Dark Knight Megathread

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Originally Posted by Conando

I feel like it's a simple fix to change Dark Mind to also mitigate physical damage, maybe a smaller amount like how Camouflage works due to the parry chance. So 10% as a failsafe.

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That's what I'm sayingggg D:

But then people just friggin ignore it or think it's stupid. :(

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

That's what I'm sayingggg D:

But then people just friggin ignore it or think it's stupid. :(

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That is what oblations role is. Yet another 10% phys mitigation is not what drk needs. Rather they attach dark minds effect to oblation to free up the hotbar for a new skill (offense or defense).

Yeah Oblation is a nothing skill that was added obviously because Dark Mind is so situational. Just roll them into each other.

...I can't believe I have to say this, genuinely cannot.

Oblation is a multi purpose low CD tool to flexibly add an additional layer of 10% mitigation, on either yourself or an ally, regardless of role and independent of TBN. Mind you in higher level content (Savage+) we even use Reprisal for buster mitigation, which is also 10% and it hella matters.

Dark Mind is a single purpose self mitigation tool with a critical flaw that comes to light when there is no source of magical damage outside of raidwide attacks. It is the "unique CD" of DRK and is the type equivalent to Bulwark, Thrill of Battle and Camouflage (unique cooldowns wiith niches).

Oblation's role is not solely making up for Dark Mind having this critical weakness vs all of these cooldowns. It should NOT be merged with or folded into Dark Mind; Dark Mind needs to be adjusted in solitude without touching what makes DRK's Oblation so flexible to hand out.

If you think Oblation is weak, be my guest and suggest buffs for it but I assure you every version of "just merge it with..." is objectively worse and reduces diversity.

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

Oblation's role is not solely making up for Dark Mind having this critical weakness vs all of these cooldowns. It should NOT be merged with or folded into Dark Mind; Dark Mind needs to be adjusted in solitude without touching what makes DRK's Oblation so flexible to hand out.

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You know what'd be crazy.

Putting the Excog from the SWall upgrade onto Dark Mind instead.

Just running random dungeons, the one thing that keeps coming up is that while the Excog effect is sufficiently strong, sometimes I don't want it on my 40%. It makes moving into living dead unnecessarily annoying to have chunky heal to keep it from proccing, but putting it onto Dark Mind would give it far greater purpose while still making it a great magic cooldown.

But of course then there'd be some specific, niche, magic buster in the future where we'd instead want the effect not on this cooldown but on another. Ain't no winning with Dark Knight, that's the one truth.

They have to do something about the self sustain in some way at least. The upgraded to Shadow Wall doesn't cut it when you can only use it every 2 minutes while Gunbreaker has a 900 Potency heal on 20s.

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Originally Posted by Conando

They have to do something about the self sustain in some way at least. The upgraded to Shadow Wall doesn't cut it when you can only use it every 2 minutes while Gunbreaker has a 900 Potency heal on 20s.

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If anything the other tanks need their self sustain brought down to Dark Knight levels.

give dark knight good self-sustain on par with the other tanks and at the same time put body checks like enumerations in normal dungeons. and increase boss autos as well. that way the tank's fun does not hinder other roles.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

You know what'd be crazy.

Putting the Excog from the SWall upgrade onto Dark Mind instead.

Just running random dungeons, the one thing that keeps coming up is that while the Excog effect is sufficiently strong, sometimes I don't want it on my 40%. It makes moving into living dead unnecessarily annoying to have chunky heal to keep it from proccing, but putting it onto Dark Mind would give it far greater purpose while still making it a great magic cooldown.

But of course then there'd be some specific, niche, magic buster in the future where we'd instead want the effect not on this cooldown but on another. Ain't no winning with Dark Knight, that's the one truth.

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I'd just rather not have any of our sustain budget go towards an Excog effect, period, tbh. I cannot imagine a duller means of healing than an Excog, especially if gets tied to something you'd be punished for pre-popping.

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

If you think Oblation is weak, be my guest and suggest buffs for it but I assure you every version of "just merge it with..." is objectively worse and reduces diversity.

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Oblation is strong enough that a buff would make it broken but not enough to have a significant impact.
Oblation's problem is that those 10% for 10s gets buried under tons of mitigation and its efficiency gets reduced to 6%

It's great alone, thought. But its weaknesses pulls Oblation down.

One suggestion I have is that Oblation's calculation should always reduce 10% regardless of other mitigation or its duration being heavily extended to cover auto attack after a buster or very long buster (looking at EX1 for example).

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

...I can't believe I have to say this, genuinely cannot.

Oblation is a multi purpose low CD tool to flexibly add an additional layer of 10% mitigation, on either yourself or an ally, regardless of role and independent of TBN. Mind you in higher level content (Savage+) we even use Reprisal for buster mitigation, which is also 10% and it hella matters.

Dark Mind is a single purpose self mitigation tool with a critical flaw that comes to light when there is no source of magical damage outside of raidwide attacks. It is the "unique CD" of DRK and is the type equivalent to Bulwark, Thrill of Battle and Camouflage (unique cooldowns wiith niches).

Oblation's role is not solely making up for Dark Mind having this critical weakness vs all of these cooldowns. It should NOT be merged with or folded into Dark Mind; Dark Mind needs to be adjusted in solitude without touching what makes DRK's Oblation so flexible to hand out.

If you think Oblation is weak, be my guest and suggest buffs for it but I assure you every version of "just merge it with..." is objectively worse and reduces diversity.

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It's not that Oblation is weak, it's that Oblation does not even begin to make up for the weakness of TBN. It seems like Oblation was the devs answer to HoC, HS, and BW but for DRK and honestly it doesn't even begin to compare to how bad the combination (Yes, combination) of using TBN with Oblation actually is when compared to the other tanks cooldowns, especially this expansion. The math has already been done. Those numbers are based on early EW content but the concept remains the same. Especially this part.

