[Opener/Tips/Advices] How to play Drk

[Giantbane]

Mobs crit rate isn't the worry, its bosses. In A1S and A3S, during progression anyway (not overgearing) those boss' crits can 1-shot you or finish you off. And if you're in a dungeon tanking 11 mobs the chances of you eating a crit go up exponentially.

You're severely underselling Blood Weapon. First off, Berserk and FoF are 90s recasts, Blood Weapon is 40. Blood Weapon's attack speed increase is also only part of the DPS increase it grants. In its duration you can spam DA Souleater, and if you applied Delirium immediately prior, you'll only have that fall off for a few seconds due to the attack speed increase. The increased attack speed directly compliments healing from Bloodbath. And yes, if you're in Grit, rotating DA SE with Bloodbath up is good healing, so I'd say that yes, they do synergize. Its like saying Second Wind and ToB don't synergize. They do. If its a low damage phase with mostly auto-attacks you can recover several thousand HP between the two.

These are oGCD cooldowns... they cost you no DPS other than the .01% you can gain in the course of a fight with Mercy Stroke. Its not like folks are asking you to stack all vit and glue your face to your tank stance. Why not pop them if you have them? They DO have uses, USE them. Why discourage people from doing everything they can to mitigate damage?

I do not understand why tanks get on here and shit on cooldowns. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they aren't the tanks that just don't pop cooldowns. Its not just the quoted poster, its everywhere on the tank forums. "Foresight is shit, Bloodbath is meh, Awareness is useless..." What is there to gain from constantly shit-canning untraited cross-class abilities other than trying to look like a badass that's too good for a cooldown that isn't a clear tank buster CD? People get on here and talk like they've got too much swag for Awareness/Bloodbath/etc. but if they are a decent tank they're still popping those cooldowns if nothing else is up or they're saving bigger CDs for bigger hits. The only thing this does is encourage new tanks to not push any cooldown that isn't fucking Sentinel or Shadow Wall and then wind up on the floor 10 seconds later.

You need some reading comprehension and bad.

We're talking STRICTLY about the cross class abilities, which ones are must have, which ones are optional. You don't take the cross class abilities and then let them sit there. Who the hell does that? It's just a choice of what to use. In the grand scheme of things, they're not that powerful, so if you want to trade off ONE of them for mercy stroke, it's not that big a deal. Mercy stroke is also weak, as you point out, so you're perfectly fine going the defensive route if that's your preference with very little lost.

Blood Weapon having a 40s cooldown is completely irrelevant to the discussion. I'm ONLY talking about blood bath here, and when you use blood weapon and blood bath at the same time, it's a lot weaker than blood bath and berserk or blood bath and FoF. Who cares if you can use it again in 40s? Can you use Blood bath again in 40s with it? no. Is it going to give you any more healing from Blood bath by using it 40s later? no. So it's pointless to mention.

Several thousand HP over a low damage phase? It's a low damage phase. Who cares? What are you trying to save your healer 1 GCD to throw regen on you? Is it useful? Sure, mildly. I use it when it's up, and try to pair it with Blood weapon whenever possible. Is there something wrong with using it? no. Is it a huge deal if you want mercy stroke instead? Honestly, it's probably not going to change healer behavior that much unless you're talking a dungeon run where you're over geared. Usually when you want healing, you want it right now. That's why Equilibrium is so good and part of why Clemency is not so amazing. Stretching this over 15s is not exceptional. Usable, of course, but if you want to swap it out, you'll probably be ok. Particularly when you consider the DRK has the weakest tools for boosting its effects.

And awareness is eliminating a 5% chance of what you're talking about for 15s over a 2 minute period. If you can somehow cope with crits for the other 105s of that duration, you're probably not really gaining all that much by using it. Of course you use it if you have it, and if you can use it in conjunction with a parry boost or block boost, then by all means do so and get the most out of it. But we went through the entirety of 2.x where warriors collectively shrugged their shoulders at it as a cross class choice. And that's with a lot of shared raiding experience across every warrior that didn't feel it was mandatory by any stretch of the imagination under normal circumstances.

[Syzygian]

You need some reading comprehension and bad.

We're talking STRICTLY about the cross class abilities, which ones are must have, which ones are optional. You don't take the cross class abilities and then let them sit there. Who the hell does that? It's just a choice of what to use. In the grand scheme of things, they're not that powerful, so if you want to trade off ONE of them for mercy stroke, it's not that big a deal. Mercy stroke is also weak, as you point out, so you're perfectly fine going the defensive route if that's your preference with very little lost.

