DRK DPS?

[JayCommon]

snip

Some very good points. I guess I am compensating for the fact that every 3rd GCD we can heal ourselves, but I know self-healing isn't an acceptable form of "mitigation" because it isn't really mitigating anything....just healing after the fact. You do have a lot to pop and rotate as far as defensive CD's, but none of them feel as protective as anything a Paladin can do.

As for the tank buster thing, that's kind of irrelevant also. The nature of a tankbuster is insanely high damage, so eating it "unmitigated" is wrong. It makes no difference if one hit can deplete my 16k HP instantly if I didn't mitigate it because that's my fault. The utility a PLD brings now is absolutely a great point and I didn't even consider that. And I agree with Shadow Wall, it's pretty bad, but you can at least still time it with some knowledge of the fight in the right spot to be effective for something like a tank buster. That's why I brought up player skill, because on top of all the MP/TP micro-management you already succumb to as a DRK, you have to pop those buffs spot-on timing in order to actually mitigate properly.

So far, I have never popped Living Dead and lived after I went into Walking Dead, and I even have a macro telling the healer exactly what to do. WHM have Bene, does SCH/AST even have anything like that? Or do we basically rely on a WHM being in the party to even activate that skill? Trash. The only defensive CD's we have that actually feel like real mitigation is Shadowskin and Dark Mind (use that to mitigate Dry/Wet Fins in Bismark EX and you can see that they are pretty effective for magic based attacks), and knowledge of the fights will allow you to comprise defensive CD rotations that will allow for a win.

While you bring up some good points about the DRK's lack of MT ability too, I still think it's in much better shape than our OT ability. Spamming Unmend/Unchain procs for 30 sec after going OOT only gave me enough TP to make use of 1 single application of Blood Weapon. And after you have done the Unmend/Unchain spam, if using Dark Arts vigorously like you should be when DPSing, you don't have much MP left either. You are stuck auto-attacking for however long until you're comfortable going back into a normal rotation. And it isn't like the "stoppage" will allow you to recover over time into something respectable. You will continue to run out of TP and much quicker than before because I highly doubt anyone would auto-attack long enough to regain all 1000 TP in a raid setting.

And with what your saying about PLD DPS....yeah it needs addressed. Our potencies are great and all but if you can't use them then they equal zero. Plenty of DRK's are MTing Ravana right now. Mitigation problems aside, it is still possible. It is plainly not possible to sustain the ceiling of your DPS on DRK for any longer than 3 minutes. I would like to see both addressed, but TP in DPS stance was more glaring to me. Hell just attach a TP reduction on to Blood Weapon, we don't need the extra TP when MT.