How is this fair for DRK?

[Crater]

A variable duration of Nullification being up ranging from 2 to 14 seconds of total uptime,

You're way too hung up on duration. The correct metric here in a dungeon-pull context is damage prevented.

A shield provides 100% mitigation until it's broken. In a situation where incoming damage is constant and uniformly distributed, a shield that lasts 3 seconds is equivalent to 9.375 seconds of 32% mitigation (Holy Sheltron gives you 4 seconds of 32% mitigation), or 15 seconds of 20% mitigation (The final 4 seconds of Holy Sheltron). The damage prevented, despite an 8 second duration compared to 3, averages out to only 2.08 seconds of a shield.

At that point, if you're comparing the two skills directly, you're weighing up Holy Sheltron's 1000-potency heal and a "sometimes you'll have it" possibility of banking an extra 50 Oath Gauge versus TBN's 1/3rd greater direct damage reduction and a lower cooldown that (over time) trends toward getting 50% more casts than you get out of Sheltron.

There are other use cases where you'd start looking at different metrics (singletarget raid bosses have very different considerations than dungeon pulls, obviously, dungeon bosses are different from dungeon pulls in a way that disfavours TBN, etc) but in dungeon pulls TBN tends to be slightly ahead of Holy Sheltron most of the time, occasionally very slightly behind, and generally beats out Heart of Corundum in any realistic scenario. The idea that DPS is sacrificed to use extra casts of TBN is not relevant for dungeon pulls, for example, even though that may be a concern in a raid environment.

[Lammas]

2 TBN's a Minute. Realistically speaking, with respect to a Drk's rotation. A variable duration of Nullification being up ranging from 2 to 14 seconds of total uptime, that does not heal us, provides no mitigation effects, explicitly tied to a damage resource which is required to fuel it, that must be monitored and held in reserve at the cost of our damage resource...

Vs Bloodwhetting, Heart of Corundum, or Holy Shelltron that has a fixed duration that is actually up and running longer than TBN, costs absolutely nothing for Gunbreaker and Warrior to utilize and can also be used twice per minute, that mitigates damage and heals the user as well. ( And in Bloodwhetting's case, shields you as well )

Bluntly, yes, they are more powerful. And arguably far, far more useful. If a Dark Knight is holding back their mana to fuel TBN's constantly, they are sacrificing something they shouldn't have to.

Everything that Crater said there covers what I'm about to but I'll respond myself anyway. This is talking about dungeons. You're not losing anything by using TBN on cooldown in a pack of mobs. If you're using it once a minute in a dungeon mob pull I'm not envious of the healers that get you on DRK in their dungeons. No wonder people think DRK is weak in dungeons if people are sitting on it's most powerful tool.

Also the duration variance is completely irrelevant. What you're looking at is that it breaks at which point it's prevented 25 % of your max health of incoming damage. You could realistically get 3-4 uses where it breaks in any mob pull. With 3 you've effectively healed yourself for 75 or your heath. If you get a 4th then you're looking at a benedictions worth of shields. And this is something you can just keep doing on every single mob pull while combining it with your other mits.

[Dracosavarian]

Everything that Crater said there covers what I'm about to but I'll respond myself anyway. This is talking about dungeons. You're not losing anything by using TBN on cooldown in a pack of mobs. If you're using it once a minute in a dungeon mob pull I'm not envious of the healers that get you on DRK in their dungeons. No wonder people think DRK is weak in dungeons if people are sitting on it's most powerful tool.

Also the duration variance is completely irrelevant. What you're looking at is that it breaks at which point it's prevented 25 % of your max health of incoming damage. You could realistically get 3-4 uses where it breaks in any mob pull. With 3 you've effectively healed yourself for 75 or your heath. If you get a 4th then you're looking at a benedictions worth of shields. And this is something you can just keep doing on every single mob pull while combining it with your other mits.

The very fact that you feel the need to try and turn this around into a personal insult, completely invalidates what you are trying to espouse in my opinion, and shows that you are not interested in debate. Objectivity in this matter, is clearly not your goal. It amuses me that you feel the need to turn to that.

I've been around since 1.0, I know how to play Dark Knight, and use TBN in Dungeons every chance it is available I get. But to sit there and act like everything is perfectly fine with TBN, and Dark Knight in turn when so very many are voicing complaints, many healers among them, on such a vast scale flies in the face of the argument.

It frustrates me when folks espouse that Dark Knight is perfectly fine, and nothing is wrong with it. Nothing to see here. When clearly the kit is messy, janky and ill thought out, is not fun to play at all, and provides nowhere near the amount of sustain and durability that Paladin, Warrior, and Gunbreaker does. And the reason most always end up in turn using as their excuse as to why Dark Knight is fine, as we are seeing here, is TBN.

Were TBN so utterly, insanely powerful in comparison, then why can Dark Knight not endure the level of insane pulls in dungeons that Warrior, Gunbreaker, and Paladin can that we are seeing?

Greater Duration of Mitigation + Healing bestowed vs greater number of incoming damage over a period of time matters. Dark Knight Pales in comparison to the other jobs right now in sheer wall to wall pulls with no stop. To act otherwise is ignoring what we are seeing actively happen and also ignoring the voices of so many who are giving their valid complaints in the hopes of seeing Dark Knight corrected.

To you and Crater, sorry, I am going to agree to disagree. And I will remain fixed in my thoughts and opinion.

