Darkness creates a shadowy area with an 8-yard radius, lasting 8 seconds, that grants allies inside a 15% chance to fully avoid any damage event. 8 yards is small, smaller than most people picture, and it is the tightest constraint on assigning it. It is not a flat 15% damage reduction. Each incoming hit is rolled independently, so on a single large hit the result is binary: roughly 1 in 7 players avoids it while the rest take the full damage. In that case it should not be thought of as damage reduction at all, treat it as a 15% chance per player to fully negate the hit, effectively saving each affected player from the damage they would otherwise have taken.

In a raid setting it functions best against damage profiles that consist of many smaller ticking hits, where the avoidance chance averages out across the duration and approaches the value of a true raid-wide damage reduction.

The base cooldown is 5 minutes and can be reduced to 3 minutes with Pitch Black.

Assign Darkness to a genuinely stacked raid-wide damage event, ideally one with multiple ticks rather than a single large hit so the avoidance chance averages out. With only an 8-yard radius, anyone at normal spread spacing is outside it. Prioritize the largest damage windows available within its cooldown cycle, and pair with Spirit Link Totem when possible to smooth out the players who roll the avoid.