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Originally Posted by Ryaduera

You can see the way the math works out the more damage a tank takes the weaker TBN is by comparison.

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And in this expansion, we are taking more damage. Especially in trash pulls (Is it just me or are tank busters weaker?) where DRK can run out of mits if the DPS don't burst them fast enough. Suddenly the 10s uptime of Dark Mind looks more necessary, but it does literally nothing in trash pulls. The fact that people can still sit there and defend TBN and Oblation tells me none of them have actually done the math to see how miserably the skill fails next to the other tanks abilities. It has 2 more seconds than other tank abilities but with 5 seconds (on average, since it is on a charge system) longer cooldown. Either use it back to back and wait 60 seconds or use it between cooldowns (as I think is intended) and be upset you're still taking more damage than them.

It's an uptime difference of less than 1 second leaning in the other tanks favor (Exception maybe PLD since they use gauge on it, but PLD Shield is passive damage reduction other tanks don't have anyway) while they also provide around 4 times the defensive value of raw damage reduction (Math on damage reduction not considering healing and/or shielding such as the heals from the other tank cooldowns or pairing it with TBN, which should be comparable anyway).

Oblation isn't bad, but it also isn't nearly enough. Oblation falls flat as the DRKs answer to other tanks shared cooldowns even when paired with TBN and yet Dark Mind still sees incredibly little usage outside niche scenarios. At least one of them needs to be brought in line.

That's a fair asessment. Personally the two changes I'd propose may be stale copies of Addle (for Dark Mind as a buff) and Exaltation (a timed 400 cure potency on expiration of Oblation).

I don't think we need this muchnmore power in general, just a consistency change for Dark Mind and a touch of spice for Oblation.

Also I am not going to disregard the math, but while TBN obviously becomes weaker the more damage is taken (since its just +25% eHP and not mitigation), isn't TBN also a cooldown, like Thrill of Battle, that greatly increases eHP% when stacked with normal mitigation? This and the frequency of access is what I thought makes it strong, even in face of the Lv82 tank upgrades.

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

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So it gets a little complicated here to do the math, so instead of direct math I'll do a lot of estimations and use vagueness that hopefully covers enough ground to make it a bit more understandable, but shielding and healing have fundamental differences in how it effects eHP. Healing can be capped, overhealing is real, but shielding can't really be capped outside of timing out, and with how much damage we're taking in this expansion, that's not really going to happen. At an initial look, this appears to have shielding more favorable, but it's a bit more nuanced than that. Under the circumstance you are missing HP (we're ignoring warrior healing from BW because let's be honest, it's just broken, and we should consider standard levels when stating why DRK is weaker) you can, of course, regenerate it. So the HP value starts to change a bit since you should also consider how much HP was removed and under what curcumstances they needed to burn through your HP. Let's use super basic numbers, 150,000 HP, being lower than what the 99 job gear gives us. My PLD HS heals for about 7600 hp, but for constency of rounding down with our HP, let's round down with our heals, too, and call it 7000. Should be about a 10% drop for both values. Let's remove Oblation and the damage reduction from the equation here as well, to keep it simple.


12s regen for 7k is 4 ticks iirc which is 4 heals. That's 28,000 HP restored. At 150,000 health TBN is 37,500 shield. This looks like TBN should be offering a greater eHP value, but the thing about healing is if you are not overhealing you need to double the value, because in order to leave you at less than full health it needs to do that damage twice, but let's assume half of your healing ends up being overheal, which it probably isn't that much. then you gain an eHP value of 42,000. And if you do get full use of your healing, the enemy has to burn through 56,000 hp. Now remember, this is without the damage reduction percentages in play. With a difference at its base value of 9500 with the numbers provided, the fact that the other tanks get even larger damage reductions on top of those heals makes DRK start to look pathetic. And then, to put some icing on the cake, heals can crit and ramparts buffs incoming healing from your tank abilities, meaning it's even easier to inflate those healing numbers by a lot. I absolutely hate bringing up healing crits because it's RNG and can lead to negligible overheal, but with how often these heals tick and proc, it should be mentioned because they will happen and it will make a difference. TNB cannot be increased outside of increasing max HP, something 2 tanks do that DRK does not.

All that to say if DRK uses TBN below full health, it takes exactly the shields worth of damage to finish them off at that amount of HP they began with, but if a heal were implemented instead it would have to had burnt through more health than you could heal for at any given time. That is to say heals and shields both grow in power equally as significantly as damage reductions are applied, this is basic tanking logic, taking less damage is always good. However, if damage reduction is applied and enemies cannot do more damage than the values of the heal, you end at a greater HP value, but with a shield, no matter what, regardless of how tanky you are, even if you take 0 damage, the shield finishes you off in the same state you began in. This is why only 10% from Oblation is just not enough. The other tanks get heals and greater damage reduction, meaning they can almost always finish off the cooldown in a greater state than they left it in, but DRK will always finish off their cooldowns in the same state they began in, so its cooldown really means nothing because there is no way to bounce back from damage that has already happened, just pausing damage for a brief moment. TBN briefly offers a greater advantage as taking no damage to your actual HP is always better, but it offers no recourse after it is broken, meaning no matter how good a tank you are, DRK will always suffer.

It really comes down to this fact; When tanking, the only thing that matters is the state of the tank after the damage has occurred, everything inbetween is just semantics. Maybe DRK does reduce more overall, but does it matter in this context if the DRK always has less HP after the damage has occurred? I argue no, not even a little bit. And no, Vigilant should not be considered because every other tank has 2 sources of healing, their special 82 mit and one other, and so Vigilant should be considered to be compared to the other tanks healing like Requiescat combo and Aurora, even Equilibrium.

