Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

I'll set you up the bomb here, laddy.

Change, "Situate mobs best you can for parrying." to, "Situate mobs as best you can for tightly bound AOEs(Rockbreaker, Abyssal Drain, etc).

Change keep Blood Price up to, "Activate Blood Price as the pull is coming to a stop, spam Abyssal Drain for damage and hate if you packed them tightly enough, if not, Unleash. DA, Dark Passenger, or at the very least, Dark Passenger every time it's up."

Addendum: If you have a Holy happy WHM, forego activating Blood Price until the monsters achieve stun immunity(3rd Holy).

Addendum 2: When you have good enough gear relative to your DPS/healer, you may pull without Grit entirely, unless your healer is new/bad, or unless you intend to do a pull with over 9 monsters.

Lastly, for trash and for trash only, once your Blood Price has ticked down to ~2 seconds, if the monsters are still 50%+ on average, go ahead and DA Dark Dance. Try to line it up with a DA Dark Passenger for an insane evasion rate. Alternatively, if Blood Price is still down for a bit going into another pull, do this at the start after hate is established. It is your most powerful cooldown for trash pulls. But only for trash pulls.

MP recovering Carve and Spit is fine for big pulls, especially if you misjudge monster life expectancy/mistime or misuse blood price.

Oh and, make sure to use Sole Survivor on a soon to die mob if you need the MP.

Boss: Start in Grit for hate. Drop grit once hate is established. Do not mindlessly rotate through cooldowns one after the other, especially in newer dungeons or any dungeon where the boss possesses a tank buster.

Never Dark Arts, Dark Dance on a Boss, bosses of current level generally have such high accuracy that you cannot improve your evasion rate against them.

Even if the boss is not magical, you should use Delirium combo when you need MP, since it is your strongest non-DA combo. Do hate combo as necessary, don't wait to lose hate. If your DPS are really good, you'll be stuck doing hate combo a lot, but even if you get stuck doing this, it's still better overall damage, due to not being in Grit.

Anyway, to answer your question, your understanding of the job is in line with the average tank. Just polish it up and practice, and you'll be above average soon enough.

AoE Pulls: If you have unlimited MP going(Ala Blood Price) Abyssal Drain is better damage wise. Only use in conjunction with DA during this or if healer is having trouble keeping you up during the pull. Depending on MP/mob hp I might switch to unleash to conserve a tiny bit of mp(what is it like... 50?)

I'm more likely to, if there's a straggler, see if I can pull my group closer to it or if they're just close enough to my group, just switch my Abyssal target to that mob to try to keep my AoE damage going. This is of course assuming I'm not moving everything too much and screwing over the DPS/Healer.

Once I either get dangerously close to running out of mp or the mob total drops below 3 I will switch to single target. I'll usually stay in Grit just to let the healer keep dpsing but I wouldn't say dropping grit is bad. This is usually the time I will look at getting my MP back up for the next pull. Having less than half mp when you start a new pull can be annoying as all hell.


Boss:
Depending on gear, usually 2 is just fine. I might do my first delirium combo in Grit as well as an extra buffer if I'm still worried.

This is where I would definitely ask Ina/Vyre:
I open with a DA - Carve and Spit almost immediately.
2 Reasons: 1) Extra Starting Hate
2) Because of how much long you need to initially stay in Grit you are potentially losing a use of it if you try to save it until you drop grip, which overall would still be a DPS loss.

This thinking also applies to Passenger, use it as soon as possible in your opener so that you don't lose extra casts trying to save it.

Another thing for passenger, on anything less than 2-3 mobs I do not DA it. I believe it is too much of a waste of MP and not enough of a boost in DPS to bother without multiple mobs being hit.

I also tend not to pair Dark Dance with DA either, unless I'm using it for another AoE pull CD. The Evasion bonus just doesn't seem worth the MP. I do almost always pair Dark Dance with Awareness, since crits bypass Parry. this means I tend to pair Foresight with Convelsance unless I know I need Convelsance later on in a fight for something (Walking dead if I don't have a WHM). Always pop Dark Dance whenever it's up, unless you're not taking physical damage. Extra Parries=extra chance at low blow/swipe(or w/e it's called)= more damage.

I try my best to keep Scourge and Lunge on the same cooldown since they both sync up well, obviously if you know you need Lunge for a mechanic then save it.

If you have to use an unbuffed Carve and spit, you have likely *** up.

Your priority for single target DA application should be something like

Carve and Spit
Dark Mind(if the boost is needed)
Passenger
Soul Eater
Dark Dance

If you have to choose between buffing Soul Eater or Carve and Spit, choosing soul eater is a DPS loss.

obligatory

Also, do not start dropping in/out of grit until you are actually comfortable with a fight.

Once you a comfortable use Grit like a Defensive Cooldown, especially if you know when Tank busters come out.

