Issue with TBN

[Interovegas]

[Part 2/2]

Now : TBN with Rampart is even more effective than Heart of Stone with Rampart. And this disregards that you can get TBN to cast twice during Ramparts duration - although it is admittedly rare that you would ever need to cast TBN twice during Rampart.

"TBN is a dps loss" - assuming you properly use TBN and pop it each time (because if you are taking less than 25% of your maximum HP in 7s why do you even need major single target personal defensive) You are losing 0 dps. You spent 3k mana to get a shield and then cast a free EoS instead of directly casting EoS.

"You have to hold 3k MP" - Uhuh, ok. You spend upwards of a hundred thousand mana during a fight. Keep in mind you spend every 3k MP you generate in excess of the first 3000. Pretend for a second that you start with 0 mp in a fight. Yes, the first 3000 MP you generate has to be held back for TBN. But any time you use TBN properly you will get the free EoS for that 3000 mp spent. Any extra mana above that 3000 is freely spent on damage. So if you generate 102,000 mana during a fight you will be able to use 99,000 mana on EoS or TBN that generates an EoS. Worst case you have 3000 mana left over towards the end of the fight that you didn't spend (but actually you can just dump that mana when its clear the boss is going down meaning 0 damage lost).

Concessions:

Shelltron blocks 20% with the current best shields in SHB, which is superior to the 15% of Heart of Stone, but still worse than TBN for any amount of damage you would actually mitigate with a short cooldown defensive rather than an invulnerability. So TBN is superior to Shelltron and can be cast on other players, go figure.

DRK has weaker other abilities. Abyssal drain is pathetic compared to Clemency, Aurora and Equilibrium. Dark Mind is a strictly worse version of similar abilities (like Camouflauge and Thrill of Battle).

Warrior can pull off similar mitigation to the DRK by stacking the likes of vengeance or Nascent Flash with Thrill of Battle (or Equilibrium too for effective HP calculations). Of course the warrior is also a main tank so this makes sense. The caveat here is that warriors cannot use these kinds of mitigation as often.

Barring some sort of small balance tweaks in the future DRK will be outscaled in value by WAR. When critical values on gear increase over the remainder of the expansion WAR will probably do significantly more damage than DRK and become more useful by that point alone.

[Part 2/2]