EDIT: To clarify, both healing and shielding increase eHP but have different forms of impact on your tankiness, and healing only loses when you are already full health, otherwise healing and shielding have the same multipliers to your eHP when applying mitigations, but healing will leave you at a higher health value at the end creating a bouncing effect with your HP keeping you full where shielding just won't do anything about damage already taken. So yes, it probably increases eHP by a greater amount with TBN, but if nothing is done about damage taken durng its downtime, it is inherently unsustainable.

Yes TBN is a cooldown, but it's not free like HS, HoC, or BW. You lose 3000 MP every cast, and the amount of MP regained between it coming off cooldown isn't equal, not only that, it's a straight up DPS loss if it doesn't pop, 3000 MP out the window that you can't get back and you could've used on an edge of shadow for damage instead. The other tanks just have better defensives overall and sustain. DRK has souleater and abyssal drain that directly correlates to the amount of enemies it hits and is on a 60 second cooldown. Personally I think DRK just needs a complete overhaul since it's basically a discount warrior.

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Originally Posted by Ryaduera

12s regen for 7k is 4 ticks iirc which is 4 heals. That's 28,000 HP restored. At 150,000 health TBN is 37,500 shield. This looks like TBN should be offering a greater eHP value, but the thing about healing is if you are not overhealing you need to double the value, because in order to leave you at less than full health it needs to do that damage twice, but let's assume half of your healing ends up being overheal, which it probably isn't that much. then you gain an eHP value of 42,000. And if you do get full use of your healing, the enemy has to burn through 56,000 hp. Now remember, this is without the damage reduction percentages in play. With a difference at its base value of 9500 with the numbers provided, the fact that the other tanks get even larger damage reductions on top of those heals makes DRK start to look pathetic. And then, to put some icing on the cake, heals can crit and ramparts buffs incoming healing from your tank abilities, meaning it's even easier to inflate those healing numbers by a lot. I absolutely hate bringing up healing crits because it's RNG and can lead to negligible overheal, but with how often these heals tick and proc, it should be mentioned because they will happen and it will make a difference. TNB cannot be increased outside of increasing max HP, something 2 tanks do that DRK does not.

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I decided to do the math and if HS ticks twice under the first set of mits and twice under just the one 15% mit then it's eHP regeneration would be equal to 33985, slightly less than TBN but if you add Oblation to TBN should make it 40800 eHP, the problem comes exclusively in overheal potential to reduce that PLD eHP with HS, but then they have healing regularly in their offensive kit where DRK gets one heal in pulls and 1 GCD heal exclusively, so once the healing from the other tanks kits are applied it becomes apparant where DRK has a problem in not being able to restore damage that has already been done to it. Honestly, a 100 potency per tick regen on Oblation could probably solve this issue and sway the math towards DRK, but still has an issue with Dark Mind, an easy solution being to add a 10% physical damage reduction and keep the 20% magical. Simple solutions to fix the defensives issue.

Do you think DRK would feel better to play if:

* Passive MP regen was dramatically increased
* TBN had it's cooldown dramatically reduced (say around 10 seconds)
* Dark Arts could hold 2 charges

Thinking leaning into MP management as more of a thing.

My biggest complain would be the lost of Plunge.
The new animation is lame, does no agro does no damage. Nor does it feel natural to use as plunge was.

Meanwhile both WAR and PLD closers remain with their agro and their damage. Which removes the excuse of not having the damage or the agro.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

If anything the other tanks need their self sustain brought down to Dark Knight levels.

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That's not going to happen. It's been 2 expansions.

To add to that, even with the slightly meatier hits in DT, a lot of PUG healers refuse to gcd heal so it would end very poorly.

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Originally Posted by excelsiorjones

Do you think DRK would feel better to play if:

* Passive MP regen was dramatically increased
* TBN had it's cooldown dramatically reduced (say around 10 seconds)
* Dark Arts could hold 2 charges

Thinking leaning into MP management as more of a thing.

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I don't think reducing the cooldown would help the main issue of sustainability or be healthy for the game. MP regen isn't necessary either, but would certainly help the defensives since TBN consumes MP meaning it's cooldown is actually shorter than it's realistic uptime. The main issue with DRK is sustainability. I'm pretty sure that, because of TBN and its cooldowns, technically DRK reduces damage taken by the largest amount, the issue comes from regenerative abilities and its lack of in long term situations. Every other tank can heal, then when they are done healing, they can heal until their heal is ready. DRK can just heal once off an oGCD every 60 seconds and once every 2 minutes. I think that because of this a better solution is to just throw a small HoT on Oblation or add heals to your Delirium combo and make Dark Mind do something useful. As it stands the main issue with Dark Knight is it just runs out of mits and cannot keep itself up long enough to see them come back.

But also, 2 charges on Dark Arts would be very nice.

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Originally Posted by Ryaduera

I don't think reducing the cooldown would help the main issue of sustainability or be healthy for the game. MP regen isn't necessary either, but would certainly help the defensives since TBN consumes MP meaning it's cooldown is actually shorter than it's realistic uptime. The main issue with DRK is sustainability. I'm pretty sure that, because of TBN and its cooldowns, technically DRK reduces damage taken by the largest amount, the issue comes from regenerative abilities and its lack of in long term situations. Every other tank can heal, then when they are done healing, they can heal until their heal is ready. DRK can just heal once off an oGCD every 60 seconds and once every 2 minutes. I think that because of this a better solution is to just throw a small HoT on Oblation or add heals to your Delirium combo and make Dark Mind do something useful. As it stands the main issue with Dark Knight is it just runs out of mits and cannot keep itself up long enough to see them come back.

But also, 2 charges on Dark Arts would be very nice.

