It's about time Shield oath and Grit become Abilities instead of Spells. (off-GCD)

[Mahrze]

As it turns out, having both Grit and Darkside up is a 4% damage loss. Your base power is always 100% before buffs. After Darkside, it's 120% since 100+20%=120. Then, after applying Grit, you lose 20% of your new power, so it would be 120-20%=96.

Another thing to consider is that Dark Knight's enmity multipliers are much lower than the other tanks. You could argue that Darkside helps with this, but PLD has fight or flight and WAR has Storms eye, Unchained. It doesn't work out well for DRK at all when it comes to enmity. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/wiki/enmity

In general I wouldn't compare these quantities in this way. The reason for why not is that FoF can be used without tank stance, and it has more damage that way since it does not have a 15% penalty imposed on it. Likewise dark knight has a 20% damage buff that as Saeno said reduces the 20% penalty to only 4% penalty, I would consider that against doing 120% damage without tank stance (comparing .96 modifier to 1.2).

Unchained doesn't suffer from this because it is specifically designed to only cancel the tank stance penalties, it has no value when not in tank stance. However, you are still out the 5% damage buff of deliverance which is why I say nearly cancel the loss and not "free".

Ah, TIL. Thanks for the info. I did know about the enmity part. Wasn't acquainted with how instead of canceling out, DRKs buff/debuff was applied in separate steps. I know that Unchained is designed that way. Was trying (and being horribly wrong I guess) to point out that maybe SE interprets those abilities as equivalents. Even more so now with the zerk/IB changes.

But that is my (at this point: erroneous) interpretation.