[DRK] Wanna know why Unleashed & Abyssal Drain are both needed?

[Kleys]

Because while Abyssal Drain deal slightly more damages for a slightly higher mana cost...

...Unleashed:
- Doesn't consume your Dark Arts buff (that you'll most likely use for a Carve and Spit)
- Doesn't break your combos, and this is your only GCD having this property.

I've been wondering why people never mentioned that in any of these QQ-DRK-threads so I thought you guys just didn't know.
This is extremely helpful in A2S, where DRK is -spoiler alert- (once again since A1S) the best tank.

[SpookyGhost]

This is extremely helpful in A2S, where DRK is -spoiler alert- (once again since A1S) the best tank.

How do you figure that?

[Disc]

Depends on what you're looking for, but DRK offers some of the highest DPS a tank can achieve in A2S due to their abundance of AoE abilities. PLD is a much safer choice for Waves 7, 8, & 9 if your group prefers to alleviate pressure on healers.

[Ditto]

Depends on what you're looking for, but DRK offers some of the highest DPS a tank can achieve in A2S due to their abundance of AoE abilities. PLD is a much safer choice for Waves 7, 8, & 9 if your group prefers to alleviate pressure on healers.

Warriors do more AOE damage than Drk's, at no cost.

You try to capitalize on your AOE damage as a Drk and you'll have no MP left for the next pull and wont be able to control AOE enmity anymore. Thats sort of.. worse than doing mediocre at best AOE damage.

[Lorielle]

Much prefer having PLD over DRK for AS2(Assuming your OT is WAR anyway, normally is). For the mentioned already, just to help alleviate some pressure for the healers. But it more comes into play on Wave 9. PLD can HG at a certain point and I'd not have to worry about healing them and focus the Co-Tank versus 1 LD where it will more than likely cost me a Benediction after getting the most out of its function. Then there's just Paladin's overall mitigation.

[Kleys]

Warriors do more AOE damage than Drk's, at no cost.

You try to capitalize on your AOE damage as a Drk and you'll have no MP left for the next pull and wont be able to control AOE enmity anymore. Thats sort of.. worse than doing mediocre at best AOE damage.

Could you... learn to play before spouting such nonsense?

I'm really getting tired of all this bullshitting from DRKs that can't even manage their MP/TP.

DRK isn't even that hard to play.

And yeah, 1020 DPS as a DRK in A2S for my very first down, having done a lot of mistakes due to pressure and yolo'd last wave. I've yet to see a WAR doing more than this, while I could've gone for 1050 (without any DRG or NIN in party) if not more.

[Phoenicia]

And yeah, 1020 DPS as a DRK in A2S for my very first down, having done a lot of mistakes due to pressure and yolo'd last wave. I've yet to see a WAR doing more than this, while I could've gone for 1050 (without any DRG or NIN in party) if not more.

Congratulations, you used an ilv 200 weapon to pull 30 DPS lower than the WAR in my previous FC who used an ilv 190 weapon: Video here. I skipped to the end of the fight so you can see the parse.

It's a first kill video and neither of the WARs was "trying" to max DPS.

[LordHousewife]

Because while Abyssal Drain deal slightly more damages for a slightly higher mana cost...

...Unleashed:
- Doesn't consume your Dark Arts buff (that you'll most likely use for a Carve and Spit)
- Doesn't break your combos, and this is your only GCD having this property.

I've been wondering why people never mentioned that in any of these QQ-DRK-threads so I thought you guys just didn't know.
This is extremely helpful in A2S, where DRK is -spoiler alert- (once again since A1S) the best tank.

DRK is the worst tank in A2S since almost all of their abilities that you would use while regularly AoE tanking are rendered useless. I am not sure where you're getting that but yeah you're wrong. I'd honestly much rather be a WAR or a PLD in A2S than DRK, which incidentally is why I am leveling WAR atm and why none of the top progression groups use DRK in A2S. The reason why it is used so often in A1S is due to the magical tank buster that DRK can effortlessly mitigate with DA Dark Mind + Shadowskin stacked with Delirium 100% of the time, guaranteed. You could apply the same logic to any of the other Dark Arts skills and claim that they need an equivalent in order to not consume the Dark Arts buff (which is stupid because you should plan around Abyssal Drain, knowing that it consumes Dark Arts. Both skills literally fulfill the same job and only one of them is needed. Saying that one consumes DA and the other doesn't is a flawed argument because there are 6 other Dark Arts skills that don't match that logic at all. That's like saying we should have another version of Powerslash in case I don't want to use Dark Arts on it (which believe me I don't want to, therefore I don't use it).

[Kleys]

Congratulations, you used an ilv 200 weapon to pull 30 DPS lower than the WAR in my previous FC who used an ilv 190 weapon: Video here. I skipped to the end of the fight so you can see the parse.