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Thanks for the reply! I suppose I was thinking that more TBNs (especially during dungeons) would allow DRK to just straight-up not need as much healing in your average dungeon pack. I was thinking of it, like, "why not allow me to blow all my MP if I need it? MP is already a limiting factor, let me spam shields. PLD can shelltron back to back."

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Originally Posted by excelsiorjones

Thanks for the reply! I suppose I was thinking that more TBNs (especially during dungeons) would allow DRK to just straight-up not need as much healing in your average dungeon pack. I was thinking of it, like, "why not allow me to blow all my MP if I need it? MP is already a limiting factor, let me spam shields. PLD can shelltron back to back."

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PLD can Shelltron back to back yeah, but you really shouldn't. You have to build your gauge back up, it amounts to about 21 seconds of autos if you don't need to step away from your target. Damage reduction only lasts 8 seconds where the HoT lasts 12, so you want to keep those both working for you. You can, however, use Shelltron pretty much every 20s resulting in intentionally stacking defensive cooldowns, which actually increases the value of the regen that comes from Shelltron. The math here is a bit complicated and I... don't feel like doing it this time. But it means the HP value from the regen builds up to a significant number. The PLD has a regen totaling a potency of 1000 every 20s, roughly 30 thousand using my level 99 gear and tomestone accessories. DRK was given a 1200 potency once every 2 minutes. PLD has a 400 cure potency every 3rd GCD in AoE, then 400 cure potency on 4 GCD in Requiescat making 1600 over 4 GCD. DRK has a 40k shield every 15s but only 2 opportunities to fill that gap with any sustain. I really think a 100 or 200 potency regen for 12 seconds on Oblation solves this issue no problem, as well as a 10% mit on Dark Mind for all damage not just magic (Never forgive that Camouflage is just HW DRK Dark Dance reworked, buffed, and given to a different tank). 6000 heal potency over 2 minutes (not calculating Abyssal Drain because it's target dependent) will still not compare to the PLD with it's 2 minute heal potency total being 29,200ish (idealized AoE scenario) while also giving PLD a 1000 potency shield on top of it all. Baring in mind that Ramparts can amp any 20s window of that healing as well, and that, of course, those heals can crit, and over the course of a pull, they will.. (Why 2 minutes? Because that's when all cooldowns would be equally "reset", I do realize how infrequently you'd get all 2 minutes out of a single pull, but it's the simplest way to display the math, as well as using PLD because it's pretty baseline with what a "healer tank" should do)

That said, the reason I point out it wouldn't be healthy is because DRK would then just not take damage at all, even Warrior has to actually take damage. A lowered cooldown on TBN could work but adding the MP regen wouldn't. Outside if Delirium, it takes 6 GCD's to recharge 3000 MP for TBN, which is basically a 15s recharge anyway, so you'd have a burn mechanic for your MP, but again, once the shields are down, pretty much any damage you take sticks on you forever.

EDIT: Interestingly if a single 1000 potency heal on my gear is just over 30,000 HP then by that math PLD would heal around 300,000 hp with no crits or ramparts, which at 40k hp shielding from TBN is 7.5 total TNBs which also takes 2 minutes to burn through on a 15s cooldown if used entirely off cooldown. Obviously round up to 8. So if the healing without crits and without ramparts is actually the same as TBN, surely something is to be said for the extra damage reductions PLD gets from Bulwark, the greater value from HS compared to Oblation, and the passive blocking that does happen regularly? This kind of math is why TBN just doesn't work, it's too short term and with nothing to fill in the time inbetween when damage is properly taken. It's more damage taken with less health to bump survivability. The math is there, I don't know why the devs allow this to continue. Abyssal Drain also isn't really a heal to me, it's more of a "free bounce back once a minute" in pulls, but this could be attributed to my way of thinking with reliability and consistency and pressure to use it in burst windows regardless of current HP. That's why I haven't considered it into my numbers.

Pretty much if you are a DRK in a dungeon you want a SGE or a SCH with you. Specifically SGE due to dedicated sustain coming from Kardia every GCD and things like Haima every other trash pull. When you get a WHM or AST if they run out of OGCD heals then good luck getting a GCD heal from them.

Honestly DRKs whole dungeon problem could be fixed if they removed AD from CS. Put AD on the GCD with 30s cooldown with 2 charges and make a low level TBN ( call it shadowskin) at lvl 40. That would greatly improve the leveling process and improve expert dungeon runs on DRK.

But devs and JP think DRK is fine as is. JP only have issues with plunge being removed but that is getting fixed in 7.01 with emnity added to the dash. So looks like we are waiting until 8.0 for sustain fixes if any.

I'm leveling Warrior and it kind of became depressing how the job became more enjoyable than Dark Knight.

With the loss MP regen, MP management is not a thing anymore and you'll rarely cap MP. That also leads to 4 oGCDs lost during opener and burst window (1 Edge, 2 Plunge, 1 Blood weapon).
The changes and merges are good but they should've been replaced with something. DRK wasn't exactly bloated with oGCDs, it was very flexible but disconnected, now it feels empty but still disconnected.

Bonus point, DRK got a bit scammed on its new 120s defensive , it restores 1200 potency worth of healing, around 43k. Warrior restores 2000 potency over 15 seconds.
GNB gets around 36k extra HP but it is much more valuable than any other sort of healing as those extra HP works like a shield that can be resplenished if necessary. Same goes for PLD, barriers are fantastic given the mitigation bloat.