Second Edit: For Large Pulls you are the only Tank who can safely sprint pull, which will help you take a little less damage during the pull. HOWEVER please pay attention to your healer and know what kind of dps you have with you. If you have primarily somthing like mnk, don't sprint. It often ends up with a mnk trying to build grease lightning stacks during your pull and being unable to because mobs are sprinting out of range constantly(this can be avoided in most cases but sometimes they're ***out of luck) meaning they need that much longer once you're situated to build their stacks and start AoEing.

You also have to be able to trust your healers to be good at their jobs before you start dropping in and out as needed.

I made the mistake of dropping out of my defensive stance once, with an overgeared healer who couldn't seem to keep up with healing, much less dps.

This is also true. If your healer doesn't have the ability to handle what your doing or doesn't know what you're doing it's possible you're locking them out of Cleric stance DPS and your extra DPS from being out of Grit may not actually be as much of an increase as you think.

Overall party DPS > individual DPS every time.

Adjust to the party/situation as needed, and you'll be a badass dark knight in no time, instead of all these squishy *** knights I keep hearing about.

STACK MORE STR!

... You know... when I was typing up that paragraph I was putting myself down a lot thinking "oh why am I doing this I'm probably wrong on all of this, I suck at drk I should just let Vyre and Ina handle it"

Now that I look at it...

I'm proud of my DRK.

Definitely use Carve and Spit in the starting hate combo. That starting hate combo needs all the help it can get. Also the aforementioned, by both of yous(I paged ina!), difference between an extra use or not.

They just don't know how to use cooldowns and damage reducers. I keep hearing that DRKs are these paper thin tanks, but mine is hardly paper thin.

Mine is as thick as the pollution in Beijing!

Death Saurer a ***.
Death Meteor a best.

I spent like 20 min sifting through Kojos post and yall paged me D:

Yes, in general holding onto cooldowns is a dps loss so only do it if you need them for a dps push phase or something.

I think titan hard mode is the only boss in the game where buffed dark dance could do anything... and even then I'd rather just buff the soul eater.

Ehh going off the current content grit is sorta like training wheels... once your comfortable and have your cooldown rotation sorted there isn't much to justify it going into it unless it's for hate reasons because of how much mp it costs.

Technically pld can sprint pull too... but I can't say I'm a fan of it if there are any tp users in the party. In some cases it just ends up giving the mobs more uptime on you.

Ina, come visit me in thunder bay. I'll make pancakes.

When I play my DPS jobs, I keep my tank jobs in mind (though mine are 255-257ish), and when I play my tank jobs, I keep my healers in mind, and when I play healers, I keep my tanks in mind again.

"How hard can I hit these mobs before I start ripping hate? Can the tank hold hate in an offensive stance?"

At best, my whm is 44, my sch is 50, but I can cycle between healing and dps pretty well already, even if the tank is completely new.

Drk attracted a lot of people that wanted to play it just because it is drk... my experience is a drk will either take very little damage, or be made of wet paper. There isn't much of an inbetween.

I'm admittedly not really sold on this. You come to a point where you can trust in your own mitigation to keep you alive vs the healer... like if they are afk there isn't much you can do but I usually do the same stuff regardless of the healer... And then there is Vyre who sees my healer alt (without knowing it's me) in Ilv 200 gear with a 160 weapon and proceeds to pull the whole of Sohr Khai.

You come visit me instead, I'm lazy.

All of the tanks can pull sprint, it's just on WAR, you have to pay attention to where you are, and what's the best place to start so that you regen enough TP, and then, your damage will suffer a little bit, but if you got competent casters, it won't matter all that much.

Course, you occasionally run into healers that don't use sprint. Always makes me have a sad, like last night when I did Gubal for war anima. I sprinted after zoning into the part after 2nd boss. Get to the end of the pull with like 780 TP, which is plenty, the SMN LBs the pull, and we're having at it... only the SCH is still at the bottom of the steps slowly meandering towards us. They got into range, and didn't even try to get me healed up, just sitting on 3 stacks and an Aetherflow.

I am the true wet paper DRK

Because I know that DRK is truly a dps that was coded wrong.

If focused, on a dummy, I can maintain MP pretty well swapping out of Grit, I just need to learn to put all this into practice. Thx guys.

I'll have to keep rereading this too. lol

go into dungeons or content and experiment?
this is how I been learning healing in the past week+
:v

worst scenario, you dont get the commendation or get kicked out of group or just get told you are trolling.

XIV DRK can't do Entropy! Great Sword onry!

There's a point where it has to go both ways, I suppose. Even if I use all my defensive cool downs, and Abyssal Drain, if my healer can't back me up when I need it, none of my cool downs are going to matter, which is where the trust in your healer being able to do their job comes into play.

I can trust in my defensive abilities all I want, but that will only get me so far. I've had healers in ilvl 200 gear do better than those in shire gear. Because they took the time to learn how to adjust, which means I can trust them to do their job, so I can do mine.

my favorite drink is Cognac... replaced with Some Appleton Estate private reserve rum.

Everyone needs a pocket Shiggles. Now if only I could get him to stay in my pocket! Curse his raiding static! /shakes fist

stuff him in your back pack when you run the gauntlet in Gubal (Hard).

Or get a Shiggles Minion.