Dark Knight and stance dancing

[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!

[Archaell]

Don't forget that paladin has to pay for the stance change every single time.

Turn Sword Oath on - lost GCD.
Turn Shield Oath on - lost GCD.

While Grit goes off free of charge.

[Sarcatica]

Don't forget that paladin has to pay for the stance change every single time.

Turn Sword Oath on - lost GCD.
Turn Shield Oath on - lost GCD.

While Grit goes off free of charge.

The SwO/ShO interaction is way better. You would lose the whole combo benefit when you switched Oath, imagine if you had a GB queued and you were forced to switch to ShO. RIP DPS (if you just put switch off the said Oath, you didn't/don't get penalized tho). On-ing Grit still loses a GCD, but turning it off doesn't.

[Chronons]

Don't forget that paladin has to pay for the stance change every single time.

True, but PLD has an emnity modifier attached to its one of it dps combos (Savage Blade as apart of the Goring Blade combo). DRK does not. Meaning you should have to step in and out of ShO less. Also, the MP cost of ShO and SwO are far less impacting on PLD than they are with DRK's Grit. Combined I think it justifies the GCD cost of ShO and SwO.