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Originally Posted by Ryaduera

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GNB Healing is also a steady 1200 every 30s from Aurora and 900 every 20s from HoC. Pit them together in the same 2 minute period and the healing is 10,800 (rounding up one cast of HoC) as well as a 20% increase in max HP (That can be harder to calculate its actual impact because when it falls off you can lose the health if you were full). That should be around 150,000 from my previous assessment of what healing does with my gear. GNB is third in healing for tanks and in a 2 minute window the disparity is still almost ten times the difference. Even if we assume 200 potency per target on a pull from a pull of 10 mobs that's 2,000 potency every minute adding only 4,000 making it a 2 minute window of 5200 healing, less than half of GNB still. The math is there, DRK just can't compare to the other tanks.

EDIT: Math error, wrong cooldown.

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Originally Posted by CKNovel

Heart of Corundum is also 25 seconds, not 20.

Over 2 minutes, you'll have 3 uses of Aurora (not counting the one coming back at the 2nd minute, because it hasn't ticked yet) and 4.8 uses of corundum.
That's 3600 from Auroras and 3600 from Corundums, so 7200 over 2 minutes, 8100 if you round up the corundum usage.

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This being correct humbles what I was saying as a difference, but still eclipses DRK entirely, outside of AD usage of course. I wonder what the math is on damage reduction...

Aurora's CD is 60s @ 2 charges, so 2x 1200p in 2min. Just wanted to correct that.

So I am going to point out the issues with Dark Knight that have NOT been fixed since it launched ALL THE WAY BACK IN Heavensward;

Living Dead, for lack of better phrases, SUCKED @$$ then, still SUCKED @$$ even AFTER it got "buffed" and it still SUCKS @$$ now, and and it will CONTINUE to SUCK @$$ until Living Dead works similarly to Superbolide where it drops my HP to 1 instead of 10 seconds of dead air UNLESS an attack hits that would NORMALLY kill activates the effect.




Now for the issues that were present in Stormblood and by extension Shadowbringers;

The ability pruning did NOT do Dark Knight any favors and is even more true when you attempt to do level sync content, and basically go "This jobs plays like @$$!" which is most, if not ALL, jobs when they are forced to do any level 50 dungeon via duty roulette, though when Stormblood content was relevant it wasn't AS bad as it is today, but nevertheless, it still causes balancing issue to this day.

In addition removing good changes for bad changes until later deciding that those bad changes need to be less bad, or in extreme cases ACTUALLY GOOD changes, or in the absolute WORST case making change that makes Dark Knight go from bad to WORST has ALSO not been doing Dark Knight any favors. Most of Shadowbringers Dark Knight is a prime example of this, but Endwalker Dark Knight is ALSO guilty of this as well, and Dawntrail Dark Knight continues this trend, for the worst...

In Heavensward MOST of Dark Knight's issues were made to make Dark Knight less bad if not made Dark Knight better, after launch, same with Stormblood, especially when Sole Survivor was a button almost never got used until it got buffed to have an Excog effect where, all of a sudden, the ability's usage spiked, which should have been the sign that devs were onto something good, but Shadowbringers Dark Knight design seems to be have been made by someone who absolutely HATES Dark Knight, and is only getting paid to get the job done, rather than to care about making it better, for 3 EXPANSIONS IN A ROW!




And now for the issues with Shadowbringers Dark Knight;

The Blackest Night no longer generates 50 Blood Gauge when it breaks but instead grants Dark Arts when it breaks which is then can be used for Edge/Flood of Darkness/Shadow... the problem is that you CANNOT generate Dark Arts OUTSIDE of The Blackest Night...

Edge/Flood of Darkness/Shadow are now used to maintain Darkside... the problem is that I CANNOT turn Darkside on OUTSIDE of battle OR downtime...

Living Shadow being a series of actions that it can execute, but more often than not feels like waste of spot on my hotbar, and no amount of forcing actions behind it is going to change my opinion on Living Shadow, especially if I have no way of maintaining it and it's only purpose is "do more damage than the player" which is poor AND lazy game design...

Abyssal Drain being a 60 oGCD, which hurt Dark Knight more than it should have.

Blood Weapon being a worse Berserk only needed to be buffed to where it restores MP when you use magic attacks while still buffing your attack speed BECAUSE of spells ESPECIALLY in AoE.

Delirium being a worse Inner Release, as a opposed to leaving it alone, is where the Warrior comparisons really started...

Making Dark Knight be weak against Physical damage even AFTER you get The Blackest Night




And ever since Endwalker it feels like the devs are only adding things onto Dark Knight is because of a checklist that they have to complete before the launch of the next expansion, nothing more... such as;

Locking the cooldown of Abyss Drain with Carve and Spit also hurt it more than it helped, Salt and Darkness might as replace Salted Earth at this point, so long as the keep the 20 second cooldown.

And their level 90 ability with the Darkside restriction felt tacked on because they couldn't think of an actual downside and they gave after that...

Oblation because Dark Knight sucks against Physical damage but because you get it so late it that doesn't even matter because you already made the swap to another tank before Endwalker launched. And I'm being generous with how early/late players made the switch...



And then there is change for the sake of change like;

Removing Plunge which LIVING SHADOW ALSO USES BY THE WAY for an ability NO ONE EVEN WANTS TO USE BECAUSE IT DOES NO DAMAGE AND YOU CAN'T EVEN USE IT ON OTHER PARTY MEMBERS AND IT'S TOO SLOW!



But in Dawtrail we at least got;

A new GCD combo that's locked behind Delirium even though I would rather it cost Blood gauge instead... and a new AoE GCD... that might as well be a combo action for Queitus... a new line AoE that is locked behind Living Shadow... and I would rather it be part of line AoE burst combo that costs 3k MP that was 15 second cooldown and finally do away with Living Shadow so the devs can finally make a tank whose entire gimmick is Summoner but as a tank and not a Limited Job... Oh and half of the 4.3 Sole Survivor effect on our Shadow Wall replacement... which I would rather have Shadow Wall grant a buff the makes the 40% damage reduction available for 30 seconds, which can also be said for a LOT of replacement abilities...

