Quick DRK Questions

[ZDamned]

Your best bet unless your fighting Ravana Extreme specifically, (and even that is a toss up) is to go full strength in both accessories, and Bonus stats. Reason being is 3 fold.

1) You will hold enmity vastly easier. More damage, is more multiplication to your enmity. Grit = X2 for all sources, and Unmend/Unleash are X10 + Grit. So small gains in strength are invaluable for enmity.

2) You will self-heal double what you can in Vitality gear. Once you get enmity established, you can basically get away with the enmity combo once, and then Soul Eater until whatever you are fighting dies. You will see heals for over 900 leveling, and over 1000 in full Law gear. This helps with your lack of alternative mitigation, and overall less than amazing mitigation cool downs.

3) There is no encounter in the game currently that requires your usage of fending gear. Damage taken must always be healed regardless of what % of your life that damage is. AN extra 4000 HP as a cushion is only useful to a healer who is not paying attention, but you have cool downs for that.

Want a little more convincing about how useless extra HP is? Ask around your server to healers, what they think of healing warriors vs other tanks. Warriors "mitigation" stance is extra HP, and enhanced healing taken, but in general they all say warriors are harder to heal, even though it comes out to be the same number of cast to keep them alive as both Paladin and Dark Knight. "Feeling" like you are more sustainable doesn't actually mean much when everything dangerous in this game is 100% predictable, and telegraphed.

What about big AOE pulls? Again, you have cool downs for that. turn grit on, and cycle through the CD's. Your mitigation is identical to a Warrior's here, and your damage output during the pull puts Paladins to shame. The enemies will actually die before they get a chance to deal as much damage as a Paladin will end up taking in the same spot, because your adding at least 1000 DPS to an AOE pull against 6+ enemies.



Also! Remember. If asked, you can always swap out accessories, but there is no need for 17,000 HP. It only servers to cut your damage by 50%. (Were are in grit 650 DPS, I don't see why you would want to be less.)

[Ergumenus]

This is ffxiv dude. Tanks are just DPS classes with aggro draw modifiers slapped onto their abilities.

Nothing in this game is threatening enough to warrant caring about defensive stats. And the stuff that is can just be cheesed with things like holmgang/Hallowed Ground/Living dead.

Full strength. Keep your eye on those DPS parses.

[Seku]

This is ffxiv dude. Tanks are just DPS classes with aggro draw modifiers slapped onto their abilities. With the best defense armor in the game, best defense cool downs in the game, and best self-reliance hp regeneration in the game.

FTFY

To the OP. If you've got a good group you hang with, where you can play your job to your fullest or are up for making accessory melds with both STR and VIT. Go STR with your stat points.

If you're lacking a good group and are PUGing everything. Stick with Vit. You don't know your healer and more often than not will probably get one that can't deal with it (even though in theory, they should be). You then can get both slaying and fending accessories and go full on either one or mix and match until you get accessory melds for both STR and VIT.

[Litegrace]

Okay cool. I went Vit just because I was completely new to the class and it seemed my safest bet to start out with. I haven't had any issues holding enmity, but that could change in later content. The healing aspect does make sense though, as does the extra DPS/enmity generation.

So would you recommend Slaying gear instead of Fending then? The only thing I would worry about is having enough health to take some of the bigger hits, but if my health pool would still be large enough without Vit attributes or Fending gear, then I guess there's no need to use them.