Dark Knight Megathread

I just want this thread to keep going. A lot of people, including me, have posted what they want from DRK. I am, in general, against the direction the game takes with tanks and healers (making them more and more simple and homogenized), but DRK was hit hardest by this on the tank side, IMO.

I'll be hopping on RPR to test it out in a week, but I still hope DRK receives a cohesive dedicated rework that would distance it from the "just dump all of your resources in the buff window and 1-2-3 the rest of the time" design philosophy SE seems to have adopted for many classes. I know SE can balance DPS numbers very well even without making everything work the same way, they did it in HW and SB (and ShB for DPS), so I don't really see the reason to do it.

Assuming the best case scenario, where this thread is seen, yoshi took the suggestion that DRK had problems seriously, that JPN forums are making some noise, and that the devs are taking a closer look at DRK;
What do you guys think we can reasonably expect within a given time frame?

I'm guessing minor number changes by 6.1 (mana numbers, cooldown adjustments, etc. ), mechanical changes by 6.2 (BW on a charge system, etc.), and major reworks by 6.4 at the absolute earliest. I want to temper my own expectations, but I'd be interested to know what your thoughts are.

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Originally Posted by RatCopter

and major reworks by 6.4 at the absolute earliest.

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What kind of "major rework" do you think they'd do mid-expac?

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Originally Posted by ItMe

What kind of "major rework" do you think they'd do mid-expac?

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Changing Enhanced Unmend to something less insulting :V

Real talk, I dunno. Changing how the new skills interact with each other, expanding the dark arts system, those kind of things.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

What kind of "major rework" do you think they'd do mid-expac?

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Most likely nothing since, by the numbers, DRK is an functional tank within reason. Its not wildly unbalanced like in ARR/HW. SB was the closest they got to balance while keeping the tanks different and even then they weren't nowhere near the balance of ShB. It's not gonna get anything new outside of hopefully making Blood Weapon 5 stacks, or, give it 10% haste like in SB. Unless DRK becomes the social pariah that 2.0-2.1 WAR and HW PLD was, it's likely gonna stay as is, outside of potency tweaks.

It's a shame they missed out on Dark Arts as the concept of buffing and augmenting your abilities is a great idea. Guess we have to deal with a poormans WAR/MCH hybrid for the next two more years.

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Originally Posted by KaliAurion

I've honestly been pretty discouraged from even playing Endwalker because of what's been going on with DRK. I've been stubborn and stuck to it through StB and ShB but I really don't think I could go through this for another 2 years.

Another problem is that I'd much prefer to be a tank and the other 3 tanks don't interest me in the slightest.

Right now I'm heavily leaning towards just skipping Endwalker for the time being until the job design team can get it together..

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I feel you there. I leveled PLD, played a lot with it in fact, and it's sweet seeing how good it will be in Endwalker with all their heals, flashy abilities and QoL changes across the board, but at the end of the day, DRK aesthetics are so much more interesting to me, everything from animations, to lore, to artifacts and artifact armor designs.

I was raiding with a group of friends but the more I played PLD, the less interested I was in joining them on raid nights while at the same time, I find DRK as if not more boring than PLD when it comes to gameplay, and seeing how things remained LARGELY the same for DRKs in Endwalker, I do feel a crippling doubt settling in about what I wanna play as after I am done with the story and decide to push on some harder content.

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Originally Posted by RatCopter

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My main thought here is that I really hope DRK doesn't get a mid-expac rework. I expect that they'll tweak the numbers around in any case, whether that's making it into the game for 6.0, or if it's the panic buffs in 6.05, or some round of buffs in 6.1 or 6.2 or whatever. But I really hope they don't try to make major changes partway through an expansion, because every time they've attempted to do that with a class in the past, the form the "rework" has taken has been to throw the baby out with the bathwater and destroy a class mechanic rather than fix it. If we get a 6.3 or 6.4 rework, we're liable to see something stupid like Edge/Flood changed to 1.5s Spells that are on the GCD, rather than an improvement to DRK's actual gameplay.

The only real hope here is that DRK limps along through Endwalker without any major revision, and then gets a total overhaul in 7.0 that might produce something more fun than the current version. If they try to tackle this mid-expansion, it's all but guaranteed to just make things worse.

I'm very wary of having hopium. SB was a terrible time for DRK. We were bottom and the redesign was awful. I can't understand thinking the old Dark Arts was good because it 'empowered' or 'changed' abilities when it came down to using it when you had MP to spare or not using it when you were low or out. Also, it was just APM bloat. You had to squeeze an extra action for everything and still be a worst tank than PLD or WAR. Also, TBN not getting broken was a much bigger deal back then, too. A single Holy would royally screw you over in a trash pull. All of this coming off HW DRK which was sheer perfection.

What might happen is you either wait too long for nothing (literal years too) or wait too long for something that might not be worse but it isn't good. Make yourselves heard or let your wallet do the talking.

SHB might be boring but at least its functional. I'll take it over 4.X DRK.

On the one hand, HW era DRK was the most fun I've ever had with this game. I know that we can't go back to that for a variety of reasons (not going to lie, it was jank as hell then too, but for entirely different reasons), and as much as I deeply, deeply miss HW DRK, I do understand that the simplification of tanking kind of had to be done to make the entire game more playable. But I do think things went way too far in that regard, and I wouldn't mind dialing things back to a more refined version of the concept we had in HW.

Tanking is plenty accessible now, with so many simple jobs, it wouldn't hurt to have one with more complexity now. We can roll back that huge overadjustment a little bit, even just for one class.

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Originally Posted by Kiteless

On the one hand, HW era DRK was the most fun I've ever had with this game. I know that we can't go back to that for a variety of reasons (not going to lie, it was jank as hell then too, but for entirely different reasons), and as much as I deeply, deeply miss HW DRK, I do understand that the simplification of tanking kind of had to be done to make the entire game more playable. But I do think things went way too far in that regard, and I wouldn't mind dialing things back to a more refined version of the concept we had in HW.

Tanking is plenty accessible now, with so many simple jobs, it wouldn't hurt to have one with more complexity now. We can roll back that huge overadjustment a little bit, even just for one class.

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thats the problem, all jobs are braindead simple. The universal simplification and homogenisation was not neccessary in the jobs that suffered most from it.
There is nothing wrong with having some jobs be more challenging than others. It works for the dps jobs, it worked back in SB, it worked in HW. That's one reason why everyone wants to go back to HW for a lot of jobs- because HW was the most fun era.

I've argued all through shb we need HW drk as the base, with a bit of SB and SHB drk added on top. the latter two had some good additions but they don't have the fun that was HW

Grit is a mere enmity switch now so thats fixed.
Darkside can be used for a haste mode, perhaps each attack drains mp while giving more potency and blackblood.
Dark arts being able to be stocked could be a place to explore.
Blackblood can be used for mp regen or sustain

so much they could do if they gave it the same effort as they do dps