DRK Adjustments via Manifesto

[Urteil]

Example Adjustments
A new ability that sacrifices TP gain to make attacks more powerful.
A new ability that raises the amount of damage the dark knight takes, but also raises the amount of magic and elemental weapon skill damage it deals.

The "price" that we pay is far too expensive for the mediocre results we can achieve.

Terrible ideas SE.

*Revamped the original OP from only whining to what I have carefully considered,via the DRK job forum, and myself.* 7/30/2011




SE please consider the following:

DRK requires more survivability "Making us take more damage," leaves many of us scratching our heads, I am not sure we have any more to sacrifice in the defense department.

However TP is certainly not what we should be sacrificing.

Bolster our job with something else to provide a buffer between us and death, when we are fulfilling our role as a "premier damage dealer"!

Blood Weapon

Square Enix, please make Blood Weapon a normal job ability for Dark Knight not a two-hour.

Give us a real two-hour. (Chainspell and Hundred Fists I'm looking at you.)

Dark Knight being praised for using a club (WHM weapon) or a dagger (Defnitley not a DRK weapon) is very silly, trite, stupid, boring, and retarded.


As such please balance Blood-weapon in the following way:


Blood Weapon:
Duration: 60s (1 Minute)
Recast: 480s (8 Minutes)

Heals the Dark Knight for the damage inflicted through melee swings, and physical Weapon Skills.

Effective only with a two handed weapon equipped.

Meaning that if you are using a Sword, Dagger, Club, Axe the Job ability will be 100% useless and provide no benefit whatsoever.

Souleater

Souleater currently has gotten an upgrade that I find most favorable, logical and most importantly useful. The only request I can see that makes any sense is that we get at least one more tier of Stalwart Soul nativley.

Lv. 95DRK Stalwart Soul V - Reduces HP consumption from souleater by 60%

Alternatively in addition to another tier of Stalwart soul allow us to merit the potency of souleater.

1 Merit: +2% additional damage to souleater that is not taken from HP.
2 Merits: +4% additional damage to souleater that is not taken from HP.
3 Merits: +6% additional damage to souleater that is not taken from HP.
4 Merits: +8% additional damage to souleater that is not taken from HP.
5 Merits: +9% additional damage to souleater that is not taken from HP.

Last Resort

Total win.

Dark Seal

Make this Job Ability maximize the magical accuracy of all spells of the darkness element and Dark magic spells: Sleep, Sleep II etc.

It would be nice to have some better utility from this skill.

The only reason its merited is because Diabolic Eye and Muted soul are garbage not even fit for blowing a commoner's nose.

Diabolic Eye

This Job Ability reduces our Maximum HP by 15% for a measly 20 accuracy, there are many ways to get accuracy and not be incompetent by sacrificing your HP.

You keep wanting us to sacrifice something, well MP is something we have in general abundance! So let's use that!



Diabolic Eye:

"The Dark Knight's killing intent allows them to percieve their enemies weaknesses, and the most effective and brutal ways to exploit them. Putting strain on the Dark Knight's mind lowering their total effective amount of MP."


Duration - 2minutes
Recast Fully Merited - 5 minutes

-15% Max MP for all Tiers.

Diabolic Eye I: -15% Max MP and + 2% physical and magical accuracy and damage.
Diabolic Eye II: -15% Max MP and +4% physical and magical accuracy and damage.
Diabolic Eye III: -15% Max MP and +6% physical and magical accuracy and damage.
Diabolic Eye IV: -15% Max MP and +8% physical and magical accuracy and damage.
Diabolic Eye V: -15% Max MP and +10%physical and magical accuracy and damage.


I could buy for a few seconds that for people in terrible gear or who put no effort into their job, the original Job Ability made sense at one point in time back in the day.

However this person is not me, and if it is you, you should feel bad.

Tactical Parry:

With DRK in its current state, this job trait makes zero sense. Please SE do a combination of the following:

Increase Dark Knight's parrying rating to at least B+.

Give Dark Knight a Job Ability that works along the same lines of Perfect Counter or Third Eye that allows the Dark Knight to parry the next 1-3 attacks directed at them on command.

