The Definitive Dark Knight Guide

[Xyphon]

I been doing alot of testing with DRK since I hit 60 a couple days back. Now that I've finished upgrading my all left side to ilvl180, I'm seeing a huge difference. I'm not sure if syphoning strikes scales off attack power or off of your base weapon dmg. When I hit 60 prior to my law weapon, I was getting like 750 mp back. Now I'm getting 880 mp back with the upgraded law weapon.

This is massive, because the more mp you get back the easier it is to stay spamming soul eater. I'm personally full str, and its not purely for dps reasons. Having full str helps holding threat to the point that, as long as you do a good opener with dark arts + power slash; you should never loose threat. Also since str = your attack power this is huge for all drk skills. I always keep a vit set on me just in case stuff gets rough, or in case new healers can't keep up with the dmg.

I'm typically seeing trash hit an average of 1k, without any mitigation. I'm at about 13-14k hp without food. So that's about 13-14 hits, depending on how many mobs are hitting me. On big packs though, that's what blood price + abyssal drain is for though, lol.

So far, despite carrying around a vit set I've yet to really have to swap it on. Out of tanking habit, I normally use vit on trash, and str on bosses. Though, don't forget that even unleash gets boosted in dmg by having str gear. So I'd say vit is good in terms of having enough HP to survive; just like the old ARR. As long as you are rotating buffs properly, and using reprisal every time its up; you should be fine.

One thing I can say is DRK is very very strong on enmity. So strong that when I pull with hunts, A or S; I can lock down enmity without any issues. Dark Arts + Abyssal drain, followed by dark arts+ power slash is very insane threat under grit. Though normally I do blood price > dark arts + abyssal drain > plunge > hard slash > dark arts > carve split > spinning slash > dark arts > power slash. Obviously you can weave in salt / scourge how ever you want.

I'm currently at about 840 str or so, and like 865 in party. I still have to upgrade all of my accessories to see how high it goes. I'm still not sure if crit or SS is the way to go in terms of secondary; because both are really good.

In terms of getting crits I've seen split and carve hit up to 2.7k with grit on. The most odd thing is syphoning strikes crits alot more than both split/carve and soul eater. Its probably just the sample I've seen in terms of numbers.

[JayCommon]

I'm still not sure if crit or SS is the way to go in terms of secondary; because both are really good.

I think this is going to depend on your role in a raid setting. If your going MT, I would imagine the highest priority is having a Parry stat as high as it can be, since Dark Knight's actually get rewarded in different ways for Parrying. You'll want Reprisal up as often as you can and procs on Low Blow are nice also.

As for off-tank/DPS, I just can't with good merit advise spec'ing into Skill Speed. If you don't need to be in Grit, then you won't be and will be able to use Blood Weapon. Even with low SS this becomes problematic very, very quickly. You will drain TP like a sieve and FAST. Pushing that value any further aside from organically raising off gear upgrades just seems like it would be bad for long term fights. Maybe shorter bursty fights would be advantageous for some SS, but I can't imagine it would be very viable for most endgame, when we have been conditioned with long lasting fights with little to no downtime for recovery. I realize that DoTs would be stronger and stuff, and Scourge/Salted Earth would be affected positively, but I don't see that being a good enough reason unless there is some hard data to prove me wrong. When DRK runs out of TP, we have no choice but to spam Unmend, hope for Unleashed procs and continue until we have regen enough to attack normally. You lose a ton of DPS by doing this. I'm just not sure if that loss in DPS is covered by the gain in DoT ticks.

I'm also pretty sure no one has done a substantial amount of crunching enough to know how much worse off Det is now as well, so currently (imo anyway) the only value that makes sense raising via materia is Crit because we know the stat itself has been affected in a mostly positive way: higher value = more damage possible from the attack.

I'm not doing testing like you though, I had some STR 4's laying around and figured I would help more on the DPS checks in Bismarck EX if I just put them on the gear I still had that could take them. I haven't added any Crit to anything I'm using on DRK, I just noticed that my Crit value was naturally pretty high with w/e I was wearing at the time. Also the variations on the crit values being much more spread out then in the 2.x lifetime.

[Xenosan]

Now that I've finished upgrading my all left side to ilvl180, I'm seeing a huge difference. I'm not sure if syphoning strikes scales off attack power or off of your base weapon dmg. When I hit 60 prior to my law weapon, I was getting like 750 mp back. Now I'm getting 880 mp back with the upgraded law weapon..

Keep testing. As far as I can tell there's no correlation yet to be found between Syphon Strike/C&S's MP returns and gear/stat allocation. You'll absorb 884 MP naked using a lvl30 weapon same as wearing full BiS. Job LVL so far seems to be the only determining factor (which is a non-factor, since MP cost scales up as well).

Also some suggestions I'd like to share:

One thing I can say is DRK is very very strong on enmity. So strong that when I pull with hunts, A or S; I can lock down enmity without any issues. Dark Arts + Abyssal drain, followed by dark arts+ power slash is very insane threat under grit. Though normally I do blood price > dark arts + abyssal drain > plunge > hard slash > dark arts > carve split > spinning slash > dark arts > power slash. Obviously you can weave in salt / scourge how ever you want.

Dark Arts only adds HP absorb to Abyssal Drain. I don't think you should be wasting a Dark Arts on a HP absorb at pull. It is smart to open with Dark Arts though, so just move an oGCD like Dark Passenger or Dark Dance/Dark Mind in front so you're getting an oGCD +DPS or +mitigation.

C&S, time it with your first DA'd 3 combo finisher whether it's Power Slash or Souleater. Because reasons.

[Giantbane]

One thing I can say is DRK is very very strong on enmity. So strong that when I pull with hunts, A or S; I can lock down enmity without any issues. Dark Arts + Abyssal drain, followed by dark arts+ power slash is very insane threat under grit. Though normally I do blood price > dark arts + abyssal drain > plunge > hard slash > dark arts > carve split > spinning slash > dark arts > power slash. Obviously you can weave in salt / scourge how ever you want.

for hunts, really? I wonder what the threat multiplier on DA + Power slash is. It would have to be insane to outpace a WAR opening with UBIR, especially SE > UBIR.