Just hit lvl.70 with my Dark Knight! This is my first sub-battle job (main is NIN) I've tried leveling and my first tank! Took me about a month, about 2 hours a night/50-80 hours to get from 30-70 with the 30% xp earring from shadowbringers and daily leveling roullette and beast tribes and latest dungeons.
It was fun and I learned a lot about tanking! It was also fun going back through Heavensward/Stormblood campaigns in story order. I don't really do roulettes with my main NIN, so a lot of dungeons I did like once in the story and never again.
I didn't read any guides to Dark Knight so I just took my best guess at figuring out what each ability is used for and when to use and what rotation is good. I did pretty good at staying alive and keeping group enemity until I hit Doma Castle lvl.67 and then all the sudden my armor was melting and the teammates were stealing aggro in group mobs faster than I could aggro. Then I figured out that rather than just doing my 1->2->3 with dark arts between 2/3 and throwing Carve and Spit and Bloodletters and Leaps which are all single enemy targets and keeping Salted earth up, that with mobs I should just focus on doing Dark Arts -> Abyssal Drain as much as possible to keep enemity and HP and that helped a lot in the last few dungeons in SB. I tried using Quietus for AoE enemity but it doesn't seem to do much. In fact I'm not really sure what I should be doing with the Blood Guage I'm building up. I use the extender one to extend my MP gain but while that's in cooldown I pretty much just toss out Bloodletters whenever its at 50.
As a DRK without reading any job guides, so not knowing the rotation I find I'm struggling keeping MP up all the time because everything eats up a lot of MP, especially with Dark Arts buffing. I just did the final lvl.70 job quest and got The Blackest Night and I have no idea when I would use that since it's another thing that just sucks up a bunch of MP. Like I guess I use it at the start of mobs after aggroing them all to fill the blood gauge quick but like I said I'm not really sure what to do with the bloodgauge when it's filled up so idk. I feel like I'd rather have the MP than Blood Guage.
So yeah, next step is I'm going to read a job guide and rotation guide and actually learn how I'm really supposed to be playing DRK! But it's been fun playing blind until now and most of the time my teammates had a good time haha.
After reading up and practicing the job more, the last thing I really need to do before I'd feel comfortable trying on current endgame content as a tank is I need to learn how to tank swap. I've still never done it and I've still after maybe 75 hours as a tank never used Shirk action once in the game. I mean in dungeons you're the only tank! So it doesn't come into play and all of the normal mode bosses I've fought so far haven't required any swapping so every primal or alexander raid I do one tank just is the tank and the other is the off-tank and just acts as a DPS the whole fight. It has been a lot of fun being the MT on stuff like Susano and Lakshmi, very different experience from being DPS.
So next time I'm on, I'm going to ask whoevers online in the FC if they'll help me practice learning and doing tank swaps. I understand in concept how it works, but I need to actually do it in action so I feel like know what I'm doing.
After that will try Ala Mhigo & Shinryuu (normal) since I just hit 70 and haven't tried tanking them yet. Then will try some Omega raids (normal mode) tanking and maybe try Rabanastre and see how comfortable I feel with a current 24man. I did all 3 maps of CT as tank to try it out and it was pretty fun and easy but that's because CT is tuned jokingly easy at this point. Haven't tried the Void Ark stuff.
Oh one question I have for tanking 24man raids is how do I tell if the enemy on my enemy list is green because a tank in another alliance is currently tanking them or whether it's green because I should be tanking them and I'm not and they're pounding on one of my non-tank teammates murdering them? I just see a list of enemies with a bunch of green and I'm not sure which enemies I should be grabbing aggro on??
That reminds me, a second tanking question I have is when I was a DPS for like the last 1,000 hours and 2.5 years of playing this game I was always told in boss fights when adds spawn DPS KILL ADDS. Now as a tank, when adds spawn and I'm tanking the boss I never aggro them...am I doing it right? Or should I be grabbing any adds that spawn while tanking the main boss? As I watch the adds go around and beat up my teammates I'm like thinking "oh shit am I supposed to be getting those???"
Also when I'm tanking a boss and you have to move around a lot because of AoE marker spawns, is there a general consensus on where I should be leading the boss around? Like the boss of Doma Castle with the 4 gears that drop with big AoEs and mines and stuff I'm moving around a lot and I feel like I hope my teammates aren't annoyed that the boss keeps moving around instead of staying in one spot to fight.
