The Definitive Dark Knight Guide

[Dead-Child]

Mercy Stroke is generally prefered over Foresight. Foresight provides around 5% mitigation, mercy stroke is free dps.

Lmfao, yes, as a TANK let's toss away damage reduc. to become something (half-assed, mind you) we're not even intended to be. So much crap about dpsdpsdpsdps. You guys do understand when you load up in the duty finder it says tank right? Not half assed dps. Sure dps helps with threat, but isn't an "omfgggg must do dem deepz!" requirement. Build yourself to stay the hell alive and let the actual dps do their damn job. So many trashy tanks trying to dps and not focusing on survival. I honestly feel terrible for the healers that run with some (notice I said some, not all) of you. Lord. This isn't FF11. *glares at you wannabe DRK dpsers*

[Lyth]

Mercy Stroke is a tank ability, as is every DRK cross-class ability. In addition to DPS, it potentially brings with it a built-in self-heal when timed correctly. While I wouldn't give up Foresight to bring it along, I'm more than happy to discard Bloodbath to do so.

Surviving when playing as a tank class is the absolute bare minimum of what you're expected to do. You don't get a gold star for mitigating attacks with the correct amount of defensive cooldowns. Nobody will give you a standing ovation for understanding snap enmity generation. These are basic pass-fail checks for a tank. What separates a "good" performance from a mere "pass" is your ability to position smartly, and to maximise your dps while still competently performing the fundamental requirements of your role.

[Jpec07]

Wow, a thread that got necroposty'd twice.

Mercy Stroke is incredibly weak. It's only 200 potency, has a 90s recast, and can only be used when the enemy is below 20% HP.

Foresight is stronger, providing a good bit of reliable physical mitigation, which can be invaluable for tankbusters. I usually pair it with DA-DD when tanking trash or during a white-damage phase, which usually does a pretty good job of mitigating incoming damage.

Bloodbath is also stronger than Mercy Stroke because you can use it for the whole fight, with a very similar cooldown. It also provides more healing over time than Mercy Stroke, because the potency healed over 15s is 25% of what you put out (on a single target, that can mean 256-627 potency healed, depending on procs and oGCD cooldowns, while the number balloons as you get into multi-target situations). When compared to the possible 200 potency self-heal from Mercy Stroke, there is no question which one you should take.

EDIT:

Surviving when playing as a tank class is the absolute bare minimum of what you're expected to do. You don't get a gold star for mitigating attacks with the correct amount of defensive cooldowns. Nobody will give you a standing ovation for understanding snap enmity generation. These are basic pass-fail checks for a tank. What separates a "good" performance from a mere "pass" is your ability to position smartly, and to maximise your dps while still competently performing the fundamental requirements of your role.

Ah yes, the old, "good tanks focus on DPS" argument. While it is true that every Tank needs to be able to focus on their damage, being able to do that is secondary to winning an encounter (AS1-4 was unique). The best tanks are the ones who can adapt to any situation that's thrown at them, and who are best able to recognize and deal with mechanics as they encounter them. Progression raiding is about learning the fights and their mechanics more than anything else, and learning what cooldowns to use where to empower yourself to focus on other things.

When you're learning a fight? Focus first on mechanics and positioning, then on mitigation, and once you've got that down, THEN you can begin to figure out where you can push more DPS. A tank's main focus is holding hate and surviving--anything else is incidental.

[Deathgiver]

(on a single target, that can mean 256-627 potency healed, depending on procs and oGCD cooldowns, while the number balloons as you get into multi-target situations).

How does the number "balloon" in multi-target situations?

edit: just to clarify, I'm not arguing the effectiveness of BB vs MS stroke on single target. On a DRK doing 1200 dps they can get roughly the equivalent of a cure/physic/benefic back meaning the healer can get 1 more "free" dps cast in, which outweighs the 200 potency of mercy stroke.

[Jpec07]

How does the number "balloon" in multi-target situations?

edit: just to clarify, I'm not arguing the effectiveness of BB vs MS stroke on single target. On a DRK doing 1200 dps they can get roughly the equivalent of a cure/physic/benefic back meaning the healer can get 1 more "free" dps cast in, which outweighs the 200 potency of mercy stroke.

Assuming a DRK is facing 3 or more targets, their DPS starts to go up a lot, and Bloodbath goes from a guaranteed healing potency floor of 256 potency per use to 360 potency per use (assuming you have Blood Price available and don't use something that increases your Evasion chance). 4 targets goes to 480 potency, and it only gets higher as you have more enemies you can hit--and all this in addition to your autoattack.

