Dark Knight Megathread

[Shurrikhan]

While TBN does negate as much if not more damage overall compared to alternatives, the point is for the tank to slow down their damage intake enough for them to be healed over the course of the encounter, not to stop it all for 3 sec so that I have to burst heal them for the remainder.[/SIZE]

No. If it absorbs more damage, you have to heal less damage. Period.

The only time what you're talking about here would ever trump total mitigation is if you had to maximally GCD every heal and overheal in any GCD would put you in such a deficit that they would inevitably die. That just does not happen unless

It is not hard to heal a competent DRK. You just don't overheal them, and don't mistake TBN for Hallowed Ground. That's it. That's the difference. And if it breaks in "a single GCD", as you say, well, then it at most delays your (Eukrasian) Diagnosis spam by 1.5 seconds.

On my DRK, I almost never get GCD heals save for a EukDiagnosis pre-pull (maybe another when my Sage is repositioning if they've run out of Addersting), and I stay up just fine. On my alt, I rarely do more than pre-pull GCDs on my DRKs, and most stay up just fine. If I go with a friend, it is entirely just pre-pull shields, Kardia, and oGCDs.

Nobody's saying it's an issue in those scenarios. The argument here is more about its use in AoE scenarios.

The number of sources of damage is irrelevant to TBN's performance. However, the rate of incoming damage typical and the granularity of intervals of attack typical to dungeon trash pulls cause TBN to do especially well in those exact situations.

At risk of, par for the course, conflating correlation with causation, TBN has no issue with AoE scenarios.

You are clearly determined to defend this hill. And that’s fine. Respectfully, I can’t agree with you. Been tanking in this game as my main since 1.0 far too long.

That the only thing that matters about mitigation is how much, in practice, it mitigates is not some "hill". Your instance that the effect taking place over a greater amount of time or via a scalar, regardless of actual total throughput, on the other hand...

Imagine, for instance, that you have the option between a 1000-potency oGCD on a 2-minute cooldown or a 15-second 20% damage buff over which the time the most potency you can fit in is 4850. The latter isn't just inherently better. Nor would it be inherently more powerful for a 1000-potency heal to be done as a HoT than as a single, direct heal. The span is irrelevant. All that matters is how much effective throughput, be that damage, healing, mitigation, or healing+mitigation, that the tool has.

Percentile mitigation over a duration does not "always win out" over a shield. One defensive tool surpasses another only when its combined mitigation and healing exceeds that of another. That is it. And TBN does not "always", let alone all that often, lose out in that comparison, despite not even having a trait.

Of course, if we wanted to actually stop conflating and give complaints about TBN any sort of real relevance, we'd compare TBN against Raw Intuition, Shelltron, and Heart of Stone, and then Oblation against what's added by their respective traits. Does Oblation then badly take the loss in each of those comparisons? Yes. But that's the level 82 additions, not TBN.