Why does DRK is considered weak and bad?

[Chrono_Rising]

Most of the complaints you see are directed at the raid scene, not the dungeon scene. In dungeons, at 70, the tanks are more level since dark has pretty good AOE abilities. So the picture, as others have noted before me, is incomplete, and if at 70 you mainly do dungeons, not extreme primals and savage, then you will probably find yourself fairly satisfied with Dark Knight.

The problems are more apparent when leveling and in raid. There are a huge number of posts about dark knight damage and utility floating around, these are the major sources of complaints, and there is a reddit post by a fairly well know raider addressing this issue in a clean way here (it is a response to the question): https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ge_discussion/

As far as the leveling experience, many have noted that leveling dark knight feels squishier than leveling paladin or warrior. I cannot speak to the pre-60 content, as I was level 60 on everything before Stormblood, but from 60 on you are missing an eHP cooldown (or several) or passive abilities until you hit 70.

Pre-70:
Dark Knight: Shadow Wall and Dark Mind
Paladin: Sentinel, Bulwark, Sheltron, Passive Blocking
Warrior: Vegeance, Raw Intuition, Thrill of Battle, Inner Beast, passive parrying

As you can see Dark Knight is missing a few defensive abilities compared to the other two tanks, and half of them only work on one type of damage. Shadow Wall also has the benefit of being the worst of the three big unique cooldowns, being a minute longer cooldown compared to vengeance and mitigating 10% less than Sentinel. Of course, leveling dungeons aren't made to be optimized to the degree that this is the difference between life and death, but it does make things more difficult for no apparent reason.