Getting refused to EX groups as a DRK

[Kiteless]

Our Royal Authority combo has 30 more potency than a NON dark art'ed soul eater combo. If you DA every third combo, you are comftorably in the lead. Add in that you have over 2000 free off gcd potency (free) attacks per minute and have a constant 15% buff and I have no idea what you are talking about. And it doesnt do anything like heal us for damage dealt.

You do a great job of leaving out PLD's Fight or Flight, which adds +30% damage for 30 seconds, every 90 seconds. That's essentially a straight up 10% damage increase over time that applies to everything that PLD does, including auto attacks (Including Sword Oath's added 1400+ potency per minute, not restricted to any form of cooldown or resource), weapon skills, oGCDs, and DoTs. DRK's only damage increasing cooldown, Blood Weapon, increases our attack speed by 10% for 15 seconds every 40. That's overall a 3.75% increase in damage over time that only applies to weapon skills. Furthermore, that increase also costs us a lot more TP than PLD spends for the same damage. All those oGCD skills we have exist in an attempt to help us catch up to the raw damage output PLD can put out.

All this is a bunch of hooey. Your TP management is almost the same as a paladins, and while not as good--your off GCD offense is spectacular,

PLD beats DRK's entire oGCD offense with a single skill, and it doesn't even expend any resources of theirs.

your AOE is spectacular, you gain mobility and other features others would love.

Almost every DRK would happily give those "bonuses" up for the ability to actually be valuable in a raid situation. Our AoE weapon skills are only as powerful as WAR's Overpower at best (the circular pattern is certainly nice, but no WAR should have difficulty getting mobs lined up for Overpower), with a much harder to manage MP cost associated. Salted Earth is one of the best AoE DoTs in the game, but in our context, only makes up for the fact that WAR can get a sizeable amount of AoE damage out of Steel Cyclone, Decimate, and its myriad of offensive buffs.
DRK's mobility skill is a good one, but also a fundamental part of its damage output, and can't really be afforded to be left unused without a very large drop in DPS, meaning that most any real benefit of this mobility is based on luck.

[Reynhart]

DRK's only damage increasing cooldown, Blood Weapon, increases our attack speed by 10% for 15 seconds every 40.

Hmmm, Darkside, maybe ?

[Agrieus]

Hmmm, Darkside, maybe ?

Yup. Dark Arts as well. And Drk has also has quite a few OGC attacks to use even while in it's tanking stance. It's got a lot to do with why Drk dps is higher than War dps while the two are in their respective tanking stances. Kiteless...you also forgot to mention that all attacks that hit the War from the side or rear will be crits while Raw Intuition is up, which is kind of a big deal....especially when tanking two large enemies or many small to mid sized enemies because some of them WILL be flanking you so you've got to be careful when using raw intuition. You CAN combo it with awareness to help with the crit thing but having to pop another CD to counter the negatives of another could be considered a disadvantage. This is also assuming that the two can be used at the same time, which I'm sure they can be.

[Kiteless]

Hmmm, Darkside, maybe ?

Darkside isn't really a cooldown. You should always have it turned on unless you're bad. It's closer to a weaker, MP draining Shield Oath in that comparison, even if you can keep it on during Grit (at the cost of losing Blood Weapon, which evens things out with Keen Flurry).

Yup. Dark Arts as well. And Drk has also has quite a few OGC attacks to use even while in it's tanking stance. It's got a lot to do with why Drk dps is higher than War dps while the two are in their respective tanking stances.

DRK does have quite a few oGCD attacks, but that does not mean that they'll do more damage than WAR. Considering their major offensive buffs, DRK will generally be dealing 92% damage (Darkside at all times), WAR 90% (Maim at all times), and PLD 88% (Keen flurry a third of the time) while in their tanking stances. Then you factor in things like Unchained, Eye of the Storm and Berserk, and WAR's damage starts to soar. Furthermore, WAR has the ability to stance dance freely. Even if DRK can manage to outDPS WAR in Defiance, that doesn't really matter, since good WARs should be freely switching throughout the fight, outputting massive damage with Deliverance, and then switching to Defiance to use Inner Beast and eat any big hits.

Because of the massive MP cost and GCD attached to Grit, DRK doesn't really have this luxury. WAR has changed quite a bit with 3.0, and you're not giving it the credit it deserves.

Kiteless...you also forgot to mention that all attacks that hit the War from the side or rear will be crits while Raw Intuition is up, which is kind of a big deal....especially when tanking two large enemies or many small to mid sized enemies because some of them WILL be flanking you so you've got to be careful when using raw intuition. You CAN combo it with awareness to help with the crit thing but having to pop another CD to counter the negatives of another could be considered a disadvantage. This is also assuming that the two can be used at the same time, which I'm sure they can be.