Blood Weapon having a 40s cooldown is completely irrelevant to the discussion. I'm ONLY talking about blood bath here, and when you use blood weapon and blood bath at the same time, it's a lot weaker than blood bath and berserk or blood bath and FoF. Who cares if you can use it again in 40s? Can you use Blood bath again in 40s with it? no. Is it going to give you any more healing from Blood bath by using it 40s later? no. So it's pointless to mention.

Several thousand HP over a low damage phase? It's a low damage phase. Who cares? What are you trying to save your healer 1 GCD to throw regen on you? Is it useful? Sure, mildly. I use it when it's up, and try to pair it with Blood weapon whenever possible. Is there something wrong with using it? no. Is it a huge deal if you want mercy stroke instead? Honestly, it's probably not going to change healer behavior that much unless you're talking a dungeon run where you're over geared.

I feel I read and comprehended you just fine. And I'm sorry if I came off strong but I did specify that its not just you, I see this everywhere, and its just tiresome to see people calling buttons on their hotbar useless, especially in a thread started by someone asking for tips/advice, when you know damn well that they're still pushing them. It feels hypocritical.

Low damage phase is a relative term. Low damage phase in savage still means several thousand DTPS. And if you're doing huge speed run pulls in a piddly dungeon, its not far off from that either. I'm not thinking about saving healer GCDs, I'm thinking if something stupid happens, how long will I be able to survive without their intervention if they have to go tend to some dumbassery on the part of someone else in the party? Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one not living in this fantasy world that people seem to make their arguments based on, where every party is a farm party, DPS never fuck up/take unnecessary damage/die, and the healer is 100% focused on you.

I see people quote math on Foresight and Awareness all the time, but people just give Mercy Stroke the benefit of the doubt because "mah deepz, bruh" (not referring to any one particular person in particular here). What's the actual percentage increase on a DRK (who can't Zerk or IR it) for personal DPS assuming they get to hit Mercy Stroke twice in a boss fight? Not trying to be sassy, I'm genuinely curious, and Mercy Stroke seems to get a free pass because its deeps and we're in a dps focused meta. How much does it *actually* increase DPS?

I just feel like it deserves the same scrutiny, and it doesn't get it because its an offensive ability rather than defensive. We will take time out of our days to math a defensive cooldown to death for the sake of discounting/devaluing it but if its a DPS increase it could be .00000001% and we'd still take it. =/

[Giantbane]

What's the actual percentage increase on a DRK (who can't Zerk or IR it) for personal DPS assuming they get to hit Mercy Stroke twice in a boss fight? Not trying to be sassy, I'm genuinely curious, and Mercy Stroke seems to get a free pass because its deeps and we're in a dps focused meta. How much does it *actually* increase DPS?

I just feel like it deserves the same scrutiny, and it doesn't get it because its an offensive ability rather than defensive. We will take time out of our days to math a defensive cooldown to death for the sake of discounting/devaluing it but if its a DPS increase it could be .00000001% and we'd still take it. =/

Ok, but I never said useless in any of my posts. I think you could have covered your opinion much more concisely by just pointing out that Mercy Stroke is very weak as an offensive option, so you think it's better to go the defensive route and lay that out.

[whiskeybravo]

I would just like to say, I wasn't one of those War's who shit on awareness >.< I always took it over second wind because if awareness saves you 1 crit damage that's close to (if not more depending on the encounter) then what you get back from second wind. I guess awareness wouldn't save you if you had like 500 hp and needed a quick heal, but the chances of second wind saving you aren't really that much better. (it certainly has saved my ass on drg before, but that's a little different since you *generally* aren't taking regular damage like an AA as a dps).

[Syzygian]

I would just like to say, I wasn't one of those War's who shit on awareness >.< I always took it over second wind because if awareness saves you 1 crit damage that's close to (if not more depending on the encounter) then what you get back from second wind. I guess awareness wouldn't save you if you had like 500 hp and needed a quick heal, but the chances of second wind saving you aren't really that much better. (it certainly has saved my ass on drg before, but that's a little different since you *generally* aren't taking regular damage like an AA as a dps).

Wait, why can't you take Second Wind AND Awareness? o.o

[AlexiIvaniskavich]

In regard to cross class usefulness.

