Trying to understand the complaints about DRK

[Megguido]

It's worth noting that Bloodspiller makes up a much smaller proportion of our overall dps than does Holy Spirit or Fell Cleave (most of our dps comes from Souleater). This is even before you account for the fact that the benefit of the ones generated by TBN are negated by the MP cost. I think TBN could benefit from being a potency gain.

Except it is not. Just compared two God Kefka parses where I did about the same DPS with both PLD and DRK (± 100 DPS). Holy spirit was 11% of the total damage dealt. Bloodspiller was 18% of the total damage dealt (and Souleater was like 20% total damage). For both PLD and DRK, auto-attacks are what deals the most damage.

Fell Cleave cannot even be compared to Holy Spirit or Bloodspiller, since it's about 40% of a WAR's total damage (more than twice Bloodpsilla's contribution, and three/four times Holy Spirit's).

I respectfully disagree, I do believe Dark Knight has other pressing issues still remaining, but I feel that TBN as it exists in its current form still creates quite a bit of contention among the playerbase and would benefit Dark Knight tremendously for being looked at. [...]
I apologize for such a rant, but I had to get it all out. Judge me if you want, but I hope some other hopeful Dark Knight players can relate with these frustrations.

IMO, TBN is a bit like Sheltron but with a higher risk. If you use Sheltron but you aren't taking any damage in the next 10s, you're losing 100 potency from Shield Swipe (happens often when being OT if there's not that much AoE damage for example). But if you're using TBN and you're not taking enough damage, you're losing 50 blood. Now that TBN is 7s, it's kinda hard to not make it break, it's long enough to cover 2 boss' auto-attacks which are 10-15k damage each usually. But if it is timed poorly, just before the boss casts something, it may not break and that feel bad.

My point is, TBN is a great ability if used wisely, otherwise it's kinda disappointing. A ressourceless, 13k HP shield every 15s would be rather OP, so it has to be gated by a ressource. But DRK only has 2 ressources and both are used to deal damage, so you consume mana (you lose damage for mitigation) and if you shield yourself at the right moment, you're rewarded with blood (which makes TBN virtually free).

If you time TBN poorly, you're not only losing damage, you're also using mitigation for nothing (shield isn't breaking = you didn't even mitigate 13k damage).
If you time TBN well, you're not losing any damage, and you're mitigating at least 13k damage.

[shao32]

I apologize for such a rant, but I had to get it all out. Judge me if you want, but I hope some other hopeful Dark Knight players can relate with these frustrations.

you dont need to apologize, its actually what you say, TBN is not desing to dealt with AA, its the comunity who start to say we need to do this to say we dont need fluff mitigation, TBN start being a 5 seconds shield, in those days it was imposible mitigate AA without loosing the potency and then SE buff it to 7 seconds but no for dealt with AA, it was for those with high ping being unable to place the shield in so short window so now they can precast the shield and use it more easily, today its imposible pop the shield with AA outside of some savage figths.

[Lyth]

...

If you look at the example that you cited, you use TBN 22 times over the course of a ten minute fight, which works out to be a little more than once every thirty seconds. That's significantly more than you'll see in most of the better optimised runs.

This is the reason why your Bloodspiller values are inflated. The additional Bloodspillers that you gain are coming at the expense of DA Souleater and DA Syphon. What's more, if you look at your total counts for your combo actions, you have one less Souleater than you do Hard Slash and Syphon. This suggests that at least one of the forced Bloodspillers clipped Souleater, costing you a minimum of 93 potency on at least one of those TBN uses. That's a surprisingly large amount to accidentally lose on a "dps neutral" defensive, especially when many players consider spending 170 potency on IB to be anathema.

If you look at better optimised runs, you'll generally see a pattern of Souleater contributing the most dps, followed by autos, followed by Syphon, followed by Bloodspiller. This is partially because a lot less MP gets dumped into TBN (some of the better runs use on the order of 0-2 uses total). It's also because better coordination with raid buffs tends to increase the weighting of your harder hitting abilities relative to your autos.

I don't want to dissuade anyone from using TBN here. You're going to lose more dps from a lost GCD due to mistakes in uptime than you will worrying about clipping Souleaters. But the system as a whole is unnecessarily convoluted.

Why does any of this matter? There are two reasons. The first is related to burst. As we said earlier, burst makes your life easier. The smaller the window that you concentrate your dps into, the less important overall uptime becomes, and the more room you have for error. This is one of the reasons why you have lower percentile WARs doing comparable dps to DRKs nearly 40 percentiles above them. Bloodspiller and Delirium are supposed to be hard hitting attacks. But because DRK tries to be cute with the MP/blood exchanges, you end up treading water instead of getting the proper gains out of them.