It's a first kill video and neither of the WARs was "trying" to max DPS.

Please. You don't pull out 1000+ DPS as a tank without trying to max out your DPS. He simply failed at maxing his DPS since it's a "first kill", which is my case and that's why I claim that I could've done more (even more than 1050 now that I think about it, 7% crit is really bad luck), but well, considering how low your healers' DPS is, I don't think it's worth it to push tank's DPS too far. Tank DPS is nice but if you're just pushing your DPS by sacrifying twice more DPS from healers, it's not worth it at all. My healers are just casual players without any 2.0 raid experience, yet 327 DPS from them against 240 from your healers. I think you got my point.
(I've seen healers doing more than 450 DPS with a WAR doing 1000 DPS, so... do the maths)


@LordHousewife,
Most servers first teams and even the world first party were using a PLD/WAR setup in A1S. But, PLD is extremely bad in A1S, while DRK is amazing. So, why were they using this setup? It's simple: they were too busy competiting for world/server first instead of trying to figure out whether or not new jobs are balanced enough to be played in savage. (*cough* AST *cough*)
They didn't bring DRK in A2S for this exact same reason. And also because PLD/WAR is perfectly fine in A2S. Not to mention that A2S isn't harder than A1S.
But as you might've been aware of, A3S is harder than A1S/A2S, therefore the world had time to investigate those new jobs, and guess what? World 1st & 2nd A3S teams both used a DRK/WAR setup (and one of them even used a MCH! *cough* still no AST *cough*)
So please, don't bring me this kind of argument. People just didn't know how to play DRK until now, and, hmm, well, most of them still don't know.

I've highlighted in red why Unleashed is good. Not consuming a DA is a thing, but my main point was that it doesn't break any combos, which allowed me to continue my combos from the last cleared wave on another mob of the next wave, thx to Unleashed, which is pretty much the same for WAR and their Steel Cyclone.
This, plus the fact of having a self-targeted Enmity AoE AND a ranged-targeted Enmity AoE being really helpful in A2S, led me to create this thread, because I couldn't have done things that easily if I had only one of those skills, so I believe they're both needed.

Also, it is very rare but WARs sometimes have to use Flash, just as rare as DRK sometimes have to use Unleashed, but since Unleashed is simply much better than Flash, DRK don't have to bother picking Flash in their cross-class skills, so why would you want to remove it? If you have a decent tanking experience, you should be aware of the fact that a ranged-targeted AoE isn't enough, neither is a self-targeted AoE. So what's so wrong with having a GOOD self-targeted AoE? Shall we remove WAR's Steel Cyclone?

[Phoenicia]

Snip.

I'm not arguing over petty things though. The Pizwah wasn't paying attention to his DPS and he still managed to outDPS you, with a lower ilv weapon no less, when you were bragging about DRK being better than WAR... . That was what I was trying to point out.

Also you claim people still don't know how to play DRK, but DRK is really simple, it's a reskinned PLD with the same CD structure as PLD (1 CD with 90s and 1 with 180s and 1 uber long bad-version-of-I-won't-die CD + other CDs to cover gaps). DRK micromanagement of MP and oGCDs are mainly DPS things that don't contribute much for defense and there is no micromanagement mitigation (Like WAR's wrath and IB for example). Please let's stop pretending any of the tanks is "too hard" to play and people can't learn to play them. Hell it took me 30 minutes to read through DRK skills and understand that it's a PLD in a dark spiky suit playing pretend-WAR.

DRK is the worst tank in A2S because, out of the three tanks, it has the worst mitigation options while not bringing that much in terms of DPS compared to WAR (who has far superior mitigation options in this fight). PLD is king in that fight because of how well it mitigates damage in there and its ability to use HG on the toughest waves.

Now on topic, Unleash is useful, Abyssal Drain is only a DPS increase if MP is not an issue (and in A2S it is). But there is almost no point in having both.

Yes, every tank class has 2 AoE skills that generated ~600 potency enmity. PLD with Flash (600 potency) and CoS (250 x3), WAR with Overpower (120 x5) and SC (200 x3.5), and DRK with Abyssal Drain (120 x5) and Unleash (100 x6). If you look at each class you see that their 2 skills work differently. PLD has a no damage MP PBAoE and a DoT PBAoE on a CD. WAR has a cone AoE that costs TP and a PBAoE that costs Infuriated. But AD and Unleash just don't function very differently from one another and that's why they feel redundant. Both use the same resource, both generate exactly the same enmity. One of them having an added effect at the cost of triple the MP (DA+AD is almost triple the MP of 1 AD) just doesn't cut it.

IMO, remove Unleash, give Abyssal Drain the ability to not break combos and add enmity to Salted Earth and give DRK 1 more CD or something in place of Unleash. Or make Abyssal Drain ALWAYS "Drain" 50% or even 25% of its damage and have DA up that to 100%.