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

Aurora's CD is 60s @ 2 charges, so 2x 1200p in 2min. Just wanted to correct that.

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It's 1200 (200 per tick at 6 ticks) per Aurora charge which with 2 charges is 2400 every 60s which is 1200 every 30s so my math stands. I point out every 30s because you should use it, get the full usage, let your HP drop, then use it again, thus using it once every 30 seconds. The frequency of usage means at the 2 minute mark you can use your 4th charge. My math stands so idk what you are trying to correct here, but I hope this clarifies my statements.

Even if you drop off the last 1200 since it's a regen and doesn't happen inside the two minute window, the difference is still quite large.

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Originally Posted by Ryaduera

It's 1200 (200 per tick at 6 ticks) per Aurora charge which with 2 charges is 2400 every 60s which is 1200 every 30s so my math stands. I point out every 30s because you should use it, get the full usage, let your HP drop, then use it again, thus using it ocne every 30 seconds. The frequency of usage means at the 2 minute mark you can use your 4th charge. My math stands so idk what you are trying to correct here, but I hope this clarifies my statements.

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.... huh?
No, you start with 2 charges, you get 1 charges every minute. You can't use it every 30 seconds.
Of course the first minute you'll get 2400 potency worth of healing over 36 seconds but past that it's one use every minutes, so 1200 potency.

Heart of Corundum is also 25 seconds, not 20.

Over 2 minutes, you'll have 3 uses of Aurora (not counting the one coming back at the 2nd minute, because it hasn't ticked yet) and 4.8 uses of corundum.
That's 3600 from Auroras and 3600 from Corundums, so 7200 over 2 minutes, 8100 if you round up the corundum usage.

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Originally Posted by CKNovel

.... huh?
No, you start with 2 charges, you get 1 charges every minute. You can't use it every 30 seconds.
Of course the first minute you'll get 2400 potency worth of healing over 36 seconds but past that it's one use every minutes, so 1200 potency.

Heart of Corundum is also 25 seconds, not 20.

Over 2 minutes, you'll have 3 uses of Aurora (not counting the one coming back at the 2nd minute, because it hasn't ticked yet) and 4.8 uses of corundum.
That's 3600 from Auroras and 3600 from Corundums, so 7200 over 2 minutes, 8100 if you round up the corundum usage.

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Everything you said about Aurora is what I said, yes. As for the HoC error, my head was in PLD space who can HS approx every 20 seconds in ideal scenarios, my mistake there.

I can't bring myself to level DRK anymore I tried and I got to the 97 dungeon with a friend and I could feel how boring it is to play and how terrible the MP generation is, the scarlet Delirium moves feel so underwhelming when WAR gets a new animation for Nascent (A previous expansion ability no less) that's a FREAKING CHAINSAW SLAM they made the new animation so good, where's the weight and power in DRKs animations? It's truly amazing how little thought it takes to play DRK and it feels just so bad from mobs not noticing you with the new dash, how my MP just is bottomed out, when you don't have a gauge OR Delirium you just have old ass Blood Weapon and they just give MP for that extra crappy Edge/Flood.

We've truly hit DRK rock bottom this expansion, I mean I know we've been slowly getting everything taken from our job since SB but holy kupo nuts how much more are they gonna take away at this point?

Hopefully they buff PLD to be right under GNB so I can go play that instead.

So out of curiosity I decided to do the math on how much GNB and PLD can out mitigate damage compared to DRK. I'm ignoring Ramparts, Reprisal, Arm's Length, and parry rates, also ignoring the passive block rate from PLD, for the sake of keeping the math simple. I've been using a 2 minute window, so let's keep using that. Here's how I am doing the math.

Every cumulative second of mit added together for how many seconds of total uptime the mit has within the 2 minute window I have been using. In this case if we end up at a number being a decimal (like 7.5) we are rounding down. Then divide it by every second in a 2 minute window (Divided by 120) to determine the average damage reduction, this should be a decent indicator of how much less damage the other tanks take in comparison, but I'm not 100% convinced this math will be actually accurate. since I am not calculating overlapped mits with diminishing returns I'm also not entirely sure how accurate it will be for actual damage reductions, but it should be a solid indicator of damage reduction differences between the tanks. I am leaving out Warrior because it's power comes from self healing and is the outlier for tanks whereas I feel GNB and PLD sustain and reductions are pretty solid standards. Also obviously pulls don't last 2 full minutes, but pulls this expansion have been beefier and have room for 2 minute burst windows in them, so the logic should apply even if the math doesn't.

For PLD if you consider you can HS once every 21s roughly, we're going to call it once every 25s since, like I said, it's only "roughly" every 21s and we want consistency here. 120/25 is 4.8 casts of HS, which is split between 4 seconds of 27.75% damage reduction (Remember, since it's 2 buffs it has diminishing returns on itself) and 4 more seconds of 15%. That's 4x4 each, so 16 and 16. Bulwark lasts 10 seconds and while it isn't a flat damage reduction, it's essentially 20% reduction for 10s on a 90s cooldown, so you can use it twice in a 2 minute window. So to sum it up: ((16*27.75)+(16*15)+(20*20))/120=9.03% Reduction

GNB is basically the same math but instead we change the 20% reduction on Bulwark for 10% reduction on Camouflage and raise its uptime (Ignoring Parry rate as we ignore PLD Passive block): ((16*27.75)+(16*15)+(40*10))/120=9.036% Reduction

DRK we will start with full charges of Oblation, meaning we can get 3 off in a 2 minute window, but outside of that that's the only thing we have for personal and unique mits. Then we do the math again for magic damage, knowing full well magic damage is so rare and you almost never would use Dark Mind off cooldown to any effect. First, physical damage. Since it's just 3 Oblation charges at 30 seconds of 10% reduction, this is easy: (10*30)/120=2.5% reduction.

