In your darkest hour: DRK's identity crisis

[Lyth]

Dark Knight is a tank in search of an identity.

But it shouldn’t be. It’s one of the most well-recognised jobs in the franchise. Most fans of the series know Cecil. Pretty much everyone knows Cloud. You could make the case that, if you haven’t run into an angsty, greatsword-wielding protagonist yet, you’re probably not playing a Final Fantasy game.

Every game has its variations, but there are a few constants. High risk, high reward. Use your life force (be it HP or MP) to power your attacks. Steal it back from your enemies. Weave together swordplay and dark magic. Even the job’s difficulty is not new. When FFIV was first released, 25 years ago, the NA version locked most of DRK’s abilities away, because they were deemed too hard for NA players to use (and Dark Wave/Dark Passenger was one of the casualties – some things never change).

So what went wrong?

A tale of two tanks
FFXIV is a two-tank game. High level content is designed for two tanks. For the longest time, those two tanks were PLD and WAR. PLD was the “defensive tank”, and WAR was the “offensive tank”. The problem is that these are not identities. They’re much too broad. It’s a bit like describing yourself as being “the best” without qualifying what you’re actually good at.

Job mechanics that should have been spread across three or four different jobs were jammed together into one. It stifled the development of new jobs, because the original two have been grandfathered into so many different job mechanics. I wonder, for example, if life-steal wouldn’t have played a more significant role on DRK if it had been introduced as one of the original tanks, back in ARR. If WAR hadn’t gotten there first. I feel that a lot of the present problems with tanks and healers could have been avoided if the roles had left room for multiple jobs to be added in from the outset, rather than building everything around just two.

When DRK was introduced in Heavensward, there was no room for a third tank. SE’s solution was to stick it in the middle, as a sort of compromise between PLD and WAR. Isn’t that what DRK is famous for, after all? Balance? The middle ground? A high-risk, average reward tank. It doesn't really fit. The problem is that the middle ground is all too often either the best of both worlds or the worst of both (Living Dead is probably the best example of striking an unhappy medium between two extremes).

There’s a lot of interest in a fourth tank. Some want Blue Mages and Beastmasters. Others want Judges. But there’s no room for it. The developers need to refine and narrow down the scope of the existing jobs first. Every job should reflect a unique playstyle and a unique identity. Being defined as “the strongest” is not a playstyle.

Concept Creep
Being the “middle tank” places DRK in a turf war on two fronts. When the job was announced in London three years ago, it was introduced as a parry tank. An expansion later, the word “parry” doesn’t even appear in our job action list. The closest thing to a parry tank is WAR, with both inbuilt bonuses to parry and the only guaranteed parry move in the game.

For a while, we were magic tanks. In Heavensward, the developers attempted to differentiate between making PLD strong defensively against physical damage, while making DRK strong defensively against magic damage. In Stormsblood, block and Sheltron applied to all damage types. After all, PLD is supposed to be a strong defensive tank. But this had an impact on DRK as well; it went from being a tank that specialized in magical defense to a tank that was just weak when facing physical damage.

The ongoing trend seems to be: introduce in a new mechanic on DRK, realize that either PLD is supposed to be “better” defensively or WAR is supposed to be “better” offensively, and copy over a better version of the action. It’s a never-ending arms race. When Plunge was introduced as the first tank gap closer, it was supposed to represent a unique way of engaging your enemy. But WAR needs a gap closer too, if it’s to be the best offensive tank. So, we have Onslaught, which is better in every way.

The new role-action system is probably the single most egregious example of this. Abilities that were unique and gave our job flavor were freely distributed out, with nothing given in return. But when you politely ask for Reprisal back, because Shake it Off, Divine Veil, and Passage of Arms are all job exclusive, you get “Don’t take away my Reprisal.” Hang on a sec, when did it become yours?

There’s a reason why the system isn’t changing. Tanks are necessary to clear content, but they also tend to be less represented in the playerbase. Developers are rightfully cautious about changing things up. PLD and WAR tend to be players’ first experiences with tanking. PLD is supposedly the baseline tank. WAR is popular. DRK may have been important in marketing HW, but it certainly isn’t essential now. Why try to balance three tanks when you only need two?

Theme park MMOs are built off of disposable content. But not everything is disposable.

I’m the darkness, you’re the starlight
There’s a reason why people are so attached to DRK. This is a Final Fantasy game. If I wanted to play an axe-wielding barbarian, I’d play Warcraft. It’s part of their lore, of their culture. Fast-paced greatsword combat is a part of ours.

Most of our most iconic weapons are greatswords: Balmung, Defender, and Save the Queen, to name a few. Imagine trying to implement the Buster Sword in a world without DRK. What would you call it? The Buster Axe? Perhaps you’d have to shrink it down and make it into a 1h PLD weapon. Slowest Omnislash ever.

Series lore aside, DRK is very much an important part of FFXIV as well. The job quest storyline has consistently been one of the most popular ones in the series. It’s probably the only one in which we get to explore our player characters as, well, characters. The developers brought this job into being. And we care about it. Just give it the treatment that it deserves.

During the Game Developers Conference in 2014, when discussing the reasons why 1.0 failed, Yoshi-p highlighted the importance of learning to listen to the playerbase and learning to adapt to their feedback. There are pages and pages of feedback, both on this forum and elsewhere, that are falling on deaf ears. People care about this issue. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past.

