Dark Knight and stance dancing

[alimdia]

Each class stance swapping has its benefits and downsides. Therefore they are about as balanced as they can be. Maybe one class needs a bigger penalty in tank stance, and one class lower.
But removing shield oath, sword oath, grit from the GCD is such a huge buff that it would make PLD and DRK OP.
They would gain all the benefits of the tank stance instantly, at negligible cost (see what I did there?)

[KorenA]

I find stance dancing on drk rather....clunky and sometimes I hate it with mp consumption. After playing pld for a bit I think the stance dancing for pld is even better just because of less mp, other than that it's still clunky. So imo, I'd prefer less mp and/or ogcd, but even if they made it a lot less mp, I'd be happy.

[Sarcatica]

I find stance dancing on drk rather....clunky and sometimes I hate it with mp consumption. After playing pld for a bit I think the stance dancing for pld is even better just because of less mp, other than that it's still clunky. So imo, I'd prefer less mp and/or ogcd, but even if they made it a lot less mp, I'd be happy.

This is exactly what is happening for every single DRK main, clunky is one thing since both DRK/PLD are delayed by 1 GCD (which is actually not that bad nowadays) but if you have been seeing the first few pages, you should understand that Grit/Shield Oath actually do something right off the bat unlike Defiance where you are reliant on healer and Inner Beast to make the cut. So if Grit/Shield Oath are both oGCD like Defiance, you will have the case where experienced tanks will very much bridge the gap against WAR (WAR has the worse potency per second for all the 3 combos and the huge gap atm is Fell Cleaves) and possibly even doing more as a pseudo tank/dps where WAR will have to rely so much more on healers to top up versus DRK/PLD doing better job at tanking and better ability to do DPS at the same time.

[NellMoshroca]

Okay, so from reading this thread it seems DRKs shouldn't be stance dancing a lot with Grit. So my question as a noob tank and DRK is when exactly should we be enabling/disabling Grit?

[Drkdays]

At lower levels it's recommended that you always rock grit accompanied by darkness if you're in a dungeon with only a few exceptions. If you're well geared with a team you feel you can trust you can go without grit for small pulls. On large group (4 or more) you should keep grit on because you run the risk of getting beat down or losing hate on enemies you're not specifically focused on unless you unleash spam. Also you can drop grit for boss fights since your tanking combo should never fail to hold individual hate plus the healer can usually be assured that you as tank will take the most damage making healing you a simple task against basically one enemy.

[NellMoshroca]

I've already been max level for a while, so I was wondering for the more difficult end game content. I'm still having problems with figuring out optimum Grit usage and not losing all my MP when in Grit.

[Drkdays]

It's possible to go without grit on raid bosses as well, though again there is that issue of trust. Also you can drop grit when off tanking and use blood weapon, but you need to plan ahead so that you have enough mana and time to reactivate it before you tank swap if you need to. Never try tank swapping without grit, you won't be able to hold agro, but you can drop it once you've secured agro if you trust your healers and your gear.

[Kotemon]

Don't forget to turn blood weapon on when you drop grit. For me if Dark is tanking or swap tanking, Grit stays on. If its just going to DD then it can be turned off. If its something like the first phase for Calca and Brina you can leave it off and turn it on before they combine. Otherwise it's not a good idea to repeatedly turn it on and off for short spans at a time. I can think of one robot in Midas where you could leave it off if your not the main tank because there is no need to swap tanks on it. Only doing math on the randomly targeted player.


Also Dark has that red aura that gives a +15% damage increase so it roughly reduces the -20% from grit to about -5%. Pld doesn't have that and War has Unchained and a bunch of other gimmicks tied to swapping. That's why folks say Dark is second for damage among the tanks. Pld has the highest damage mitigation and War has the highest damage output, Dark has the longest uptime on TP and enmity generation (doesn't rely on hate combo the whole fight). The cons are Pld has to micro manage its CD's, War has to compensate with a higher HP threshold and more TP management on hoard control. Dark has to worry about maintaining MP levels instead of TP since its the source for most of their threat generation.

If anything its knowing when to drop Dark Side between boss phases is more important than turning Grit on and off.

[ADVSS]

YEAH I totally agree with that boss jumps wreck your mp if theyre long enough it might even be better to drop DS to let it bump up a few before going back to DS

[Awful]

Anytime you're not attacking/being attacked you should drop DS if the cost out weighs the downtime. Midas 4 is a good example as when he's running around with the droids that's like almost a minute of downtime or Ravana right before he does bloody fuller, When Seph Ex does his ultimate. Be a conservative Drk and save your MP today!