The Definitive Dark Knight Guide

[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).