Why Shirk?

[Felorr]

He's actually far more dangerous in the first phase with untelegraphed Assails hitting you for 30k+, but I'm in shield for a large portion of that phase so it doesn't matter.

Not telegraphed but 100% predictable. He always uses one right before/during his second melee (so just CD on the pull), and all the other times he does it a few globals after the knockback/line mechanic in P1.

[Alphras]

Shirk is not really about tank swaps (although it doesn't hurt), it is allowing the tanks to forgo the enmity combo and also Tank a lot of the time outside of tank stance without ever worrying about aggro.

If you provoke and instantly shirk it is basically an instant 25% enmity increase. Very strong in coordinated groups.

Also there is no real alternative if the fight doesn't need stun or silence.

[Deadeye]

The best part of Shirk is that you don't have to do enmity combo when you get the boss. You can just stay doing your normal DPS rotation because you already have enough enmity from the Main Tank.

[Ampheni]

Mostly for tank swaps, so tanks can maintain their dps combo or doesn't have to swap their stances to perform a tank swap safely. Or use it to kill a target party member that you don't like.

Your healers would not appreciate you taking the boss in sword oath though.

I wouldn't say that, I know some healers react kinda...rabidly when I took a boss using shield oath and they deemed it wasn't necessary. Depends on the heal.

[Sunako]

For me it sounds like the ability that allow you use dps stance like whole encounter without worrying about enmity.

[Dalmacus]

The thing about shirk is that both MT/ST needs to use it to have a DPS increase in fights. If only one person uses it, it kinda defeat the purpose as the other person will probably be doing their emnity combo when you shirk them.

IMO this ability is more for higher play style like savage content.

[ShariusTC]

i use it alot in laskmi farm to have 2nd highest enmity on the list while stay in DPS stand, provoke to have same enmity as MT and shirk 25% of this back to MT

[BluexBird]

You have five slots. Rampart is hands down the best ability, Provoke is a necessity, and Convalescence is just too good to pass off. So you're left with two slots and tasked with picking between Awareness, Reprisal, and... Shirk.

Between nullifying critical hits and making tank swaps easier, I'd say a 10% damage mitigation wins.

Now Awareness isn't actually a proper cooldown, unless you know beforehand you'll be hit with a crit, and that only applies in certain fights.

So I can understand why people might take Shirk over Awareness, but it is NOT better than anything else. Does it make swapping easier? Of course, but it is by no means needed to pull off a tank-swap successfully. Is it a requirement? Definitely not. But I can already see that's not going to stop certain tanks from rage-quitting parties the second they find out the other tank didn't bring Shirk. Like yeah, maybe it'll be better than Awareness THERE, but it's NOT something anyone should be whining about. -_-

[Marxam]

Now Awareness isn't actually a proper cooldown, unless you know beforehand you'll be hit with a crit, and that only applies in certain fights.

Well awareness is almost mandatory for WAR since Raw Intuition crits from everywhere except the front where you get 100% parry. I haven't dabbled in Shirk yet as the cd is too long and provoke + enmity combo finisher still works the best. Though I can see it's use, as a war tank I really only have one more spot to fill and that's for a stun.

[aleph_null]

It's not used to help with tank swaps, it's used to buy you more enmity lead before you need to use your aggro combo again. It will only be useful when you're min-maxing stuffs to boost your dps.