4.3 Dark Knight Feedback

[Ryan77k]

I'm happy at least that DRK is in its best place since Stormblood came out. Obviously there are still improvements than can - and hopefully will - be put in over the course of the coming months.

As for me at this point, I really only have a single, simple request. That being if your Dark Arts buff expires before you can use it, the MP spent be refunded, even partially. It sucks in raids, since there's plenty of examples of bosses becoming untargetable. If you were about to do a DA action right before the jump but didn't hit it in time you've just wasted 2400 MP, which kinda sucks.

[Rubytoe]

I love the changes so far. Saving mp for DA+power slash, DA+Dark passenger, and DA+plunge for gritless aggro gain feels nice when catching adds as OT in sigma v7 savage.

Also as MT you can use DA+Dark Passenger early in your opener before NIN, SAM, or WAR applies the slashing debuff so that it won't be a dps loss in raids.
Against bosses that smash you with magic attacks like Phantom train and Chadarnook, dark mind really shines.

[Nivarea]

Defensively, the changes are just really really good. Yes, we're still a tad weaker on the physical mitigation side, but seing how strong we are on the magical mitigation side, it's not that big of a deal. Aggro generation is also fare mor easier and less punishing. Now, I don't feel that I must do more work to mitigate less than a WAR and PAL, and that's what matters the most. ^^

Offensively, it's just a tiny up, pretty close to nothing. For a non-rework improvements, it's better than I thought it would be. Yes, I would like to have a total rework of Dark Arts, going back to a closer feeling of HW, when using Dark Arts was satisfying, but I can wait for now. So, yes, all issues are not solved, but it's a solid step in the right direction. \o/

[Lyth]

Burst vs. Sustained DPS
There are several reasons why burst is important. It concentrates a greater proportion of your dps into relatively fewer GCDs. This means that:
1) A greater proportion of your dps falls under raid buffs.
2) You can time your burst such that a greater proportion of your dps occurs during high uptime sections of the fight. This means that you are generally punished less for time off of the boss.
3) Your dps relative to non-burst jobs increases in fights with a lot of downtime (i.e. no targetable mobs present, boss using their special move animation). While you're all sitting around waiting, the time to your next burst phase is ticking down. You spend a greater amount of your active time in burst.
4) A number of mechanics require you to burst down an add in a fixed amount of time.

Common sense would dictate that, if you have two jobs in the same role with different amounts of burst, the job with the higher burst ought to do lower dps under target dummy conditions. This way, the burst dps job pulls ahead under lower uptime conditions, and the sustained dps job pulls ahead under higher uptime conditions. It's a bit like being forced to trade off acceleration/handling for a higher top speed in a racing game.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case. So while you can have two jobs on paper which could do similar dps on a target dummy, the one pulls ahead under practical conditions including unfamiliar mechanics and human error. You end up needing to play perfectly and needing to work much harder to narrow, but not entirely close the gap.

DRK and Burst
On first glance, you might think that DRK can burst whenever they want to. In a very limited sense, this is true. You can pool up your resources and then use them all at once.

But Dark Arts is not multiplicative. It's additive. You gain 140 potency for using it irrespective of how powerful the GCD is. Use it on Syphon, and it's a potency increase of about 1.63x. Use it on Souleater, and it works out to be about 1.46x. Use it on Bloodspiller and it works out to be about 1.35x. It doesn't make your big hits proportionally stronger (out of necessity, of course, because then you would be using it preferentially on Souleater/Bloodspiller). You're better off thinking of it as a 140 potency oGCD than a damage boost.

DRK does not "burst" by pushing out more potency into a smaller set of GCDs. It "bursts" by pushing out a fixed potency boost for longer. Blood Weapon and Delirium just give you resources to sustain this.

This is one of the places where DRK fell behind between Heavensward and Stormblood. Req and IR both represent an additional layer of burst to their respective jobs. Delirium is relatively underwhelming because it has an expensive resource cost attached, and extends Blood Weapon rather than making the window more powerful. You can contrast this with IR after the rework, where a shorter, more powerful window widened the gap between tank dps.

I think that Delirium, as it stands, needs to be reviewed so that it offers something of proportionate value.

DRK and Raid Buffs
This should come as no surprise, but in a game where burst is so important, DRK is required to play around the timing of raid buffs. You need to push out as many DA usages and Bloodspiller usages as possible under infusions and raid buffs. The only difference is that you're doing it without the aid of your own damage multiplying buff.

It also doesn't help that the 40/80s timing of our resource buffs is somewhat out-of-phase with the traditional 60/120s timing of many other raid buffs.

