Am I missing something about DRK?

[spelley]

For trash packs, at 54 finding this to work pretty well:
(Plunge+Salted Earth where I'm putting them) -> Unleash (Dark Dance+Blood Price) -> Unleash (Dark Arts+Dark Passenger)

Then it depends on size of pack. Keep spamming Unleash until Blood Price drops, on big packs keep spamming or start single target rotation on 3 or less. Generally turn off Dark side about 50% of way through last mob to start ticking up between camps.

[pandabearcat]

When I mentioned 4-5 times at least, and 6-8 times if tanking a trash pack, that's with Darkside on. I never turn Darkside off.

Where are you getting the mana for that?

Lets assume no blood price for now, and full grit/darkside.

in 60 seconds you get 8 full syphon combos.

Like people have previously said, you use 3 syphons for darkside.

You use 2 syphons to pay for dark passenger, which is more efficient than darkside.

This ends up with 3 syphons remaining. Of course you are still starting with a full mana pool, so in shorter fights you can use more, but even with blood price, starting from 0 or near 0 mp, you will only get 2 dark arts a minute, MAYBE 3.

And then at 60, I'm assuming you use 1 of those dark arts for carve.

So then you have 1-2 left. If you have to use any of those for a defensive, you're left with 0 or 1 DA a minute for souleater.

EDIT: also I'm confused on how salted earth works. Is it a one time hit? Is it a dot like shadowflare? Its confusing to me.

[SpecialKK]

Salted Earth is a dot. Abyssal drain and Unleash are not.

[saber_alter]

-snip-

salted earth is a DoT like shadowflare.

MP management is trivial at best. numbers are slightly off though. dark arts normally costs 2 syphon strikes, and dark passenger costs 1. (i believe it is at least, i get around 884 mp per a syphon, and dark passenger costs 884 from what i remember. extra syphons are probably just to offset cost of Darkside)

more often then not, you won't be using DA+DP against bosses at least. normal mobs depending how much damage you take (even then a trashpull more than enough offsets that with blood price, especially at 4+ mobs).

[Freyyy]

stuff

Your calculations are made like if you were trying to stay at 100% mana. That's not your goal. Spend your mana. And for instance, EVERY fights in the game has adds to use Sole Survivor on, and phases where you don't need Grit so you can abuse Blood Weapon.

[JayCommon]

snip

It feels like you're playing it wrong, because quite frankly, you are. Most of us do feel like we need a small boost in defensive capabilities. Some DRK's have outlined it extremely well in other threads, our CD's just don't match what PLD/WAR has. And even with the generous re-application time of Dark Mind in Magic-intensive fights...hardly any auto-attacks or cleaves in this game are magical based. We get hit hard by those, regardless of mitigation.

But the fact that you can't see the huge damage a DRK can bring just means you have to be doing something wrong.

Firstly, there is absolutely no reason to ever drop or be "out of" Darkside. Darkside is your lifeline. Yes it drains mana, but it is very easy to keep up. Also, don't ever use Dark Passenger unless you are in an AoE situation with 3 or more mobs. The mana consumption is too high to warrant using it on 2 or fewer mobs. And Blind status won't affect 99% of every boss you will ever face in this game, so this is just a waste of MP.

Starting a raid boss with full mana you want to: Combo to a Dark Arts Power Slash (1x-2x). Only do this twice if your DPS are really good. After that, you honestly shouldn't need to use it again unless your being trolled by a ninja or have a laggy healer who just decided to Divine Seal a Medica 2 or some crazy shit. You can break into Delirium spam, but you want to Dark Arts Souleater and Carve & Spit on CD. You should be hovering around 800-1500 MP point at all times that Blood Price isn't up. Time Blood Price to go off when you are receiving the most amount of hits. Increased damage does not increase MP refresh, but multiple hits do. Try getting real low on MP in Fractal Continuum first boss and pop Blood Price right before the double Rapid Sever. You will be from 0-full MP after it's done, in about 6 seconds. Blood Price needs to be used every single time its up, but smartly. (don't pop Blood Price right before a boss jump or a Ravana stance charge or something) You honestly should not have as mana problems as you claim if your using your arsenal properly. I'm not keeping exact count or anything, but I am absolutely able to use more than 1 Dark Arts per minute.

Don't use Soul Devourer specifically for HP heal. You have healers. You need to use Soul Devourer specifically in times of low mana, when Blood Price still has a considerable amount of time to re-pop and when you can obviously plant it on something that will die in 15 seconds. The HP healed is miniscule, the MP refreshed is significant. I want to say its about 1700 MP? It's enough to get another Dark Arts in for sure.

Mana upkeep is perfectly fine without Blood Weapon. You don't need to Dark Arts everything, but you don't need to be sitting at full MP either. You need to find a comfortable balance for you when you're playing. I'm comfortable with anything I can do being sub-1k mana. By then I will have more than enough enmity on the boss to not worry about losing it, and I can juggle between combo'ing Dark Arts and without until I have enough to pop Dark Arts again to infuse my next move.

Your usage sounds wrong. It does not take 5 full GCD rotations to get back enough mana for a Dark Arts, and besides you have Blood Price when MT and Blood Weapon when OT. Again, mana is NOT the problem DRKs have. You need to re-evaluate your own usage of the skills you have at your disposal, and figure out what you are doing inefficiently, because it isn't a core problem of the job itself.