Include Dark Mind, you can get 2 off since it has a 60 second cooldown. Still easy math here: ((10*30)+(20*20))/120=5.833%

Honestly this surprised me. I thought DRK would pull through in magic damage reduction with Dark Mind in a 2 minute window, but it looks like being the "Magic Damage Tank" isn't even actually happening when the math is said and done. Keep in mind, the actual disparity should be even larger after considering PLD Block and the Camouflage parry rate, but I don't really want to add the math for those steps. As I said, though, it would only increase that gap. In longer durations, DRK should catch up in magic damage reduction eventually because Dark Mind cooldown is 30s less than Bulwark and Camouflage, but honestly 2 minutes is already far too long to be holding a pull. I think technically DRK pulls a bigger average in a 1 minute window for magic damage as well, but I'm unsure because longer durations will start to show the weakness of Oblations longer cooldown. In pulls you are taking mixed damage at best so you're probably somewhere between the 2 averages, anyway, so I'm not convinced that the Dark Mind cooldown can even help it catch up. In fact, I'm quite convinced it can't when you consider the far superior cooldown of the even better cooldowns the other tanks get at level 82.

For clarity's sake, this math is basically saying that if over the course of 2 minutes 1,000,000 damage is applied to the tanks (Just using an easy to quantify number) in equal amounts of damage over each second (8,333 damage per second) the PLD reduces it by 83,666, GNB reduces it by 90,300 damage, and DRK reduces it by 25,000, or 58,333 if it's magical. This is without standard tank mits like the standard 40%, 20%, 10%, and 20% slow from Arm's Length that is basically 20% reduction as well, as those are standards and this math is intended to show the difference between tanks unique cooldowns.

So yeah pretty sure Oblation just isn't enough and TBN isn't as efficient as it looks at a glance when you consider the total HP Shielded is about equal to the total HP a PLD can restore within the same 2 minute window. In a scenario with constant incoming damage, healing is harder to calculate actual efficiency since overhealing is health not used that shielding doesn't suffer from, but at this difference does that even matter? I also calculated the healing without crits because that complicates the math a lot. I think we have 15% crit rates now without melds and about 150% crit potency and I'm not about to do that part of the math.

These numbers show that DRK isn't even succeeding at the thing it was meant to succeed at. Oblation just isn't enough.

EDIT: Just did Expert as PLD and realized blocking is not 20% reduction, it's 16%, so to adjust the number, ((16×27.75)+(16×15)+(16×20))/120 =8.36% or reducing 83,666 from 1,000,000 damage over 2 minutes.

dark knight is so bad i leveled the job as first tank level 100 but bro i never bother buying gear it is just a scuffed version of warrior.. i mean comparing dark knight vs warrior it is disrespectful to warrior

I thought about making another thread to make it more center stage but I'll put it my general thought or feedback here instead.

I'm honestly shocked you somehow managed to make it feel worse to play than before, I didn't think we could go any lower.

Let me get the good out of the way:

• The Delirium combo abilities look cool, even Quietus got a glow up.
• Disesteem also looks cool, doesn't really add much to Living Shadow, but it's there. We still don't really need to think about LS as a whole, though.
• Shadow Wall's upgrade is nice. We still need to rely on healers to live if we're doing big pulls, which I'm thankful stayed.

aaaand..that's about it for the good. Onto the criticism.

Look, I don't know who's in charge of Dark Knight but it's still just an unholy amalgamation of random abilities that just somehow manages to be playable and not eat itself alive. It's still an uninspired mechanically devoid mess.

• I'm not sure if it's an oversight or not but we can definitely feel the drop in mp per minute, especially for active TBN usage.
• Blood Gauge is still literally just a carbon copy of the Beast Gauge.
• Darkside still just kind of...exists? if your TBN's don't pop there's a high chance it can fall off.
• Living Shadow is still pretty forgettable, while Disesteem helps ever so slightly it doesn't really add much if anything outside of it being a GCD and not an oGCD, which isn't relevant to Living Shadow.
• Burst downtime is still woefully boring, and even in bursts it can get stale now. While the apm decrease while bursting is nice for more easily weaving defensives, you went too far with it in my opinion.

As I said before, job mechanics virtually don't exist, they haven't existed since Shadowbringers launched. Which, mind, feedback regarding this mechanically vacant mess of a job has existed since ShB as well.

I'm far past the point of "Just wait and see" or "wait till next expansion" It's been 5 years since shadowbringers launched, this is the third expansion now.

We don't need less mp per minute, we need MORE. We don't say MP management doesn't exist anymore just to be overdramatic. Decreasing the mp per minute doesn't suddenly fix what was lost or what it was. It's still just making sure it doesn't go below a certain threshold.

What I desire is active MP management. Actual resource management. Edge of Shadow and Flood of Shadow are boring abilities by design, and Darkside is..well..oh right we rarely if ever need to actually think about it.

If you want to bring more individuality to jobs, I've got some spitball suggestions for DRK.

You already have framework for it. You gave what's essentially Dark Arts 2.0 to a healer and if you think I'm swapping mains to Sage just because it has it you're out of your mind.

Give us more combo enders. Give them effects we need to maintain, give us a weaponskill slot that changes to different weaponskills based on which enders we used. Make DA empower said weaponskills or alter them. Go wild.

Give us more MP per minute. Like, enough to make it feel like we actually need to maintain it with skills. Revamp Blood Price to cost Darkside or Blood Gauge and it in turn allow us to leech MP for every weaponskill landed. No, I don't mean like Blood Weapon now. I mean for every mob hit. While you're at it, make Blood Weapon's effect do the same, like it used to. Make the Blood Gauge have interactions with MP like it did in Stormblood if you decide to keep it at all.

