Dark Knight Tank Rotation, Openers, and Abilities — Dawntrail 7.1

Dark Knight's rotation is one that evolves with the player's skill level and confidence with the job. Initial concerns while learning are simply to avoid losing any Blood or Mana to overcap, and to use your offensive oGCDs as many times as possible. Skilled play revolves around shifting potency into buffs provided by other party members for greater returns.

The typical structure of Dark Knight's damage output is a burst phase every minute, a larger burst on every other minute, and filler phases in between. These burst windows should include between 2-5 casts of Edge of Shadow, usage of all three Delirium stacks on Bloodspiller or the Scarlet Delirium → Comeuppance → Torcleaver combo, plus Carve and Spit. Every even minute burst window should also include Living Shadow and Disesteem, two casts of Shadowbringer, and at least one additional Bloodspiller. Salted Earth and its followup Salt and Darkness operate on 90-second timers that will coincide with the minute-aligned burst windows on every other use.

As Dark Knight focuses on resource management rather than a strict rotation, the opener is somewhat flexible. The sequence below is the standard opener, which is specifically arranged to take the greatest advantage of common buff timings. Trying to get the entire opener exactly right can be a bit overwhelming at first, so focus primarily on using Living Shadow ahead of raidbuffs and and dumping all of your offensive cooldowns after your first full combo. The exact order of your offensive cooldowns matters much less than whether you press them or not in the first place.

1. Shortly before pull, use The Blackest Night on whichever tank is pulling the boss. This is listed as three seconds pre-pull, but may need to be used slightly later in order to ensure it covers multiple boss auto-attacks and will break as a result.
2. Roughly one second before the pull timer finishes, cast Unmend on the boss. Use your Gemdraught shortly before your Hard Slash and then proceed with the listed actions.

There are a couple considerations which may affect the exact way in which you engage the boss. These are all minor adjustments that mostly trade off a small amount of damage in exchange for comfort. When in doubt, default to the opener presented above.

• If you are able to start within melee range of the boss, you may opt to open with Hard Slash. Alternatively, Shadowstride or Provoke can be used in place of Unmend. If you choose to do this, you must insert an additional Hard Slash after the Souleater before proceeding with the burst window in order to ensure that raidbuffs are applied for your highest-potency hits. These options are generally not preferred because of the greater delay caused by using an extra combo GCD versus Unmend.
• This opener counts on auto-attacks from the boss to break The Blackest Night in order to gain at least one larger out-of-combat mana tick and potentially an Edge of Shadow cast. Do not use The Blackest Night if the shield will not break.

Following the opener, Dark Knight's single-target rotation is mainly repeated Souleater combos while keeping an eye on resources and building toward your next burst window. These burst windows resemble the opener but with extra Blood banked for another Bloodspiller during buffs and no early Edge of Shadow before buffs start. Gemdraughts should either be weaved along with Delirium or a GCD earlier if a Bloodspiller is necessary just before Delirium to avoid overcap or if you choose not to double-weave your Gemdraught. It is important to use your offensive cooldowns as soon as they are ready so that they will not come out late against a punctual buff provider and eventually miss buffs entirely.

• Hard Slash and Syphon Strike allow up to 30 seconds to press the next button in the sequence before the combo times out on its own. Because of this extended timer, you can keep your combo going through many brief intermission phases. Make sure to attack the boss as soon as it becomes targetable again in these situations by holding down your target keybind and pressing the next step of your combo in advance, or by omitting the target keybind if you have the setting active that permits it.
• If you are forced to disengage from the boss, using Unmend will deal some damage while you are out of range of your melee actions. Be aware of just how long you need to be out of melee range; if you are able to return to the boss while your GCD is still rolling, it's better to cut the Unmend cast in favor of your next combo action.
• Bloodspiller and its upgraded versions Scarlet Delirium, Comeuppance, and Torcleaver, as well as Disesteem, also do not break your combo and the extended timeout period allows you to use as many of these GCDs in a row as you can cast without worry.