I don't think that "burst" has to always equate to a simple damage up buff. Wildfire is another example of how a buff can concentrate a lot of damage into a relatively short span of time. We've already talked about how, under the present system, players want to fit in as much DA usage as possible. Ideally, Delirium should reflect this, either by making individual uses of DA more powerful, or by delivering a burst of damage at the end of the window based on how much DA you use.

With the way raid buffs are designed, I think it's too much to expect DRK to keep pace without a greater degree of burst. The solution to this lies in making Delirium into a more impactful burst cooldown, and possibly making Bloodspiller come up more often.

[Terkhev]

DRK and Burst
On first glance, you might think that DRK can burst whenever they want to. In a very limited sense, this is true. You can pool up your resources and then use them all at once.

But Dark Arts is not multiplicative. It's additive. You gain 140 potency for using it irrespective of how powerful the GCD is. Use it on Syphon, and it's a potency increase of about 1.63x. Use it on Souleater, and it works out to be about 1.46x. Use it on Bloodspiller and it works out to be about 1.35x. It doesn't make your big hits proportionally stronger (out of necessity, of course, because then you would be using it preferentially on Souleater/Bloodspiller). You're better off thinking of it as a 140 potency oGCD than a damage boost.

DRK does not "burst" by pushing out more potency into a smaller set of GCDs. It "bursts" by pushing out a fixed potency boost for longer. Blood Weapon and Delirium just give you resources to sustain this.
This is one of the places where DRK fell behind between Heavensward and Stormblood. Req and IR both represent an additional layer of burst to their respective jobs. Delirium is relatively underwhelming because it has an expensive resource cost attached, and extends Blood Weapon rather than making the window more powerful. You can contrast this with IR after the rework, where a shorter, more powerful window widened the gap between tank dps.

I think that Delirium, as it stands, needs to be reviewed so that it offers something of proportionate value.

Instead of giving DRK another version of IR, I'd rather have DA developed as burst mechanic. If we got any kind of "increased dmg for X sec" skill, we'd just become pre-4.2 WAR, aligning resources and cooldowns to burn them in short window. Not fun.
Personally, I really like system we have right now when it comes to burst: you can choose how much mana to save and when to dump it without losing DPS. DA is pretty much a 140 potency oGCD that doesn't have to be used on cd.
My suggestion would be to simply boost DA damage at the cost of GCDs potency. This way we'd keep our freedom to burst whenever we want, without feeling bad when mechanics force us to delay it.

I don't want another class based around single ability timer.

[Lyth]

WAR does not have a monopoly on burst damage (although, bafflingly, some people seem to think that it ought to have a monopoly on high tank dps altogether). Every job has some degree of capability in this area. Every job also burns their high dps actions under relatively short raid buff windows. It's just some jobs are able to extract a much, much greater benefit from this than others.

In a game where burst has a clear-cut advantage over sustained dps, this either needs to be acknowledged in the design philosophy (i.e. jobs with higher burst should do proportionately less average dps under target dummy conditions), or jobs with less burst should be brought up to speed. Either way, a change is needed.

Likewise, "Increase damage dealt by X%" is not the only way to do burst. Increasing the potency of Dark Arts under the influence of Delirium is one way of doing a DRK themed burst. You could even design a stacking buff that dealt damage based on the number of Dark Arts uses that you fit into the window, ala Wildfire. The implementation is of secondary importance. What matters is that you're capable of providing a competitive amount of burst.

[Terkhev]

But that's what I don't want: another buff that we align with raid buffs and burn everything in it. WAR IR change "fixed" it by mostly separating gauge management from bursts, but with DRK's mana/DA/blood system, it'd be a huge pain to set up. Burst windows are ok, but not when you plan all rotation just for them.
It's true burst dmg has advantage, but I think we should go away from it (by buffing sustained dps jobs in no downtime fights) instead of adapting every class to fit.

[Ekimmak]

It would be nice to have a new combo to use, but short of a flat damage buff (too much like WAR to my liking), I can't think of an easy addition.

I can think of plenty of creative additions, but they'd need some very precise tuning and fine-balancing.

[Reynhart]

It would be nice to have a new combo to use, but short of a flat damage buff (too much like WAR to my liking), I can't think of an easy addition.

This could be a leech put on the target, where any member who hits the target get a fraction of damage converted to HP. The WS itself should have a higher potency than SoulEater out of Dark Arts so you would use this when you need to save some MP. So instead of having raidwide mitigation like PLD or WAR, DRK would help keeping HP bars a little higher at all times.

[Kaalia_Stormborn]

I'm fairly new to the class, but my takeaway after unlocking all the blood gauge abilities and tanking experts and alliance raids is that I felt the blood gauge abilities should be on a separate gcd than the main 2 combos. I'm unsure if this has ever been brought up before, and more than likely it has, but what are people's thoughts on this?