Am I missing something about DRK?

[pandabearcat]

Not really here to argue about the squishiness, but my point is just baseline sitting there I'm getting hit for more, and souleater health drain doesn't cover for that.

Since DRK are identical (and inferior) in every way to PLD defensive cd's, I'm wondering why at least the baseline defensiveness doesn't cover for that.

WAR gets similar self healing to DRK AND on top of that gets a 10% parry, roughly equal to base block I assume. I always thought cooldowns aside, all tanks should be taking roughly the same amount of autoattack damage.

DRK get none of that it seems, as well as a defensive cd literally worse than Keen flurry (and definitely worse than bastion), able to be buffed to...really do barely anything else.

The only thing DRK have going for them is Dark Mind...which I mean could be an advantage, but just sitting there getting hit they're going to lose out to PLD and WAR, and as far as I can tell WAR does more dps than DRK so why should I bring a DRK instead? Aside from purely magic fights w/o a MNK. And even then a WAR's pure 10% damage reduction is better, if you don't have one already.

It takes me 5 rotations to do another DA because I am doing other stuff. I really don't see the damage output from DRK being super high either, and frankly as long as I am hitting all my buttons and not capping on mana there really isn't any playstyle "skill" involved here either - none of the tank classes have a complicated dps rotation.

AoE rotation is obviously better than PLD, so I'm happy there. I guess I was just sort of expecting more, and a quicker regenning mana pool to use for fun things. Without blood weapon it really feels extremely slow.

OT i am sure they can do fine (until they run out of TP), but just MTing there since I likely will be, it just seems worse than PLD.

[Yorumi]

Not really here to argue about the squishiness, but my point is just baseline sitting there I'm getting hit for more, and souleater health drain doesn't cover for that.

Are you sure you're geared the same? Drk wears the same armor as pld, so has the same def/mdef, grit = shield oath, the only real difference is RoH's str down but that would be easily made up for by SE. As far as cooldowns, shadowskin = rampart, dark dance is half the mitigation of bulwark but has 1/3 the cooldown. Shadow wall is 10% less than sentinel. Both have the same foresight and bloodbath.

[Freyyy]

^ pretty much this, tho I wouldn't consider Dark Dance being half Bulwark since you reduce more damage by blocking than parrying. Add that when the enemy is doing mostly magic damage you also get Dark Mind which is really powerful.

[Yorumi]

^ pretty much this, tho I wouldn't consider Dark Dance being half Bulwark since you reduce more damage by blocking than parrying. Add that when the enemy is doing mostly magic damage you also get Dark Mind which is really powerful.

Maybe on higher level shields but most shields tend to be in the 20% range. I'll have to double check tonight but my shield is ilvl 180 and I'm pretty sure I'm only getting 20% blocks. I know tower shields go up to 30% but I don't believe I have access to one at this ilvl. Still that aside I think it's comparable because even if bulwark is giving you 30% blocks, you can use dark dance 3 times for every 1 bulwark.

[Freyyy]

Maybe on higher level shields but most shields tend to be in the 20% range. I'll have to double check tonight but my shield is ilvl 180 and I'm pretty sure I'm only getting 20% blocks. I know tower shields go up to 30% but I don't believe I have access to one at this ilvl. Still that aside I think it's comparable because even if bulwark is giving you 30% blocks, you can use dark dance 3 times for every 1 bulwark.

The Hive Scutum (i190) is a tower shield and it blocks 28%. As we'll get more and more ilvls with future patches shield block values will most likely become more and more powerful until the next expansion like it did in 2.0 -> 2.4.