[Deathgiver]

Assuming a DRK is facing 3 or more targets, their DPS starts to go up a lot, and Bloodbath goes from a guaranteed healing potency floor of 256 potency per use to 360 potency per use (assuming you have Blood Price available and don't use something that increases your Evasion chance). 4 targets goes to 480 potency, and it only gets higher as you have more enemies you can hit--and all this in addition to your autoattack.

All of drk's aoe skills are magical though, and don't heal when used with bloodbath.

[Launched]

When compared to the possible 200 potency self-heal from Mercy Stroke, there is no question which one you should take.

Yeah, obviously Mercy Stroke because it actually does damage.

Progression raiding is about learning the fights and their mechanics more than anything else, and learning what cooldowns to use where to empower yourself to focus on other things.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you haven't done much progression raiding, right? Tanks have the easiest job in raids. Tankbusters happen at the same time every time and they're extremely easy to get used to popping cooldowns (and most cooldowns are off gcd so you can't mess them up) . Enmity pretty much isn't a problem. Tanks should be trying to do lots of dps from the start, because there's not much else for us to do.

[Sarcatica]

Tanks have the easiest job in raids. Tankbusters happen at the same time every time and they're extremely easy to get used to popping cooldowns (and most cooldowns are off gcd so you can't mess them up) . Enmity pretty much isn't a problem. Tanks should be trying to do lots of dps from the start, because there's not much else for us to do.

Tank busters are only easy because you have guides all around or even clear videos to see, unlike world progressions. During progression it's better to just suck it up and be in tank stance while learning how to tank the fights and clearing. Unless if you are entirely sure about taking calculated risks, you are just being an idiot by blocking potentially clears that should happen. This excludes being in a team where your DPS is highly lacking thus needing that extra oomph from tanks/healer, which again shouldn't have happened in the first place.

[Deathgiver]

Yeah, obviously Mercy Stroke because it actually does damage.

That's looking at the skill inside a bubble of only the tanks dps. If you head on over to fflogs and look at the #1 drk for brute justice it's easy to see why. Brute justice offers almost ideal circumstances for using mercy stroke, with lots of different things to kill spaced out fairly regularly so you can use mercy stoke almost throughout the whole fight instead of the last 20%. The top drk used mercy stroke 6 times (the equivalent to spending over 7.5 minutes in last 20% over a 12 minute fight) for a total of about 6.5k damage. Had the drk used bloodbath off cd and been able to get the whm only 3 more stone III over 8 uses, due to mp efficiency and gcd usage, the damage return would have been higher.( stoneIII 3*2.4k =7.2k).

[Lyth]

Foresight is a solid defensive ability. It's become significantly more effective since the last expansion, and it supplements DRK quite well in the physical defense department. But you don't have to give up Foresight to get Mercy Stroke, so this isn't really an issue.

Bloodbath is a fantastic ability on WAR, and to a lesser extent, PLD. It has good synergy with potency-boosting offensive cooldowns such as Berserk/FoF. The fact that it's linked to physical damage lets WAR take advantage of it in multi-target situations, where it really shines. In addition, the trait doubles its duration from 15 s to 30 s.

DRK isn't really able to take advantage of that so well. Instead of popping skills like FoF or Berserk to boost potency, we drop Grit. Bloodbath doesn't interact with our magical based attacks, which make up a reasonable portion of our oGCD attacks and all of our multi-target attacks. It also doesn't interact with DoT ticks, which make up a much higher percentage of DRK dps than they do on WAR.

Lastly, remember that Bloodbath is tied to the amount of physical damage that you do in a 15 s period. Let's face it, if you're subscribing to the AFK-shieldwall tank mindset, you're probably not going to get a whole lot of a defensive advantage from this. Tanks who understand the patterns of incoming damage in a given fight well enough to maximize their dps are the ones who will get the maximum healing potency from this skill, and they're probably going to bring along Mercy Stroke because it's an extra oGCD (i.e. free potency).

Also, if it's worth anything, the DRK in this raid tier's set of world-first clears uses Mercy Stroke.

On a side-note: there's nothing that says that you should dps at the expense of survival or holding aggro. If generating enmity or mitigating attacks is challenging for you, then this must be your focus. But it's a bit like breathing. It's fundamental, but once you figure out how to do it automatically, then you get to move on to other matters.

You don't start a video game on Easy difficulty if you're already familiar with the gameplay. You start on Normal difficulty at the least.

It's never "How do I press activate this instantaneous oGCD defensive cooldown during the telegraphed 2 second tankbuster cast while staying in defensive stance for the entire fight and using my threat combo." It's "How do I use my defensive cooldowns to absorb all of the unmarked cleaves so that I can stay out of stance for as much of the fight as possible." On Tank jobs, the more skilled that your use of defensive abilities becomes, the better your offensive capability becomes. The two are intertwined.