Thanks!
It was fun and I learned a lot about tanking! It was also fun going back through Heavensward/Stormblood campaigns in story order. I don't really do roulettes with my main NIN, so a lot of dungeons I did like once in the story and never again.
I didn't read any guides to Dark Knight so I just took my best guess at figuring out what each ability is used for and when to use and what rotation is good. I did pretty good at staying alive and keeping group enemity until I hit Doma Castle lvl.67 and then all the sudden my armor was melting and the teammates were stealing aggro in group mobs faster than I could aggro. Then I figured out that rather than just doing my 1->2->3 with dark arts between 2/3 and throwing Carve and Spit and Bloodletters and Leaps which are all single enemy targets and keeping Salted earth up, that with mobs I should just focus on doing Dark Arts -> Abyssal Drain as much as possible to keep enemity and HP and that helped a lot in the last few dungeons in SB. I tried using Quietus for AoE enemity but it doesn't seem to do much. In fact I'm not really sure what I should be doing with the Blood Guage I'm building up. I use the extender one to extend my MP gain but while that's in cooldown I pretty much just toss out Bloodletters whenever its at 50.
As a DRK without reading any job guides, so not knowing the rotation I find I'm struggling keeping MP up all the time because everything eats up a lot of MP, especially with Dark Arts buffing. I just did the final lvl.70 job quest and got The Blackest Night and I have no idea when I would use that since it's another thing that just sucks up a bunch of MP. Like I guess I use it at the start of mobs after aggroing them all to fill the blood gauge quick but like I said I'm not really sure what to do with the bloodgauge when it's filled up so idk. I feel like I'd rather have the MP than Blood Guage.
So yeah, next step is I'm going to read a job guide and rotation guide and actually learn how I'm really supposed to be playing DRK! But it's been fun playing blind until now and most of the time my teammates had a good time haha.
After reading up and practicing the job more, the last thing I really need to do before I'd feel comfortable trying on current endgame content as a tank is I need to learn how to tank swap. I've still never done it and I've still after maybe 75 hours as a tank never used Shirk action once in the game. I mean in dungeons you're the only tank! So it doesn't come into play and all of the normal mode bosses I've fought so far haven't required any swapping so every primal or alexander raid I do one tank just is the tank and the other is the off-tank and just acts as a DPS the whole fight. It has been a lot of fun being the MT on stuff like Susano and Lakshmi, very different experience from being DPS.
So next time I'm on, I'm going to ask whoevers online in the FC if they'll help me practice learning and doing tank swaps. I understand in concept how it works, but I need to actually do it in action so I feel like know what I'm doing.
After that will try Ala Mhigo & Shinryuu (normal) since I just hit 70 and haven't tried tanking them yet. Then will try some Omega raids (normal mode) tanking and maybe try Rabanastre and see how comfortable I feel with a current 24man. I did all 3 maps of CT as tank to try it out and it was pretty fun and easy but that's because CT is tuned jokingly easy at this point. Haven't tried the Void Ark stuff.
Oh one question I have for tanking 24man raids is how do I tell if the enemy on my enemy list is green because a tank in another alliance is currently tanking them or whether it's green because I should be tanking them and I'm not and they're pounding on one of my non-tank teammates murdering them? I just see a list of enemies with a bunch of green and I'm not sure which enemies I should be grabbing aggro on??
That reminds me, a second tanking question I have is when I was a DPS for like the last 1,000 hours and 2.5 years of playing this game I was always told in boss fights when adds spawn DPS KILL ADDS. Now as a tank, when adds spawn and I'm tanking the boss I never aggro them...am I doing it right? Or should I be grabbing any adds that spawn while tanking the main boss? As I watch the adds go around and beat up my teammates I'm like thinking "oh shit am I supposed to be getting those???"
Also when I'm tanking a boss and you have to move around a lot because of AoE marker spawns, is there a general consensus on where I should be leading the boss around? Like the boss of Doma Castle with the 4 gears that drop with big AoEs and mines and stuff I'm moving around a lot and I feel like I hope my teammates aren't annoyed that the boss keeps moving around instead of staying in one spot to fight.
Thanks!