It's not just about numeric balance. It’s a sense that your chosen job, your chosen aesthetic, has something unique to contribute to the table. Something that defines it. And to do this, you have to rethink all three tanks’ identities. The archaic notion that PLD is the “defensive tank” and WAR is the “offensive tank” has got to go. Not just for the sake of DRK, but for the sake of every future tank job that the developers decide to bring into this game.

"Justice deserves no less.”

[347SPECTRE]

I really wish I could like posts on mobile, because this deserves all of them. I really wish they would give some sort of acknowledgement that they're looking into the massive amount of feedback on Dark Knight.

[Nivarea]

It's a good analysis of the situation, explaining how DRK come to be in its present state. I'm honnestly tired of defending DRK, and discouraged by the only kind of response we got from Yoshi-P. The WF was both a blessing and a curse, showing and making us remember that you can play a flawed job because you like it, but also making it more difficult to hope for buff.

As of now, DRK is considered fine by the community at large. I don't know if it's gonna evolve one way or another, if it's gonna be 3.X PLD/MNK situation again where people actually refuse some jobs, or if the job would be less played in the future. I really don't know anymore how to make Square care, and it sadden me, because for its Identity, for the gamestyle it got in 3.X which was not perfect but was more unique, I really love DRK and want to be proud and happy to play it, not feeling as a weaker tank than the two others.

[Crater]

This is a really good post. I don't know if there's much I can add to it, other than to second the opinion that choosing such overly broad niches as "offensive" and "defensive" for PLD and WAR shatters SE's ability to make DRK, or any other future tanks, both unique and useful, and to strongly request that SE give the community a specific, clearly communicated vision for what they feel DRK's identity is supposed to be, and why that niche should give us a reason to bring DRK and not WAR, or DRK and not PLD (and when I say "specific, clearly communicated", I mean please do not say anything along the lines of "we want to improve the image of a Dark Knight" - that doesn't mean anything).

[Shurrikhan]

But as of the time DRK was announced, WAR was the go-to MT, and PLD the go-to OT, with very little specifically "offensive" or "defensive" range between them. Perhaps pre-2.1, this may have been the case, with one tank and one brawler, and Fell Cleave certainly carried a more offensive feeling to it, but its niche, especially with the latter faint GB and RA buffs, was never noticeably different.

I've never felt as if DRK split the middle between the two, either. Before factoring in diminishing returns or anti-synergy, DRK had the most disposable mitigation and the most DPS while MTing, not because it was the "middle" tank, but because its toolkit more greatly rewarded (or was more dependent upon) parries. "Parry tank" therefore seems the more accurate -- in the same way or level of precision that one might classify a human as a featherless, tail-less biped -- even if parrying itself contributed very little of its reliable mitigation against bosses.

In all else, I'm in complete agreement, but I honestly believe that the niches declared for our tanks were more a matter of lip-service for those not already playing the tanks to center themselves around than actual design goals, and it would be foolish to try to create a warrant an identity off that mere lip-service.

[Ekimmak]

The fact is, now that Reprisal has become available for all tanks, it will never be a DRK exclusive again. It's either a role action or nobody's action.

In order to reduce the "WAR is a musthave" mentality, they had to remove the Storm's Path debuff, the Rage of Halone debuff, and Delirium altogether. Now it's a debuff that you have to actively think about. You only get it long enough for a single action, so you have to be smart about it. Shall I use it on earthly waltz? Dimensional wave? The dragon?

I prefer this to having an "always active" debuff, but they really should have given DRK something to make up for ripping out the majority of their defensive cooldowns.

[Zarkovitch]

I used to think drk back on hw.drk was high risk high reward tank with better magical resistance but idk what freak they are now.are they noob & friendly tank now? or job who got suffer same fate as mnk unpolished job with no fought on it.They should try to focus the roots of the class & enchant it THAT where HW did good.right now they re though process was to rush some classes then later fix them on sb.I am extremely skeptical for next expansion will be last if they continue to do this.

[Rhais]

SE seems to be trying to reduce job identity rather than give each job a unique feel, or gameplay. Considering the skills that DRK gained this expansion, for the most part they just seem like equivalents of tools the other tanks also have.
We got a redundant superfluous gauge costing GCD AoE, much like Steel Cyclone/Decimate, We got a high potency single target GCD attack that also costs gauge, a la Fel Cleave. Neither of these added anything to DRK identity. TBN is just the DRK equivalent to IB or sheltron, and in some ways is functionally inferior, certainly not something that gave the job a unique feel or identity as some seem to believe. The unimpressive, uninspired Delirium rework was the most unique thing DRK gained.

So DRK mainly gained a bunch of derivative skills, and the reworking of it's already existing kit took away much of the identity it had in HW.
I would rather have more unique jobs even if it means greater imbalance than what we are getting now.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

As of now, DRK is considered fine by the community at large.

And this is, unfortunately, are greatest hurdle. Earlier I posted on reddit, replying to someone who insisted "the tanks are all pretty balanced." Despite citing the huge disparity in utility and self-sustain, it's already being downvoted. Why? Probably because a lot of non-raiders simply look at the Ultimate clear as justification. They won't ever try to push any job's true potential, thus they won't notice the differences. It's the same argument that plagued MNK throughout HW and now plagues BLM, SAM and MNK still. The devs are looking at everyone's response not just the more nuanced replies, especially from people who actively play the job in harder content. I sincerely hope they are listening because it sucks we have to basically let a job rot before they finally take action.

[Joe777]

You do know Cloud isn't technically a Dark Knight though right?