3.0 worst TP job (off-tank DRK) lol.

I absolutely love DRK though, but Blood Weapon kills our longevity. Unless people think it's viable to stand there and spam an enmity generating move out of tank stance that uses MP for long enough for our TP to gain back organically through ticks....

[Ultimatecalibur]

Isn't it the opposite.

Instead of being 240 potency attack due to defiance it is a true 300 pot attack.

If there was no defiance penalty it would be 300pot vs 500pot.

6 of one thing half a dozen of another. The effect in all use circumstances, outside of during Unchained, is of having used a 400 potency attack. Steel Cyclone and Inner Beast are 200/300 ignore 25% penalty instead of 265/400 in order to prevent them from being incredibly overpowered during Unchained.

[SpookyGhost]

I'm so confused. IB is 300 potency. It doesn't change if you use Unchained because it already ignores Defiance's damage reduction. Where is this extra 100 potency coming from...?

[Gooner_iBluAirJGR]

I'm so confused. IB is 300 potency. It doesn't change if you use Unchained because it already ignores Defiance's damage reduction. Where is this extra 100 potency coming from...?

Inner Beast and Steel Cyclone are unaffected by the Defiance Damage Penalty and are unaffected by Unchained. Also, Fell Cleave and Decimate are unaffected by the Defiance Damage Penalty because they can't be used in Defiance. The extra 100 potency is coming from misinformation.

[Ultimatecalibur]

The effective extra 100 potency is not misinformation, but relative effect.

If you are using Inner Beast while Unchained is not up during Defiance it would deal the same damage as a theoretical 400 potency attack that was effected by Defiance's -25% damage penalty.

Unchained's actual effect is to negate the -25% damage penalty of Defiance for 20s while its relative effect is to increase the damage of all warrior attacks save Inner Beast, Steel Cyclone, Fellcleave and Decimate by +33% while in Defiance.

Inner Beast's actual effect is a 300 potency attack that ignores the Defiance penalty and its relative effect is that of a theoretical 400 potency attack that would be effected by the Defiance damage penalty. The math comes down to 300 * 100%/75% = 400.

[Taranok]

Isn't it the opposite.

Instead of being 240 potency attack due to defiance it is a true 300 pot attack.

If there was no defiance penalty it would be 300pot vs 500pot.

Don't forget Maim. Inner Beast is 360 potency versus Fell Cleave's 600 potency. FC is a full 240 above IB. But yes, it's a 300 pot attack instead of 225 (Remember, 25% penalty). It's very important to factor in all buffs and debuffs when comparing potency. For instance, let's look at the healing efficiency of IB.

IB is a 360 potency attack, but it heals at a 100/125 penalty because it does not gain bonus healing from potency, so the healing's impact from a tank perspective is reduced from 360 to 288. Souleater, by comparison, is 400 potency, reduced to 320 but then boosted back up to 400 because you reduce impacted damage, increasing the effective health returned by the same cut off. This is then boosted above 400 by Darkside to 460 effective healing potency despite its raw damage being at 368 potency, effectively making it vastly superior to Inner Beast as a self-healing ability while being more or less identical in raw damage.

^
That's how I see it as well.

Both PLD and WAR bring strong benefits as either OT or MT, its just one is more heal/defensive support oriented and one is more extra beatdown oriented. In the end though they both kind of result in the same thing, an easier time and more dps with the WAR providing the dps boost themselves and PLD lightening the load on the healers so that they can assist in dps'ing as well.

Although I think there may have been a few oversights that led to WAR dps being a little overtuned, but I'm sure it as well as other things will get tweaked and smoothed out more.

Pretty much, yeah. I am struggling to see a purpose for the DRK in a raid setting. Int reduction on the boss only works on magic damage, while Storm's Path works for all damage, though it can't be maintained without a noteworthy DPS loss compared to the DRK which can maintain it without incurring a meaningful loss.

By the way, I'd heavily look at the potency of every other class before saying the WAR's potency is really high right now. For a given span of time, at first glance it seems the WAR and DRK's potency is looking very similar. Even when factoring in things like multiple Fell Cleaves and the like, a standard damage rotation including a boosted souleater is barely 10 potency behind a standard rotation for a WAR. This is exclusively when using GCD abilities and firing off Fell Cleave/Souleater as necessary, while also factoring in Maim/Darkside (but not 5-15% crit).

Once you start throwing in Carve and Spit, Dark Passenger, Scourge, and Salted Earth, the DRK's overall potency over time starts to look quite comparable, if not favorable to, the Warrior as a whole. As an example, let's take a best-case scenario for a Warrior's potency, starting at Butcher's Block, with Maim already applied.

That's (280+150+190+270+150+200+280+500)*1.2 / 8 or 303 potency. Giving the DRK the same advantage (8 GCDs), we get (250+280+150+250+280+150+250+400) * 1.15 / 8 or ~289 potency over those 8 GCDs. The gap is a bit closer if you start from a point not halfway through a combo. The crit will start to work into the War's favor a bit more, but Scourge blows Fracture out of the water, and Salted Earth and Carve and Spit are both vastly superior to anything WAR has access to simply because they're oGCD and hit like a truck when going for DPS. Considering that chaining for Souleater isn't that far behind WAR chaining for Fell Cleave, and that Blood Weapon not only increases attack speed, but vastly increases the amount of times you can cast Souleater within a given time span, I'd be willing to bet that the Warrior isn't half as "overpowered" as people actually think it is. In fact, I'd be more likely to wager that the DRK is pretty comparable to the warrior.

The big thing that I'm not going to factor in (too lazy) is Berserk, which will overcome a few of the advantages that DRK would have and probably lets it break even with DRK when it's all said and done, especially if pacification is removed. So, while I cannot guarantee that the DRK does equivalent or superior damage to a Warrior when going for raw DPS, I'd be highly surprised if the WAR was vastly superior to both tanks.