Foresight is 20% more defense (I’ve seen nowhere that this skill only applies to physical damage – tool tip simply says defense – thank you for ambiguity SE) or an 8% damage reduction . Is it great? No, but it's pretty darn useful for sure (adding almost the same amount of defense as your chest piece). I am not sure why so many seem down on Blood Bath either. 25% of your damage to healing for 15 seconds, 1000 DPS (easy math) gets you 3,750 hp back - unless i am missing something here –


Before you complain about the remaining slots for cross skills, look at the other jobs and their options.

Monk (war/drg) - Top skills being Blood For Blood, Invigorate…..Blood Bath, Mercy Stroke, Fracture. First two are must haves, Blood Bath is second tier, and mercy stroke/fracture is ridiculously situational.
Dragoon (mnk/war) - Internal Release, Second Wind, Blood Bath, Mercy Stroke. (and what – untraited Mantra for %5 healing boost???)
Ninja and Bard (mnk/drg) - IR, B4B, invigorate, 2nd wind - probably the largest quantity of most useful cross classes – again the fifth spot is open (mantra again?)
Machinist (brd/drg) - Raging Strikes, B4B, invigorate, quelling strikes - considering their damage is mostly from wildfire, they should bet both Blood for Blood and Raging strikes.

Black Mage (smn/brd) - Raging Strikes, Quelling strikes, Virus, Eye for an Eye....
Summoner (blm/brd) - Raging Strikes, Swiftcast, quelling strikes.... blizzard 2? (reallly??)

It gets worse with healers. Swiftcast, cleric stance, protect, and not much else that is supremely useful.

My point being, with exception to the "utility classes" of Bard and Machinist and the almost utility but not quite class of Ninja, almost every other job has 2 very nice cross class skills and the rest are in the lesser category and the Fifth slot is almost always trash. As Tanks, our 2 nice ones are Convalescence and Provoke. Next tier being BloodBath and Foresight. The fifth cross class is the most meh again - (awareness/mercy stroke).

[Syzygian]

I’ve seen nowhere that this skill only applies to physical damage – tool tip simply says defense – thank you for ambiguity SE

Well...

You have a stat on your character sheet that explicitly says "Defense". The tooltip also explicitly says "Defense". Just under the former instance on your character sheet, there's another stat called "Magic Defense" which is mentioned nowhere in Foresight's tooltip.

Just sayin'.

25% of your damage to healing for 15 seconds, 1000 DPS (easy math) gets you 3,750 hp back - unless i am missing something here –

You have to subtract magic damage and DoT damage from that. So Dark Passenger doesn't count, Scourge past its initial hit doesn't count, and Salted Earth doesn't count. DRK's DoTs are a much larger part of its DPS relative to WAR/PLD so it is worth saying that your total DPS is not going to be as indicative of Bloodbath's returns.

[Februs]

In regard to cross class usefulness.

Foresight is 20% more defense (I’ve seen nowhere that this skill only applies to physical damage – tool tip simply says defense – thank you for ambiguity SE)

I had a Warrior buddy I had to explain this to back in the day (he couldn't figure out why he was taking so much additional Dmg from Raven's Ascent in T9). You have to go into your stats and actually look at the description to see that Foresight does nothing for Magic defense. It's a bit lazy on SE's part for not including it in the move's description, but it does nothing for magic. It's purely physical.

[AlexiIvaniskavich]

@Syzygian
I knew about the DOT's and magic not counting - I used the 1000 DPS number because.... I am too lazy to do the actual math. I should have been more specific here. Being on PS4, I don't have nifty access to things that could break down my damage (and its type) to do the actual number crunching required. I am guessing that I can get at least 8% of my health back (roughly 300 dps - give or take)

As far as Foresight was concerned, thank you both for clearing that up. I knew the magic defense was there, but I never actually activated foresight and looked at my stat page immediately after to see the difference.

Sorry for the generalizations and ambiguity (I learned it from watching you SE) :P

[Februs]

As far as Foresight was concerned, thank you both for clearing that up. I knew the magic defense was there, but I never actually activated foresight and looked at my stat page immediately after to see the difference.

That's not what I meant lol (I guess it was my turn to be ambiguous XD ). I don't think you would actually see a difference in your stats page when using Foresight (since it's a temporary adjustment). What I meant was that the Foresight description specifies "Defense." If you go into your stats page and highlight "Defense," the stat description specifies that the state scales physical defense only (which is why there is a separate entry for Magical Defense). If Foresight only increases "Defense" than it's only effecting physical defense.

Again, kind of lazy and ambiguous on SE's part (everyone's ambiguous! lol), but that's how it works.