Weapon Bash:

Weapon Bash sorely needs to be looked at. I'm very certain that if I walk over and bash my Caladbolg into your face, it is going to hurt just as much if not more than any other hard object.

Also, why does Samurai have a meritable Weapon Bash that also inflicts Plague.

Does anyone not notice that this makes absolutely zero sense. And is a shining example of Samurai SE favoritism? It makes no sense thematically at all, if anything DRK should have gotten plague on its weapon bash via an update a long time ago.

That was then this is now, simply give it to us too and I don't see any of us making a fuss about it.


Weapon Bash needs some the following adjustments:

+ Damage to target based on the damage rating of your weapon or weapon bash needs to do as much damage as a normal swing, with the chance to crit.

- Weapon Bash and Blade Bash should not be allowed to multi-strike under any circumstance.

+ Dark Knights deserve to have Plague on their weapon bash .

+ Blade Bash and Weapon Bash should both give the user the TP return.

Magic:

SE is resolute Dark Knight becoming more magical, I see that their decision cannot be swayed. Let's try to make it bearable.


Notes on the current state of Dark Knight casting:

Absorb Spells: Need to not decay, there are a lot of them and they don't last very long. This needs to be adjusted by either keeping the duration at its current and removing decay, or slowing the rate of decay/increasing potency.

Dark Knight is in desperate need of gaining some magical celerity if you will. Our spells take too long to cool down, and too long to cast. Absorbs decay far too quickly, and don't even get us started bout the inefficiency of elemental magic.

A combination of any of the following would be appreciated, here are some ideas:

Dark Celerity - Dark Magic casting times and recast times are reduced, stackable with all other forms of Fast Cast and Dark Arts.

Lv. 60 - 15% Casting time and recast time reduction.
Lv. 95 - 20% Casting time and recast reduction

Magical Attack Bonus - We need at least Tier I, with all this talk about Elemental Magic and Elemental Weapon Skills I am still wondering why we did not have this with the advent of Occult Acumen itself.

Avarice - A straight % increase to the potency and effect of Dark Magic, mainly Drain and Aspir and Dread Spikes.

Lv. 45 - +5% Potency to Drain and Aspir and Dread Spikes.
Lv. 65 - +10% Potency to Drain and Aspir and Dread Spikes.
Lv. 85 - +15% Potency to Drain and Aspir and Dread Spikes.

Black Mages have Elemental Celerity, we are sort of cousins or whatever. (Since you keep trying to push us in that direction perhaps you wish to give us tier 1 of that. . . this all seems incredibly backward. . .)

NEW DARK MAGIC:

Drain/Aspir III

Bio III (SE said they are revamping merits, so I'm hopeful that will fix many problems like this.)

Dispel: One of the few Darkness based enfeebling debuffs, DRK has native Enfeebling
Magic and nativley has Sleep/II, Poison/II, and Bind.

Absorb-ENH:Absorbs a Beneficial effect from the target to the Dark Knight. Blue Mage can do this, why can't we. Some DRK mobs can do this by simply swinging. Seeing as how there is a weapon in the game that can do this simply through melee (Sagasinger), this update is long overdo.

Absorb-ATK: Absorbs a straight percentage of the target's attack (with a cap) and bestows it upon the Dark Knight, stackable with all other forms of attack down.

Absorb-DEF:Absorbs a straight percentage of the target's defense (with a cap) and bestows it upon the Dark Knight, stackable with all other forms of attack down.

Absorb-SPD:Haste in the form of Dark magic that also slows down the afflicted, stacking with all other forms of slow. Reducing their attack speed and recast timers.

+15% "Haste" to DRK and -15% to the afflicted.

As far as this stacking with Haste itself, I am not too sure about that. It should be effective in its enfeebling aspect for sure however I see it stacking with other forms of magical haste as overpowered.


Plague: Reduces enemy tp and mp, pretty logical and standard stuff here folks. Blue Mage also has Plague, thematically this makes little sense for us to not possess it.

Terror: Again I don't see this as a stretch.

Stun II: Everyone gets stun, we are the first to get Stun, I think a new stun with noticable potency would be good.