• Your main focus otherwise should be on avoiding any overcap. Blood can and should be banked for raidbuffs where possible, but only as long as no gauge is wasted in the process.
• Delirium effectively prevents Blood expenditure until all stacks are consumed while also generating Blood per GCD used. Entering Delirium with more than 70 blood will result in overcap. To avoid this, always use Bloodspiller before Delirium if you are at 80, 90, or 100 Blood on the GCD before it comes off cooldown, or if you are at 60 Blood and your next combo GCD is Souleater.
• As you get comfortable with a given encounter, note any spots where the boss becomes untargetable and pay attention to which combo GCD you usually end on. If you usually end on Hard Slash with 50+ Blood, using Bloodspiller will allow you to end with a completed combo instead. Conversely, if you usually end on Syphon Strike with 0-50 Blood in your gauge, holding a Bloodspiller will end the phase on a completed Souleater combo.
• The stacks from Delirium have a generous time limit but do not last indefinitely. You can pre-cast it with under ten seconds remaining on downtime phases if you can spend all stacks immediately, but be aware of potential overcap if you have a lot of resources banked.

Mana is the most complex and demanding portion of Dark Knight's single-target rotation. At a basic level, you should aim simply to keep at least 3,000 Mana on hand at any given moment in order to use The Blackest Night if needed, while using Edge of Shadow during buff windows as much as possible. The following points lay out the process of managing your Mana with an eye on greater effectiveness.

• You generate around 10,500 Mana every minute in a full-uptime scenario via passive regen, Syphon Strike, Carve and Spit, and Delirium. This comes out to nearly exactly to seven uses of Edge of Shadow every two minutes.
• Your Mana bar maxes out at 10,000, meaning it can hold up to three uses of Edge of Shadow at once, and will take most of a minute to refill once emptied.

• The Blackest Night grants a Dark Arts proc if the shield breaks rather than expires, allowing free use of your next Edge of Shadow (or Flood of Shadow). This proc does not stack, but lasts indefinitely. Holding this proc in addition to the 10,000 capacity of your Mana bar allows you to use Edge of Shadow up to four times in succession.
• Delirium grants a total of 2,400 Mana over its duration, and Carve and Spit generates another 600. By timing Delirium so that it coincides with the application of raidbuffs, you can enter with a full Mana bar and then gain and immediately spend all of that additional Mana in the duration of those buffs. This allows yet another use of Edge of Shadow within a short timeframe.
• Either of these techniques alone allows for the effective storage of 13,000 Mana, or slightly more than one full minute's worth. By favoring the even-minute bursts, this puts four Edges under each set of buffs and then three in between. This so-called "4/3 Plan" is a basic goal for learning Dark Knight players.

• By using both a stored Dark Arts proc and the delayed Blood Weapon timing together, you can effectively bank 16,000 Mana, or five Edge of Shadow uses, at once. Because mana generation allows for seven Edge casts every two minutes, this means casting Edge five times during buffs and then only twice in between. This "5/2 Plan" is the ultimate goal for all Dark Knight players.
• To summarize, the general loop is to use Edge of Shadow five times during each instance of raidbuffs, then to use it twice followed by The Blackest Night before the next even-minute burst.
• Using The Blackest Night followed by Edge of Shadow is functionally identical to a single cast of Edge of Shadow in terms of mana management. Any of the Edge casts between bursts can thus be replaced by The Blackest Night without disrupting your burst cycle. You may, for example, use The Blackest Night three times between buffs and hold onto the proc from the third in order to properly set up your 5/3.
• Each Edge use extends Darkside by 30 seconds. You will exit each even-minute burst with one full minute of Darkside and then gain only one more minute's worth before the next burst. This means that your Darkside timer will get extremely low just before each set of buffs, and that overcapping on its duration can cause it to drop entirely. Consistently using Edges at each odd- and even-minute burst will naturally keep Darkside up without active attention, but you can build in some wiggle room by using your last even-minute Edge just before buffs expire and by not immediately spending both Edges during your Delirium combo on the odd minute.
• While not normally possible due to the mana values going into each window, it is sometimes possible after downtime to include a sixth Edge of Shadow in the duration of a Gemdraught. This is tight enough that it usually involves some level of overcap, but it may be useful in squeezing out a little extra potency in a multi-phase encounter where damage on a previous phase does not carry into the next.