The second reason is related to playstyle. Most people recognise that dps, even as a tank, is really important. But a frequently voiced complaint amongst more defensive minded players is that you always seem to lose out for mitigating. Perhaps this is a missed opportunity. If cleverly shielding your teammates made you stronger, then Sheltron, Intervention, and TBN could pave the way for a more engaging defensive playstyle which rewards you offensively for protecting others, to contrast with WAR's approach of doing more damage by just hitting really hard. If diversity is what we're after, this is one way to do it.

When Stormblood first launched, a number of us were really pleased with the seeming interplay between blood and MP. There was this sense that you'd juggle resources to boost your damage output. But because blood is restricted to the level 70 abilities, this interplay is nearly non-existent. I'm wondering if we'd be better off simply uncoupling MP and blood and treating them as independent entities.

If that were the case, you wouldn't have to worry about how adjustments to Bloodspiller might nerf Delirium and buff TBN, or how adjustments to combo potencies might buff Delirium and nerf TBN. You'd just have a system where proactively shielding yourself and your teammates from harm simply made you hit harder. Think Zarya to WAR's Roadhog.

[Kabooa]

Except it is not. Just compared two God Kefka parses where I did about the same DPS with both PLD and DRK (± 100 DPS). Holy spirit was 11% of the total damage dealt. Bloodspiller was 18% of the total damage dealt (and Souleater was like 20% total damage). For both PLD and DRK, auto-attacks are what deals the most damage.

Fell Cleave cannot even be compared to Holy Spirit or Bloodspiller, since it's about 40% of a WAR's total damage (more than twice Bloodpsilla's contribution, and three/four times Holy Spirit's).

Looks like you missed a Requiscat window, as well as missing at least one Holy Spirit per window you did have.

[Voss_Sutpen]

As a WAR main who just leveled DRK from 60 to 70 (as in, hit 70 last night), I enjoyed reading this thread and the different takes everyone has on the current state of DRK. I'm much more of an "intuitive" than a "technical" thinker, so I appreciate the number-crunching of those who lean toward the latter; it's helped me grow tremendously as a player the last couple months.

I know this thread has been going on for a few weeks, and I'm not wading in now with anything particularly substantial, but wanted to add that I had an absolute blast leveling to 70. The gameplay is much different than the build-and-burst style of WAR and feels super speedy on controller with lots of buttons to press--seems to generally have shorter CDs than WAR's off-global moves--but still feels comfortably tanky to me.

Not intending to suggest anyone's opinion is wrong, just thought I'd share my perspective as someone relatively new to SB DRK that I'm really enjoying the play style right now and can't really imagine what I'd change about it. That said, my views could always evolve once I attempt savage raids with DRK.

[Megguido]

Snip.

Looks like you missed a Requiscat window, as well as missing at least one Holy Spirit per window you did have.

Thanks for the log review, I'll take a better example than my terrible scrub performance. I'll take our World First UwU team as example, on God Kefka : https://www.fflogs.com/reports/V7ztg...pe=damage-done The difference in TBN usage is huge, Raffter used it 10 times less than I did.

The inital statement from Lyth was Bloodspiller is a much smaller proportion of DRK's DPS than Holy Spirit is to PLD.

In this case, Bloodspiller contributes 12% of DRK's DPS, Holy Spirit 15% of PLD's DPS. 3% difference isn't something I'd call much smaller. But it is cherry picking, feel free to bring another example.
Though I agree on Fell Cleave being a much higher proportion than Bloodspiller.

I still have much to learn.

[Kabooa]

I mean, you're still way ahead of me there. All I got is data reading. Practice is another matter.

Much of my concern with Dark Knight has primarily been inequity (which has largely been addressed) and style (Which is opinion). On the side of equity, Dark Knight's in a pretty good position with the recent changes, even if some of it, like Soul Survivor, feels uninspired. As far as baseline defensive kits go, the weaknesses were shored up and the specialties were emphasized. It is standing shoulder to shoulder now, with little room to debate on an efficiency front.

It's fine if Bloodspiller, Fellcelave, and Holy Spirit occupy different rungs. They emphasize different approaches to the tanks, and what we really need is more tank and healer diversity right now, rather than the core kit of each being exactly the same, palette swapped actions.

[dragonkyn20]

Pretty sure there was an interview where yoshi says DRK is fine and not being looked at. Time to adapt.

You would be wrong. Before 4.3 dropped, Yoshi said that it would take 6 months to redesign how DRK plays, so that would assume something else is on the way but not anytime soon.

[Azerhan]

Did someone has the last stats for the game ?
I've seen one recently and I'm pretty sure there is less DRK than during HW.

I could be wrong however, I've just take a quick look.