Okay, bad WARs will be hurt by Raw intuition. But we don't care about bad WARs. And yes, Raw Intuition can be used with Awareness, and that's not a disadvantage.

@Adventica6

First, it's been said to death, the Darkside MP bug is not an actual bug it's just a graphical glitch, you gain the MP back in the next ticks, but yes if you don't manage your MP and let yourself get low enough where the glitch drains you to zero before the next tick, Darkside falls off, but that's just bad DRKing.

Um... no. Any MP you don't spend is wasted output or mitigation. Managing your MP is all about letting it get as low as possible without actually reaching zero. If you're not letting your MP get low enough to the point where you're being affected by the MP bug, then you're not playing DRK efficiently enough. But if you have MP randomly dropping for no reason, there's nothing you can do about that except lower your own efficiency.

[Agrieus]

Darkside isn't really a cooldown. You should always have it turned on unless you're bad.

DRK does have quite a few oGCD attacks, but that does not mean that they'll do more damage than WAR. Considering their major offensive buffs, DRK will generally be dealing 92% damage (Darkside at all times), WAR 90% (Maim at all times), and PLD 88% (Keen flurry a third of the time) while in their tanking stances. Then you factor in things like Unchained, Eye of the Storm and Berserk, and WAR's damage starts to soar. Furthermore, WAR has the ability to stance dance freely. Even if DRK can manage to outDPS WAR in Defiance, that doesn't really matter, since good WARs should be freely switching throughout the fight, outputting massive damage with Deliverance, and then switching to Defiance to use Inner Beast and eat any big hits.


Because of the massive MP cost and GCD attached to Grit, DRK doesn't really have this luxury. WAR has changed quite a bit with 3.0, and you're not giving it the credit it deserves.

It's actually the other way around. You yourself have apparently leveled a Drk but you clearly haven't mastered it yet since you're saying you should never have Dark Side off and you're complaining about the MP cost to turn on Grit. There are times, when you're trying to fill your mp bar back up to full super quick, when you SHOULD turn off Dark Side. By turning off Dark Side + Grit and Using blood weapon (and shadow wall should you need to soak damage) you'll recover your MP back up to full within half the time it takes for blood weapon to be fully used up. Once it's back up to full, you can toggle DS back on, use a high MP draining DA combo, turn DA back off, finish topping off your MP (which will happen just before blood weapon expires) then hop back into Grit and turn back on DS. Is this a complicated move? Sure. Is it complicated for me? No. Why? Because I don't use a controller, I assign every ability I have to my keyboard, and I've practiced and gotten used to how to easily refill my MP back up to fill with ease while not having to sacrifice any DPS. And ever since the expansion's launch, the only time a Warrior has surpassed me in DPS while we were both tanking is when they spike their dps with their offensive buffs/fell cleave/etc but once the spike ends their dps just goes back down and I surpass them again within seconds. Just practice more with Drk and stop being so biased because every time you compare the two you list off everything that a War can do in depth but hardly touch on anything (if at all) that the Drk can do. It's YOU that's not giving Drk the credit deserves because you're spoiled with an easier rotation with Warrior. It's the same song and dance that it was when 2.0 came out. People complained that Warrior wasn't nearly as good as the Pld or couldn't do as much damage as a Pld because people weren't used to it yet.

[Ditto]

It's actually the other way around. You yourself have apparently leveled a Drk but you clearly haven't mastered it yet since you're saying you should never have Dark Side off and you're complaining about the MP cost to turn on Grit. There are times, when you're trying to fill your mp bar back up to full super quick, when you SHOULD turn off Dark Side. By turning off Dark Side + Grit and Using blood weapon (and shadow wall should you need to soak damage) you'll recover your MP back up to full within half the time it takes for blood weapon to be fully used up. Once it's back up to full, you can toggle DS back on, use a high MP draining DA combo, turn DA back off, finish topping off your MP (which will happen just before blood weapon expires) then hop back into Grit and turn back on DS.

I stopped reading after this part.

I've never heard anything funner in my life. If you don't have Darkside going 24/7, ESPECIALLY when outside of Grit, what you're doing is wasting so much MP by regenerating your MP over the cap, and then wasting your buff times by toggling Darkside between gcd's instead of an actual oGCD skill. If you have Grit off, Blood Weapon will carry your MP. While it's down, you simply lay off the Dark Arts spam a little whule using syphon to keep your MP going. Once it's back up, it's back to DA'ing every single souleater and C&S you can.

