Ways to Improve the DRK

[Launched]

I'm failing miserably to understand the complaints with DRK at level 60.

DPS: You have two 400+ potency attacks, 75 and 40 potency DoTs with a very short cooldown and joke of a TP cost, respectively, the most spammable AoE with proper MP management, an OGCD gap closer. Suffers only a 5% damage reduction while MTing.
Individual potencies don't matter, overall DPS does. WAR wins on that. WAR also has unlimited TP, PLD can go for 30-45s longer than DRK. DRK does 1*0.8*1.15=92% of a DRK with no Grit/Darkside. WAR does 1*0.75*1.2=90% of a WAR with no Defiance/Deliverance, but WAR also has Inner Beast and Unchained which ignore the penalty.

Utility: -10% incoming damage, -10% incoming INT based damage. Former stacks with Storm's Path. Latter procs on parry but in any fight where you're MTing its up at least half the time.
Reprisal is completely random. Delirium isn't unique, MNK has the same debuff.

Hate: DA Power Slash is ridiculous and is enough to put you in the lead on hate to the point where you don't need to maintenance it for half a dozen full combo rotations at least, leaving you free to focus on mitigation, DPS, and utility. Gap closer supplements pulling, Abyssal Drain is targeted, ranged AoE hate. Salted Earth further supplements steady hate on trash.
Enmity is literally no problem. Both PLD and WAR can hold single target and aoe enmity with no change of losing aggro, so I don't see why that would be considered an advantage of DRK.

Huge wall of mitigation text
DRK simply can't match PLD or WAR in a cooldown rotation. Even in magic heavy fights, WAR ends up with more mitigation thanks to Inner Beast and its short cooldowns. That's kinda funny considering magic tanking is meant to be DRK's gimmick.

Resource management: A DA Power Slash opener leaves you free to use Syphon Strike combos, DA Soul Eaters, maintain debuffs, and Blood Price is enough even on single targets to maintain a constant MP pool if you're paying attention.
Probably the only place you're right, but WAR/PLD don't even have to deal with that at all.

OTing: With proper use of Blood weapon you have a 400 potency attack every 7.35 seconds for 20 seconds and an additional OGCD 450 potency attack afterwards, while maintaining debuffs and MP in the 20 sec remaining on the CD at that point. Not to mention an OGCD gap closer, stun, AoE DoT, and line AoE.
And you'll be out of TP and useless at 2:15 into a fight. You don't even burst higher than WAR in that time.
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Stuff in bold.

[Syzygian]

Stuff in bold.

1.TP never stopped WARs in 2.x WAR is also designed more as an OT and its higher DPS is part of its utility. DRK is more in-between.

2. Random, but frequent. When MTing I rarely have to wait more than a few seconds after its recast time is up before it procs. The fact that MNK overwrites Delirium means we can end our combos with 400 potency instead of 280 whilst self healing. I'm okay with that, I'll bet any group would be too. Having a MNK keeping DK up actually boosts my DPS and simplifies my rotation. =]

3. The advantage isn't that the other tanks can't do anything, I never once argued that the other tanks were lacking in anything. DRK has higher potency non-aggro combos and the trivialization of aggro in your opener as an MT DRK frees you up to focus on that and thus MP, debuffs, and damage.

4. No. Dark Dance = Bulwark. Bulwark is 60% supplemented by a good shield. Great. It also has triple the recast time and 3/4 of the duration. For mild, sustained mitigation against fluff physical damage the closest WAR equivalent is Foresight, which is cross-classable. Draw here if you ask me. Shadowskin = Inner Beast = Rampart. Inner Beast's uptime relative to its duration is the almost the same same percentage (6s out of every 15-20 vs. 20s out of every 90) WAR wins here though. Shadow Wall = Vengeance = Sentinel. PLD edge here. Dark Mind = ??? This is basically an extra 30% mitigation you can stack on top of Shadowskin or Shadow Wall for any magic-based tank buster that the other tanks completely lack, or just pop on CD for fights where ALL the damage is magic, like A4 (someone also corrected me on magical tank busters. Yoshi did say though that there was going to be a leaning towards more magic-based damage in upcoming content). I guess you could equate this to Raw Intuition or Sheltron? Sheltron blocks only one attack and Raw Intuition has a longer CD. Dark Mind will be up for more tank busters, DRK has the edge here. The new self heals for WAR/PLD are big but they are gated by recast time/huge MP cost versus DRK's smaller Souleater heals that are pretty much constant. Pretty equal here. Thrill of Battle is unique to WAR but doesn't really do anything by itself without input from the healers or supplemented with Convalescence which again, is cross-classable. None of the other CDs WAR and PLD get are really game changers cause squeenix gave them all to DRK via cross class and thus they can be stacked with its CDs, etc. I'd say the tanks are pretty well balanced for mitigation.

