Quote Originally Posted by Syzygian View Post
Greetings healer! Please don't judge us by that guy.

DRK can use the cross class skills of the other two tanks, and has 4 native cooldowns. Shadow Wall is a dark purple icon with a 3-point star-looking emblem on it. Its the big Sentinal/Vengeance equivalent. Shadowskin looks like Protect, but red. Its the Rampart/Inner Beast equivalent, slightly weaker. Dark Dance is a purple-white swirly icon, this is a parry or parry+dodge rate increase, depending on whether it is boosted. Dark Mind you probably will not see much in dungeons, but its a magic-only Shadow Wall, essentially, and is an odd pyramid icon with gold/black/purple-ish colors.

The pink icon is Blood Price. Your DRK is trying to regen MP from getting hit. If you feel like being a team player, don't stun if you see this. Most good DRKs will find a way to work around it if you decide to holy-spam or the like, though.

The red emblem is Darkside. If you see a DRK tanking something without this, promptly feel free to request they turn it on. Grit is a black figure surrounded by blue/flames/sword looking things. This is their tank stance. Do not be surprised if your DRK turns this off during boss fights, in fact, prepare for it. If you see a deep red sword icon, that's Blood Weapon. This can't be used in Grit and is essentially their DPS stance in the form of a cooldown.

In particular, look out for Living Dead, the Hallowed Ground/Holmgang equivalent. Its a red hourglass icon. When it triggers, it turns gray. This grey icon will kill the DRK if you don't heal them for an amount totalling their max HP. However, they are invincible for the duration of the red and gray icons, both of which last up to 10 seconds. A lot of DRKs have a macro for this.

More than any other tank, DRK has a toolkit that lends itself to big pulls in dungeons (high MP returns from being hit repeatedly multiple times, being able to use that MP to self-heal proportionate to how many targets they can AoE on, and on that note, a ridiculously potent swiss-army-knife of AoE skills. Not to mention they can both blind and boost their own evasion when not regenerating MP), so a skilled DRK is probably going to see how far he/she can push you as far as large pulls. Just be ready for that.

Speaking of AoEs, the big spikey red thing (the sea urchin :P) is a targeted AoE called Abyssal Drain. Its a 120 potency enmity generator, and can be boosted to absorb 100% of the damage dealt to *each* target. This easily translates to 3-4K self heals on large pulls every 5 or so seconds, at the beginning when the DRK has Blood Price up. This is what most DRKs will be doing for the first 12-15 seconds of any big pull. If a DRK pulls a huge pack and spams this upon reaching their destination, they're doing it right. When they suddenly stop, it means Blood Price has fallen off or is about to fall off, and they're moving to a single target rotation, and will likely start using blind/evasion cooldowns at this point.

This is all assuming the DRK you got queued with is good, and sadly, not all of them are. But hopefully now you know what to expect a bit more =]



Here's the thing. If you do NOT take all of the cross class defensive cooldowns from PLD/WAR for your DRK, your DRK actually has less cooldowns than a PLD and WAR assuming they take eachother's cross class cooldowns.

Awareness pairs extremely well with Dark Dance, every crit you do not take is an increase in your parry rate and a direct boost to the effectiveness of that cooldown. Same goes for your dodge rate in dungeons, if you Dark Arts it. Blood Bath stacks well with DA Souleater in Grit, and synergizes well with Blood Weapon when out of Grit, as the increased attack speed=increased Blood Bath heals.

People have unrealistic expectations for cross-class cooldowns. Consider these 1/2 CDs, or 1/3 CDs. Combine them with eachother or your native CDs to boost their effectiveness. I don't consider any of them useless. Haymaker is useless. Cross-classing Skull Sunder or Savage Blade is useless. These CDs are not.
We only really have 6 cross classes to choose from. I was responding to a post about which ones to choose.

Convo is strong, and should be taken. Provoke is mandatory on a lot of content.

The other 4 just aren't that strong. Definitely not as strong as Convo or Provoke. Of the remaining set, I prefer Foresight because I think it's the strongest. At ~8% reduction you are looking at a 1/3 strength cooldown. Awareness is specifically good for enemies that have high crit % phases. But that's not very many. Outisde of that, enemy crit is very low, I've heard it's around 5%. So the overall mitigation provided is very weak (2.5%). On its own, you're looking at something like a 1/8th strength cooldown. With DD in the same circumstance, you're only losing 5% of your parries to crits. If you had a base parry rate of 20% (which is high unless you've got parry on your gear), then DD brought it up to 50%, then you're only losing around 2.5% of your parries to crits. Since parries are only 20% reduction, it's still not a noteworthy difference.

Bloodbath, I think is probably weaker on DRK than on PLD or WAR. I wouldn't really consider bloodbath & DA+SE to stack "well". They both restore HP, but there's no multiplicative effect of one with the other. And Blood Weapon represents the weakest damage boost of the 3 jobs. Berserk at 50% and FoF at 30% are much stronger, and that directly multiplies the bloodbath heals. When you're looking at total portion of incoming damage, I think the % returned isn't going to be that high, and probably not all that effective, even when compared to something like Foresight.

It doesn't mean these cooldowns are useless, it's that they're all kind of meh. In my opinion, none of them really stand out (unless you're talking about awareness vs. a boss with a high crit phase) and I don't think (aside from Foresight) even measure up as 1/3CDs.

So, anyway, Convo & Provoke are mandatory. Pick 3 of the last four, they're all somewhat mediocre.