DRK's Niche as a tank?

[Kabooa]

Play what you want. It literally won't matter outside World First progression

[Felorr]

So if Paladin has the best mitigation and possibly utility and Warrior has the best damage,
what does DRK do best? or is it halfway between the 2?

I want to know since I'm leveling DRK bit by bit.

Unless you and your group are shooting for world first clears of cutting edge content, or are shooting for top clear times in speed runs, none of the things you mention matter at all. A lot of people get hung up trying to quantify and rank the tanks. Just play what you like. If you're going to play it hardcore, you'll be playing all three anyway.

[MauvaisOeil]

Intervention/Sheltron are the same thing, arguably better. Sheltron is approx ~24% damage down on PLD (compare to TBN's -20% on DRK), and Intervention is -10~40% on a party member (compare to TBN's 10%).

Sheltron is completely busted by multi hit bursts, and TBN is not 20% damage less. It's 20% of your max HP less.

That means, it will be stronger than Sheltron (at 24% as you stated) as long as the damage are lower than 80% of your max HP, where it can account from 25% to 100% of the burst taken. Sheltron will only be stronger on TB eating 80 to 100% of your HP bar unmitigated.

TBN is mostly stronger than Sheltron, that's the cost of TBN that is higher than Sheltron which is on a separate gauge dedicated to reducing damage taken (by yourself or another).

[whiskeybravo]

TBN is mostly stronger than Sheltron, that's the cost of TBN that is higher than Sheltron which is on a separate gauge dedicated to reducing damage taken (by yourself or another).

Actually, wouldn't it just matter what the incoming damage is? Like, at 20% max HP (around 11k?), the damage would only need to be upwards of 50k or so for Sheltron to overtake TBN in damage reduction. Plus there is the scaling issue, say the incoming damage is 100k, sheltron catches 24k damage while TBN is still only catching 11k since it's based off max HP. Obviously if the damage is lower that favors TBN, but at this point most busters are already over 50k. I do like that TBN reimburses gauge instead of costing gauge, and it has a higher uptime (though that doesn't matter if only using for TBs), it's pretty hard to say it's stronger than (or even equal to) sheltron or intervention with regard to busters. But hey, still better than what War has.. Lol

1 thing to note is that DRK was widely used by the top progression teams to clear o4s. WAR does overtake DRK for 'MT slot' in dps at the highest play. I would assume that DRK should be used again for progressions but will later be switched to WAR for speedkilling.

It doesn't help that War was broken at SB release. It was fixed by the time savage came out, but the damage was already done. Either way, early prog focuses more on utility so War probably wouldn't have been the defacto 2nd tank anyways.

[TheCount]

It doesn't really have one, magic protection could be argued but that's not really so much the case anymore when Paladins can now block magic at any time by chance or guarantee the block. Meanwhile Dark Knight would have to dark arts it if they want the full version of it, which feels a bit more clunky and inconvenient after you played a Paladin who can protect against it so much more easily

[Phoenicia]

DRK's Niche is that they're fun to play around when you juggle MP, TP and Blood gauge to keep the wheel turning. It's fun. Imho that's the only niche that should matter. Unless you're racing for world first of course.

To elaborate, The Blackest Night is one of the most fun active mitigation tools we have currently. Yes it can cause a DPS loss, but proper usage rewards with blood gauge and even more proper usage can be a DPS gain. Even if it did hurt your personal DPS, it might save your healer healing GCDs for DPS. Either way who cares? You block big hit, in return you can make big hit back at bad guy!

~ Phoenicia ~

[AziraSyuren]

DRK's niche is aggressive mediocrity.

[MauvaisOeil]

Actually, wouldn't it just matter what the incoming damage is? Like, at 20% max HP (around 11k?), the damage would only need to be upwards of 50k or so for Sheltron to overtake TBN in damage reduction. Plus there is the scaling issue, say the incoming damage is 100k, sheltron catches 24k damage while TBN is still only catching 11k since it's based off max HP. Obviously if the damage is lower that favors TBN, but at this point most busters are already over 50k. I do like that TBN reimburses gauge instead of costing gauge, and it has a higher uptime (though that doesn't matter if only using for TBs), it's pretty hard to say it's stronger than (or even equal to) sheltron or intervention with regard to busters. But hey, still better than what War has.. Lol

It's not a scaling issue, if you're taking 100K as a buster, you're dead even with Sheltron because you don't have enough HP to survive this. If you can survive 100k buster with sheltron on, it means you have at least 76khp (later during expansion) and then your TBN will be 15k, but that would be having the strict minimal HP for that exact buster. If you use two cooldowns (rampart with sheltron and rampart with TBN), the 100k hit will be reduced to 60.8k damage for a PLD, and 65k for a DRK. The issue beeing : What is the damage of the buster, what are your current max HP, and every how many seconds will you need damage reduction ? Sheltron require a mere 22s of sword oath to be avaliable, If encounters are designed around 30s or 1min between TB, that means the main scaling issue is : they aren't designed around having a short on demand cooldown, which is the point of TBN, and thus it's flawed like Rage of Halone was flawed for HW raid content.

[Chrono_Rising]

If you can survive 100k buster with sheltron on, it means you have at least 76khp (laterIf you use two cooldowns (rampart with sheltron and rampart with TBN), the 100k hit will be reduced to 60.8k damage for a PLD, and 65k for a DRK. ... Sheltron require a mere 22s of sword oath to be avaliable, If encounters are designed around 30s or 1min between TB, that means the main scaling issue is : they aren't designed around having a short on demand cooldown, which is the point of TBN, and thus it's flawed like Rage of Halone was flawed for HW raid content.

Additionally, if we are looking at such extremes as taking a 100k tank buster and not using a tank ultimate then the pld Sheltron + sentinel will live with about 10k hp to spare, while dark knight shadow wall + tbn will die by about 4k, at current hp values. Doing some napkin math I estimate a pld could tank a tankbuster with these two mitigations and survive a tankbuster up to 120k unmitigated, dark could take up to 94k unmitigated. Shadow walls duration simply doesn't make sense with its duration and cooldown. I do realize this is slightly off topic but it's worth noting. The only time I think I would want to be able to do this would be the double attack in v4s if your cotank dies unexpectedly, but outside such extremes this is a very hypothetical conversation.


However, we don't need to go to such extremes for Sheltron to mitigate more than tbn, whenever a buster exceeds 84% of our max HP sheltron will mitigate more than tbn.

On the subject of multihit tankbusters this savage tier, the only one that comes to mind is Thunder in v4s, and that seems to break any TBN on the first hit meaning that sheltron and TBN are functioning relatively the same currently, if we get low power multihit tank busters TBN should be preferred over sheltron. However I think most people just attempt to tank ultimate through this entirely, but I could be wrong.

However, on the topic of closely spaced minibusters pld has a major advantage in v1s and v2s. In both turns we see two mini busters or frontal cleaves followed by a tank buster repeating at around 1 minute intervals. Each minibuster will break tbn, but the next hard hit come 5 to 6 seconds later so tbn is down, and with TBN's duration if we get to the point that it does not break then it will wear off before the next frontal cleave. Sheltron can be reapplied, provided you have nearly 100 gauge to start, and at one minute intervals you can rebuild your gauge enough to be able to repeat this every cycle.

[Catsby]

DRK is my favorite tank but Darkside and Dark Arts feel like unnecessary busywork. There's no reason not be be in Darkside and for some reason it doesn't get reapplied if you revive. Dark Arts doesn't make you more careful with your MP because half the skills it modifies are too situational to be spamming and/or a waste of the CD without it.