My impressions of DRK

[Sares]

Hello all this is my first post here although i have been lurking around for sometime.

Over the last few weeks i have been playing a Qalian Dread Knight and have currently gotten it up to lvl 19, i would just like to write down my experience with the class, solo and in groups and share it with you all.

Well as far as solo goes i would say we are pretty much a power house, we can truck around with a 2h sword and take on 2- 3 2dot mobs of equal level and come out with a victory or a very close defeat, if they are casters or healer based mobs then things become alot more tricky, but in general most mobs i have fought are physical based damage mobs and i find i can blow them them with little trouble using SS-Harrow and my cone AOE heal.

3 dot physical mobs can be a challange but i normally grab a sword and board then bleak stun the mob then click through my abilities using SS to regain health, then it is simply using Bleak foeman till timers refresh and going through the process again till the mob is dead. This takes sometime but hey it is a nice tactic if you have to solo.

As far as groups go and tanking i find that it is important everyone follows the main assist or i will not hold agro on a single target, Dreadknights at this level simply cannot hold two - three targets that are being DPS'd by random group members an it usually will mean a corpse run. If the group can follow the main assist then tanking is quite literally a breeze, pulling the first mob with Torture and hitting it with Malice, then Vexing strike should hold agro long enough for you to switch targets and place torture on the second mob and if there is a third spamming vexing strike up to DC 1 ( dosn't take very long at all ) and using our taunt to keep solid agro on it till the first Mob is dead.

I can't say how important it is that you build DC up on the primary DPS target as quickly as possible as i notice a major Difference between using provoke at DC2 and at DC3.

This is just my general impressions so far and i do notice alot of things are not working the way they should be, our defensive stance appears to not add additional mitigation and i am sure that Darkward is a bit borked as well. All in all though i have found playing a Dread Knight to be a great experience, so long as your group members can use an assist macro you should be able to preform your role as a tank in the majority of groups.

If anyone would like to add to this feel free.