PLD------------WAR------------DRK
Rampart - Inner Beast - Shadowskin
Sentinel - Vengeance - Shadow Wall
Bulwark - Thrill of Battle - Dark Dance
Sheltron - Raw Intuition - Dark Mind
Clemency - Equilibrium - Souleater
Convalescence - Convalescence - Convalescence
Bloodbath - Bloodbath - Bloodbath
Awareness - Awareness - Awareness
Foresight - Foresight - Foresight

5. A job being more difficult or complex to play in no way affects its efficiency in a raid when in the hands of a good player so yeah. WARs stack management I'd argue is somewhat equivalent to this but I guess not anymore with Deliverance/Abandon.

6. You'll be out of TP and useless 2:15 into hitting a dummy or fighting a punching bag like T8 or T12, of which there no such fights in current 3.0 content. There's currently not a relevant encounter where a DRK is allowed 100% uptime on a boss, OTing, where the boss does not engage in some mechanic that makes it untargetable/out of range/etc. Burst also depends on a number of factors. You'd have to have a DRK and WAR both out of tank stance with neither of them shouldering the responsibility of their respective debuffs (a NIN keeping DE up and MNK keeping DK up) to free them both up to use their highest potency combos. If either of them has to put up and maintain a debuff due to party composition that affects DPS for both of them, and of course, have identical gear. If you've got a side-by-side parse of those circumstances I'd love to see it. Also I've not discovered an unanimously agreed upon OT DRK opener but if you've got one, enlighten me.

I just really love the job and don't feel gimped at all while playing it, and I leveled and raided with both tanks in 2.x so I'm perplexed by the droves of people crying for buffs. I didn't enjoy being shoehorned into the OT slot as WAR and got bored with the simplicity of PLD. Party composition really shouldn't be an issue that people dwell upon if your group is skilled. Happy's group dropped t13 with a DRG and SMN before their respective buffs/fixes and no MNK. I've yet to be turned away from a raid group or PF because people were like eh, no reason to bring a DRK. I doubt people have the job min-maxed to the point where we can make judgements.

EDIT: Oh wait, checked your lodestone. DRK lvl 40. That's okay bud. Level it more, you'll learn to love it.

[Reynhart]

Shadowskin = Inner Beast = Rampart. Inner Beast's uptime relative to its duration is the almost the same same percentage (6s out of every 15-20 vs. 20s out of every 90) WAR wins here though.

WAR wins because "relative mitigation" is irrelevant. You want to mitigate every big hits, and Inner Beast's "cooldown" means that you'll have it ready everytime.

[Syzygian]

WAR wins because "relative mitigation" is irrelevant. You want to mitigate every big hits, and Inner Beast's "cooldown" means that you'll have it ready everytime.

Except there aren't any tank busters that happen every 20 seconds, anywhere, in the entire game, and the ones that happen the most frequently require a tank swap or could easily be mitigated by some other means in the case of the other two tanks because the other two tanks have more raw mitigation CDs and more small CDs to supplement them; WAR has IB on such a short "cooldown" to balance the fact that it literally has only one single other raw mitigation CD (Vengeance). ToB doesn't actually mitigate anything, Foresight is not exclusive to WAR, and Raw Intuition is essentially a physical Dark Mind with a longer duration and longer recast time, balanced by the crit mechanic.

I dunno why people keep up with this. When you actually take everything into account (durations, cooldown times, percentages, etc.) and consider that we have no clue what mechanics future content is going to bring the tanks at the moment are actually very well balanced. Every tank, in terms of defensive cooldowns anyway, has tools that equate to the tools the other tank brings, when all aspects of the abilities are considered. DRK just especially appeals to me because of the extra cross class CDs and short recast times of Dark Dance and Dark Mind, giving me high uptime and multiple creative ways to stack 2 or more CDs for a given situation, and the active playstyle of resource management that is absent in the other two tanks.