• Your first priority with defensive cooldowns is to avoid dying. Mitigation stacks multiplicatively, so the best efficiency against consistent damage is to spread them out, but many tankbusters in high-end content will kill you outright if you do not stack multiple cooldowns together.
• Your second priority is to smooth out non-lethal damage to make your healers' lives easier. Boss auto-attacks often comprise the majority of your damage taken, and mitigating them if you know you will not need the cooldown to avoid death elsewhere can help quite a bit.
• The Blackest Night is an extremely strong tool and should be used wherever necessary to ensure the safety of a party member. This usually does not conflict with the idea of shifting Mana expenditure into raidbuffs, but takes precedence when it does.
• Oblation is similarly versatile with the ability to target any party member. While not extremely strong on its own, it is a welcome addition to any circumstance requiring damage reduction on one or two specific party members.
• Prioritize using Dark Mind for incoming magical damage. Doing so can free up Rampart or Shadowed Vigil to cover a different source of damage.
• Reprisal shines against raid-wide damage, as it can mitigate as much damage as a healer's shield prevents. Coordinate with your co-tank to cover as many raid-wides as possible. Reprisal can also be used against tankbusters or other periods of heavy tank damage if the incoming damage is especially high or raid-wides are already comfortably mitigated.
• Living Dead allows you to soak up any amount of damage from most sources for its duration and can be used in a wide variety of situations. While using it in an emergency is usually better than dying, you will get the most value out of it by coordinating with your healers. A healer who is aware that you plan to use Living Dead can save resources both before and after its use that they would otherwise spend keeping you alive. The healing effect after proccing Walking Dead heals you for roughly 30% of your HP per GCD hit, and you will usually—but not always—get four GCDs over its duration, so a small amount of help from your healers will ensure your safety. You should also seek to avoid using Bloodspiller as your last GCD in this time because it has a long application delay and increases the chance of not fully healing yourself. The healing also applies per hit and not per cast, so in AoE situations, you will usually cleanse yourself with a single GCD.

• Use Hard Slash → Syphon Strike → Souleater for your basic GCD combo. Starting at level 40 and ending at level 93, it is optimal to use Unleash → Stalwart Soul instead.

• Bloodspiller is an overall potency gain versus Quietus, as is the Scarlet Delirium → Comeuppance → Torcleaver combo over Impalement.

• Continue to use Edge of Shadow instead of Flood of Shadow to spend Mana.
• Mana generation is slightly faster due to having a two-step combo rather than a three-step combo. Current encounters with prolonged two-target phases also include heavy tank damage, so focus on surviving with The Blackest Night more than setting up a perfect 5/2 Plan.

• As mentioned above, The Blackest Night has a higher priority in existing two-target phases. Otherwise, mitigating incoming damage is not radically different with two targets instead of one.

Generally speaking, large multi-target situations mainly arise in dungeons, though some bosses will summon a good number of usually pretty weak adds.

• Use Unleash into Stalwart Soul instead of Souleater combos.

• Use Quietus to spend your Blood gauge, as well as Impalement rather than the single-target Delirium combo.

• Use Flood of Shadow as your damaging spender.
• Use The Blackest Night as much as possible in trash pulls, as long as it will break. Flood can be used to dump mana at the start of a pull, as your natural generation will outpace what you can spend on The Blackest Night, but should be saved for when you have a Dark Arts proc after that.
• You regenerate Mana much more quickly while not engaged in combat, so try to spend Mana before you finish off a pack to avoid overcapping while running to the next one.

• Spreading out your mitigation gives the best value. You want to spend as much time as possible taking less damage than your healer can heal.
• Do not forget to use Arm's Length. The slow in its description means an attack speed slow, and it applies to enemies which strike you even when not negating a knockback effect. This makes it nearly as effective as Rampart for reducing incoming damage.
• Abyssal Drain shares a recast timer with Carve and Spit. While Abyssal Drain is damage-efficient at three or more targets, the main value it provides is the healing per target hit. Use it as a heal that also does damage rather than a damaging cooldown that also heals you.
• Living Dead has excellent value for trash pulls when used in coordination with your healer. Communicate your intentions beforehand, and they can focus on dealing damage while allowing your HP to drop to 1. Once Walking Dead procs, you will near-instantly heal yourself back to full. Make sure to follow this up with conventional mitigation as your healer turns their attention back to keeping you alive.