[Frostbytenn]

the fact many people arent talking about how unmend and unleash are spells instead of weaponskills is something impressive. this is horrid as basically the recast for both stays at 2.5 sec. which makes using bloodweapon impossible to get 5 uses out of. also blood weapon should have been changed to stacks like delirium. the blackest night should have gotten an upgrade instead of enhanced unmend. tbn should have gotten a 15% total damage mitigation AFTER the shield breaks so than it actually becomes great in dungeons and either a mana cost reduction or removal of the mana cost and increase the cd of it and increase duration of the shield as you must get total use of the shield to actually gain something of good value and sometimes 7 secs is just too little. the worse experience for drk is leveling up in dungeons everyone who has played drk all say this. the raids are outright great if not the best to many. you have damage in place of survivability and in dungeons you are causing the healer a heart attack everytime you do a pull and it lasts more than 60 seconds. this isnt always the case to be honest, but it happens all too often and i wouldnt be surprised if the tank that has died the most in dungs are drk while warriors are least likely to die.

why isnt dark mind a total dmg mitigation or vulne down like the warriors? it being a magic dmg only is bad. are there special cases for its use? kinda but in dungeons its basically meh. as many things are physical. and sometimes mixed damage and stacking two defensives is not worth math wise. you can still do it for less magic damage taken and dark mind is worthless so its not like you are losing much. also if oblation is going to exist lower its lvl requirement. drk gets one mitigation at lvl 38 shadow wall and the other at lvl 45 dark mind which is useless in most cases and the next defensive you get is tbn at lvl 70 that's 32 lvls of nothing but rampart, arms length and reprisal. put oblation somewhere earlier along with stalwart soul.

living dead oh boy how this skill pales in comparison to any invul. superbolide is better by miles. holmgang and bolide got buffed. in the same game where LD exists. LD makes the drk players dread in fear of if their healer noticed they used it and got the debuff. this skill shouldnt have such a punishing debuff how does it make any sense the undying move kills you anyways? it doesnt even hold the longest duration anymore. AND DOESNT LAST FOR 20 SECONDS. the first part of it is a buffer stage where you can be safe and than it becomes the no dying move after you take fatal damage and you still die after. if the healer doesnt have enough healing. which is less likely to happen cause if you used it than you they most likely have used much of their healing already (well most of the time at least).
this is just my thoughts of course, but i just feel like drk shouldnt be so painful in dungeons so it can have an above average raid and trial experience.

[Lyth]

Hm. Could damage prevented through percent damage reduction considered to be a form of healing?

The only reason why flat damage reduction gets equated to healing on these graphs is to give you some equivalent measure of a shield healer's performance. But while you can draw analogies between HP, healing, and mitigation and try to relate the three, the function of each one of these three things is distinct and there are circumstances where they should be treated differently.

The most obvious place where flat damage reduction and healing play out differently is if you're soloing something. If you have healing that can keep up with the incoming damage on average, then you can continue to fight indefinitely. You can't do the same with flat damage reduction unless you prevent all incoming damage indefinitely (i.e. you're permanently invincible), as your health will eventually chip down to zero. Likewise, if you have something that could instantly kill you in a single hit, healing doesn't help but flat damage reduction does.

If you want to compare like with like, then it should be to compare percent damage mitigation with flat damage mitigation. There are still some differences, of course (as the amount mitigated by %DR scales up with bigger hits), but it's a fairer comparison.

[Ariel_Valmont]

You could probably fix DRK's performance in dungeons just by putting CS/AD on a 30 sec CD instead of a 60 one.

Was responding to this sorry didn’t hit reply with quote.

[Elodie_Einsbern]

I think the issue that Lammas and Crater aren't considering is the spiky nature of damage in wall to wall pulls. They are looking at this over a duration of a pull and think its completely fine. But its something that DRK cant as easily address. This issue will be even more exacerbated when playing with a whm spamming Holy. As it will further align all the auto attacks to go off together. Honestly if Abyssal Drain was a 20-30 second cooldown, it would completely solve the issue. And It still wouldn't be as strong as Bloodwhetting. But it would allow you to directly and reliably deal with the waves of damage coming in. Thats why War is so damn strong as well, because it can setup to still handle itself between Bloodwhetting's. Drk cant handle itself between TBN's (I cant speak about the other tanks as I don't play them)

And I'm not saying they arent wrong about the math playing out that yes, over time TBN is a strong cooldown. Because it is strong over time, but that doesn't mean anything when you can fall over like a sack of potatoes between TBN usage. Because you get one Abyssal Drain per wall to wall pull, if you could get 2-3 in, survivability would increase tremendously. It still wont do anything to address the fact that Drk's "oh shit" button is still hot garbage, and will still be a major weakness compared to the other tanks for wall to wall pulls.

[NaidCaldera]

im doing the expert dungeons with wall2wall on drk and gnb and im doing just fine on both with minimum ilvl and without my healers using any hardcasts, there is no big difference in mitigation on big pulls, you can use TBN 3-4 times per pull without losing damage

the only time "sustain" even matters is when your healer dies on the boss and you want to cheese kill it, also sage and scholar cant heal LD, because when you are so low that you need to use it, the healer will have no instant CDs left anyway

[battleshadow66]

I'm sorry, but if certain peoples justification for the current state of DRK is "TBN is OP". Then we have some serious issues right now. The Job has been in a sorry state for a long time now, and people have to stop being in denial about it.

[Kalaam]

Even if TBN was a 300% Shield... it wouldn't make DRK ok.
The job, mechanically, is a mess. No amount of DPS will change that.