Darkness: Analogous to Holy instant cast, instant damage good synergy with occult
acumen.

[Siiri]

The ideas SE posted are not what is needed. Elemental weapon skills are horrible, their is no need to enhance them. Why would anyone want to give up TP to do extra damage. Weapon skills for 2 handed DDs make up a significant portion of damage. Unless we are hitting for 1000 a swing no one in their right mind would use this job ability, unless for 2 hour only. While suggesting these for DRK , once again SAM and WAR get instant win job abilities with no down side.

I am baffled that SE is so out of touch with job balance and game mechanics. If they want DRKS to cast, I would suggest a Dark Celerity like blm gets for elemental magic, and cut down casting timers overall. Also, add Stun II and other spells. For melee side I would have given DRK the war ability to crit the next hit.

I don't pretend to know it all, and these are just my brief thoughts, its like almost anything is better than the stuff they suggested.

[Coldbrand]

Actually your ideas sound terrible. TP bonus and WS DMG is far more relevant then bad magic.

[Bagel]

Shoudln't this and the smn thread go in their job specific forums?

[Karbuncle]

According to a friend, the "French" Version notes say that DRKS will gain 0 TP per hit for the DMG boost. so its not a "nerf to TP Gain", You literally gain no TP.

Not sure if old news.

[Urteil]

According to a friend, the "French" Version notes say that DRKS will gain 0 TP per hit for the DMG boost. so its not a "nerf to TP Gain", You literally gain no TP.

Not sure if old news.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHA.

[Airget]

You aren't thinking outside the box.

-A new ability that sacrifices TP gain to make attacks more powerful.
Could be pretty potent for kraken club + soul eater combo. Heck you never know keep in mind they said

""We are working hard to ensure that each job plays an equally important role in the new systems and NM battles, and we welcome any comments you may have that will help us accomplish this objective.""

Which means maybe we'll face mobs that have abilities like WS aura lock which would lock out ability to use WS so we'll have to focus on making our melee attacks stronger or magic damage.
---
-A new ability that raises the amount of damage the dark knight takes, but also raises the amount of magic and elemental weapon skill damage it deals.

With this you aren't considering areas where maybe meleeing the mob isn't the best option or they are straight up immune to the damage. In those cases you can sacrifice your defense to assist with dealing damage through magic.

You have to stop thinking about things in terms of how much damage I can do overtime and more so what are my damage type options. With more options you are given more opportunities to assist with defeating a mob in cases where maybe your main source of damage is negated against the mob.

If you can think of it in that way then all the job adjustments work with what they are aiming for. While they are trying to give all jobs a fair boost, they are also trying to define them and make each melee unique from one another. if you take a look at what they said I would say they are off to a good start when it comes to actually making every job unique from one another rather then just another DD job.

[Greatguardian]

According to a friend, the "French" Version notes say that DRKS will gain 0 TP per hit for the DMG boost. so its not a "nerf to TP Gain", You literally gain no TP.

Not sure if old news.

Ajout d’une aptitude améliorant petit à petit les capacités des attaques normales mais réduisant le gain de TP à 0.

Seems that way. Ha.

[Karbuncle]

-A new ability that sacrifices TP gain to make attacks more powerful.
Could be pretty potent for kraken club + soul eater combo. Heck you never know keep in mind they said

I like here you're going, But very few mobs don't full-resist Souleater after a few hits, I think even the new Voidwatch NMs are resistant to Souleater.

It would be adding an ability for a part of the game dead. Unless they're planning to add a mob that Halts TP gain as a TP move (then again it would have to last significantly to make this ability not seem like a nerf)

You're right theres a lot of possibilities, But realistically it would become an incredibly situational Job Ability, something DRK does not need more of.

[StingRay104]

Ok so we aren't gonna gain tp while we have this ability up, fine, can we also ws with 0% tp while this thing is active?

I know that sounds dumb but this whole concept that SE seems to giving us is much dumber. I know nothing is set in stone, but we drks like our ws's SE, don't try to take that away from us, besides I like many other drks have worked hard to get my empy (Caladbolg) and it would really suck to have my ws and aftermath taken away.