I'm not sure what your statement about being squishy compared to a PLD is supposed to mean. Yes, everyone in the game is squishy compared to a PLD. They are king of defense. DRKs can hold their own just fine as long as the player understands the fight and what they need to prep incoming damage with. DRK MT DPS is literally hundreds of points above PLD. So we do have one slight advantage. If we had some type of self-regen on TP we would absolutely do more damage than a PLD OT, but we wouldn't bring the type of utility they can. That just depends on how competent your team is and how comfortable they are to the fight your up against.

Bottom line - you are going to take more damage than your PLD, that's inevitable. However if you are seeing such a glaring difference between the DPS output of those two tanks then you are doing something wrong. I would be i184 if I didn't use crafted accs with huge melds. But I do, so I'm i173. But with Slaying accs melded into VIT and with party buff I have 890 strength and 865 VIT. You can duplicate my STR numbers with i170 STR accs if you want to test yourself. I parsed for 4min last night on off-tank (so no Grit). I had the party buff upping my base stats, but no one attacked the dummy except for me and I only had my ninja give me 1 goad to prolong my sustain. I held 800DPS for 4min and I was able to Dark Arts every single combo because Blood Weapon. This was without having adds to blow Soul Survivor on, or MTing for the free Blood Price MP.

TP is DRK issue, not MP. Don't use it so sparingly. Enhance and blast your enemies!!

Hope any of this helped ^^

[pandabearcat]

Not really here to argue about the squishiness, but my point is just baseline sitting there I'm getting hit for more, and souleater health drain doesn't cover for that.

Since DRK are identical (and inferior) in every way to PLD defensive cd's, I'm wondering why at least the baseline defensiveness doesn't cover for that.

WAR gets similar self healing to DRK AND on top of that gets a 10% parry, roughly equal to base block I assume. I always thought cooldowns aside, all tanks should be taking roughly the same amount of autoattack damage.

DRK get none of that it seems, as well as a defensive cd literally worse than Keen flurry (and definitely worse than bastion), able to be buffed to...really do barely anything else.

The only thing DRK have going for them is Dark Mind...which I mean could be an advantage, but just sitting there getting hit they're going to lose out to PLD and WAR, and as far as I can tell WAR does more dps than DRK so why should I bring a DRK instead? Aside from purely magic fights w/o a MNK. And even then a WAR's pure 10% damage reduction is better, if you don't have one already.

It takes me 5 rotations to do another DA because I am doing other stuff. I really don't see the damage output from DRK being super high either, and frankly as long as I am hitting all my buttons and not capping on mana there really isn't any playstyle "skill" involved here either - none of the tank classes have a complicated dps rotation.

AoE rotation is obviously better than PLD, so I'm happy there. I guess I was just sort of expecting more, and a quicker regenning mana pool to use for fun things. Without blood weapon it really feels extremely slow.

OT i am sure they can do fine (until they run out of TP), but just MTing there since I likely will be, it just seems worse than PLD.

[Yorumi]

Not really here to argue about the squishiness, but my point is just baseline sitting there I'm getting hit for more, and souleater health drain doesn't cover for that.

Are you sure you're geared the same? Drk wears the same armor as pld, so has the same def/mdef, grit = shield oath, the only real difference is RoH's str down but that would be easily made up for by SE. As far as cooldowns, shadowskin = rampart, dark dance is half the mitigation of bulwark but has 1/3 the cooldown. Shadow wall is 10% less than sentinel. Both have the same foresight and bloodbath.

[Freyyy]

^ pretty much this, tho I wouldn't consider Dark Dance being half Bulwark since you reduce more damage by blocking than parrying. Add that when the enemy is doing mostly magic damage you also get Dark Mind which is really powerful.

[Kaedan]

Where are you getting the mana for that?

Lets assume no blood price for now, and full grit/darkside.

in 60 seconds you get 8 full syphon combos.

Like people have previously said, you use 3 syphons for darkside.

You use 2 syphons to pay for dark passenger, which is more efficient than darkside.

This ends up with 3 syphons remaining. Of course you are still starting with a full mana pool, so in shorter fights you can use more, but even with blood price, starting from 0 or near 0 mp, you will only get 2 dark arts a minute, MAYBE 3.

And then at 60, I'm assuming you use 1 of those dark arts for carve.

So then you have 1-2 left. If you have to use any of those for a defensive, you're left with 0 or 1 DA a minute for souleater.

EDIT: also I'm confused on how salted earth works. Is it a one time hit? Is it a dot like shadowflare? Its confusing to me.

Here's an example minute:

HS > Spin > DA+PS. Pop BP. HS (DA+C&S) > Syphon > SE. Salted somewhere in there. Scourge. HS > Syphon > SE. HS > DA+Syphon > SE (Better to activate DA before the Syphon generally). HS > Syphon > SE. HS > DA+Syphon > SE. Scourge. HS > Syphon > SE.

And that gives 5 seconds to spare, I believe. That's 4 DA in there, with your MP nearly full still. I could still use it at least 2 more times without being in danger of running low on MP. And you've probably noticed I don't have Delirium in there. That's because it's only 20 Potency higher than SE and the extra HP, even without DA, is more beneficial when MTing, IMO. If there's no MNK, I'll mix a DE in there.

You don't have to keep your MP at full.