There hasn't been a single tank buster in the new content that I have not been able to prepare for and have CDs off cooldown and "ready every time" I have literally never eaten a tank buster because I burned all my shit and had nothing to pop, and if I ever did, it'd be me that fucked up, not the devs that designed the job. I've even theory-crafted FlattenBreath/Akh Morn CD rotation for DRK elsewhere on the forums. If there was content with tank busters placed such that it was impossible to effectively mitigate them with the tools at hand and their durations/recast times, then yeah, I'd say DRK was in a bad spot. But yeah, that's not the case.

[Reynhart]

Except there aren't any tank busters that happen every 20 seconds, anywhere, in the entire game

Back in 2.xx, Odin used Sangetall far too frequently for a PLD to have a reliable mitigation tool for each one. So, yes, you'd need a tank swap to ensure that everything go smoothly.
With a WAR, you could do a solo tank without any issue and bring an additionnal DPS.

And the point is not really that a tank buster can happen every 20s but just more often than the cooldown rotation for PLD.
For example, a tankbuster every minute ?
First buster, you use Rampart
1 minute later, you use Sentinel
1 minute later, Rampart is back, so you use it
1 minute later, Sentinel and Rampart are still on cooldown. Do yout put Hallowed Ground in your "usual" cooldown rotation ?

As a WAR, you could have a Rampart-like mitigation for every tank buster, and pop Vengeance more often than Sentinel on top of Inner Beast.
I won't count Foresight and Awareness, since both tanks can do it (And WAR more often than PLD for Foresight)

That leaves Bulwark which is not as reliable as other CD, and WAR can pop Thrill Of Battle and Second Wind to ensure a safety net.
And this is without counting Storm's Path.

Back to your list of CD, it's more like that :

PLD---------------WAR------------------------------DRK
Rampart -------- Inner Beast --------------------- Shadowskin <- WAR wins
Sentinel --------- Vengeance+Inner Beast ---- Shadow Wall <- WAR wins
Bulwark --------- Raw Intuition+Inner Beast -- Dark Dance <- WAR wins (It can even pop Featherfoot to be closer to a Dark Arts-Dark Dance
Sheltron -------- Thrill of Battle ------------------- Dark Mind
Clemency ------- Equilibrium ---------------------- Souleater
Convalescence - Convalescence ------------------ Convalescence
Bloodbath ------- Bloodbath ----------------------- Bloodbath
Awareness ------ Awareness --------------------- Awareness
Foresight -------- Foresight ----------------------- Foresight

People think PLD is far more sturdy because it blocks more damage in between tankbusters, thus requiring less heal overall.
But, when mitigation really matters, WAR has absolutely no drawback, except when when you compare the aftermath of Hallowed Ground vs Holmgang.

[Syzygian]

Back to your list of CD, it's more like that :

Nope. Being able to stack Inner Beast with other CDs does not mean WAR wins. Not always at least. Lets not pretend WAR has the monopoly on stacking CDs. Remember that DRK has two 60s recast CDs with longer durations, one of which can easily be paired with other mitigations for any given tank buster or even both of them, as 90% of the most infamous tank busters in this game just so happen occur 55-65 seconds apart. LOL@the Odin example. Remember also that its not just the tankbuster that matters but preceding and subsequent auto attack/aoe/whatever damage and longer duration cooldowns help balance this out. I.E. in T13 for first phase Flattens and final phase Akh Morns you can easily have both Dark Dance and Dark Mind up for ALL OF THEM, before actually using a bonafide mitigation tool like Shadowskin/Vengeance/Rampart etc. The same goes for Discoid in A4. 1min apart. DA Dark Mind + Whatever else you want to make your healer's job easier. tl;dr The comparison is flawed, DRK has short recast CDs too, that it can stack and have up for 95% of tankbusters, try again.

People think PLD is far more sturdy because it blocks more damage in between tankbusters, thus requiring less heal overall.
But, when mitigation really matters, WAR has absolutely no drawback, except when when you compare the aftermath of Hallowed Ground vs Holmgang.

stuff in bold.

[Reynhart]

stuff in bold.

Dark Dance is worse than Inner Beast, and only works on physical hits. Dark Mind is only better than Inner Beast with Dark Arts but only works on magical hits.