You talk about having 'mastering' Drk, yet what you're doing is the silliest thing I have seen any Drk do yet, and I've seen Drk's do some pretty silly things. The goal for a Drk's MP is to keep it floating. You NEVER want to max out, and you NEVER want to hit critical low point without a way to spike it back up. In other words, you never want to let Darkside fall off due to complete depletion of MP, and you never want to over regen your MP, or let it sit at cap. Syphon alone can prevent this, and outside of Grit, Blood Weapon will make sure that never happens. As for sitting at cap, Darkside alone should prevent that, but if you have anything over 5.5k MP, you best Dark Arts something, or throw out a Passenger, which I do literally on cooldown when I have Blood Weapon going, on top of Drk Artsing every Souleater.

Also, no matter what you seem to think, dropping Darkside for ANY reason at all while you're capable of hitting something, is a DPS loss. So yes, you're sacrificing a LOT of your DPS actually, and are likely wasting a lot of your MP as well every single time you enable Darkside. In every fight right now, dropping Darkside for anything is a waste of MP, because nothing stays out of your attack range for long enough for the Darkside ticks to outweigh the cost of throwing it back up, excluding maybe Bloody Fuller in Ravana. You have plenty of time to prepare for that however.

P.S. Blood Weapon is your main damage buff outside of Grit. Using that without Darkside on is the most foolish thing you can do.

P.S.S. I decided to read the rest, and those Warriors you went up against were likely very terrible, probably didn't utilize Berserk as much as they should have, and probably didn't know how to stance dance. Which in that case, they were playing entirely defensively, though with very questionable performance.

People actually tank A1 in Grit?

They do, it surprises even me. I take whichever boss I'm on, power slash, Dark Arts power slash, maybe power slash a 3rd time if I think I need it to push my enmity more, then drop Grit and never turn it back on again. Rotate my CD's to make the healers job a bit easier, and just go completely ham on Blood Weapon and all out assault. Often there are times where my bosses HP is much lower than the other, so I tell every DPS to go on the other boss, and I wind up either finishing my boss off on my own, or getting it low enough to where both bosses die at almost the same time. (And this starts from as high as 15% HP left on my boss)

But well I mean even as a Drk, I got all 4 floors cleared only a few hours after the patch hit.

[Agrieus]

I've never heard anything funner in my life.

Then by all means, go have some "fun" then! (It's fine, I knew what you really meant)

Jests aside, all I said was I feel like I've gotten comfortable with my Drk, I didn't say anything about being a "master". I also never said anything about going over the MP cap. The whole idea behind what I said was to basically go from low mp back up to near full in the time it takes for Dark Side to go through it's CD cycle and at no point will you ever be over your mp cap lol. Sure, you'll possibly loose a very small amount of dps, (because all you need to do to refill it back up to full is to do the power slash + syphon strike combo then back to power slash and another syphon and most of your mp is already back from that) but you'll recover mp quicker, which is the whole main idea about the method I use. It's a quick burst to refill MP and that's it.

I'm not going through full sets of rotations just to do this like you seem to think lol. You CAN leave Dark Side on while you're doing this, but it takes longer to refill your mp if you do. And all of this is assuming that blood price is on CD and, again, you just need a quick way to refill your mp.

P.S. If you you'd like to stay in blood weapon for a little longer once you've got your mp where you want it to be, then you can easily turn Dark Side back on and slam your target with a few Dark Art boosted abilities. You'll already be nearly topped off when Dark Side has been reset so there probably won't be any harm not to unless you need to conserve mp (and aside from that, you'll still be recovering some of the mp you're burning up from Dark Arts). Shadow Wall is also good to use while you're Grit is off in order to cover your lost defenses.

P.S.S I take what I said back about it being a dps loss....because by recharging your mp up quickly this way, you're more able to recover lost dps by using multiple casted Dark Arts buffed attacks. If you don't like the way I play my Drk then that's totally fine with me. It works and I don't have any MP issues and my dps is solid so I've got no complaints. It's a fun job.

[Faytte]

But well I mean even as a Drk, I got all 4 floors cleared only a few hours after the patch hit.

Well none of it was hard? It was easier than doing the EX's--basically just harder than a hard mode dungeon until you got to A4 (and even that isnt hard?). If they live up to making savage..you know... SAVAGE (harder than old coils supposedly) that will be a true test.

This was entirely too easy to really prove anything about classes. As you said, you can tank the majority of them without tank stances on. I did most of A4 in sword oath(turn to shield for running through orbs and tanking the last boss). Did A3 with sword oath until hand slaps/final phase and sword oath throughout a1.