Make maintaining Darkside not an absolute snore or completely forgettable. I don't care if it's reverted back to Heavensward where it falls off if your MP ticks to 0 but it doesn't drain it(like in StB), or you give us an action like Scourge on the GCD that lets us maintain it.

Dot interaction (again Scourge) and give us some DoT interaction with Salt and Darkness that makes it spread to all enemies hit.

You already have all that you need whether it's something that you removed (which is a long list) or what we have now. The world is your oyster. Please use it and your creativity. I want this bit where DRK is the punching bag to end. DRK was a selling point for me back when I joined (mid 2017) and it's actually miserable at this point to see it keep getting lower and it's at the point where I'm just getting apathetic. I don't care if it's bottom tank dps or top tank dps. I just want it to be more fun and enjoyable to play.

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Originally Posted by Zairava

You already have framework for it. You gave what's essentially Dark Arts 2.0 to a healer and if you think I'm swapping mains to Sage just because it has it you're out of your mind.

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Let's make a list

>Dark Arts 2.0 is on Sage
>Scourge 2.0 is on GNB
>Plunge was removed, replaced with non-damage, and WAR has 3
>Low Blow potency was removed, given to all tanks
>Reprisal potency was removed, given to all tanks
>Dark Dance was removed, reworked to remove evasion and just reduce damage, given to GNB
>Sole Survivor was removed and other tanks were given self heals in that patch, we have one now but every tank got something else, too, which still sets DRK behind
>TBN Kept DRK in an okay spot defensively, but the other tanks got their answers to it that were significantly superior to TNB
>Dark Passenger was removed, but given back to us as Shadowbringer, but without the Dark Arts component and without the blind. (Blinding enemies could be a cool way to buff DRK defensive abilities in pulls maybe? PLD gets block, DRK gets... Darkness? IDK just a thought)

TBN should consume Darkside time, too. Thought that since they reworked Darkside, it would make it interesting and give interactivity to your Darkside timer that you always overcap on.

Math boy again...

Let's take that 1,000,000 damage over 2 minutes and see how it fares after everything is brought through the ringer full scope. Let's assume you are using short cd personals as an overlap to other cooldowns, using it off cooldown on your own. This will cause diminishing returns in this 2 minute window, so we need to do math a few times here but I've already established the equation. You can Ramparts first to make the cd work for you into Reprisal Into the 40% and cycle another Reprisal and another Ramparts into this mix, you can use Arm's Length (Calculated as 20% due to the slow effect) once to fill in any gap. All tanks can fit in 2 other gaps with their personal mits, so we can just do basic tank cooldowns and simply add the effect of personals, then add the effect of short cd personals, then in the same order subtract those percentages from the beginning number starting at the base value and using the modified number to simulate diminishing returns for short cd personals. Dark Knight, however, has to fill in its gaps with Oblation and suffers less diminishing returns than the others. For PLD and GNB I will again ignore passive blocking and Camouflage parry rate.

Base tank cooldowns: ((10×30)+(20×40)+(20×15)+(40×15))÷120=16.666%

2 Bulwarks: 2.666%

PLD should be 19.333%

2 Camos: 3.333%

GNB should be 19.999%

Now factor these into the 1,000,000 damage figure. PLD: reduces by 193,333 totaling 806,667 | GNB reduces by 199,999 totaling 800,001

Using 25s on Shelltron the math is the same as with GNB so we do this and apply to both. HS and HoC would reduce by 5.7%

5.7% of 806,667 is 45,980 meaning PLD damage reduction with diminished returns is 760,686 (Rounded to the nearest whole number) from PLD

5.7% of 800,001 is 45,600 meaning GNB damage reduction with diminished returns is 754,401 (Rounded to the nearest whole number) from GNB

Now DRK can probably execute the entire defensive rotation without overlapping so we just add Oblation to one instance then add both Oblation and Dark Mind to a second and calculate both.

Start with Oblation at 2.5% add it to the regular cooldowns and come up with 19.1666, reducing damage by 191,666 from the base 1,000,000 damage totaling 808,334 damage taken. Now add Dark Mind, 20% at 20s total in a 2 minute window, an additional 3.333%, or an additional 33,333 from the 1,000,000 total. 775001 damage taken. Still MORE damage taken than the others even with magic, and again, you are somewhere inbetween anyway since it's usually mixed damage in pulls.

So let's factor in healing. At ilvl 696 my 1000 potency Clemency heals for a rough average of 32000 health, so if we add all the potency over the 2 minute window and take a 1 potency heal, which would be 32.

PLD healing from Holy Circle is once every 3 GCD's, so we do 120/2.5 to determine the amount of GCD's there are then we divide the result by 3 to see how many Holy Circles we get and multiply that by the healing potency. It's 16 Holy Circles, so 6400 cure potency. Imperator can be used to twice in a 2 minute window, so we add it in with 400 potency on each set of 4 for an additional 3200 healing, however since these are 8 GCD's we adjust and take away 3 Holy Circle potencies. 8,400 potency so far, but now we factor in HS, assuming you take every tick of healing from it before refreshing and use at every opportunity in a sensible way. That's 5 HS at 1200 potency each for 6000 additional potency. That's 14,400 potency healing in a 2 minute window for a total of 460,800 without crits or Ramparts buffing.

GNB was already established earlier as 7200 over 2 minutes for a total of 230,400 healing.

But how much does DRK shield? in 120 seconds you can use TBN 8 times. 25% of that same ilvl health is 41,798 value. Multiply this by the amount of TBNs in a single 2 minute window, which is of course 8, but the last TBN happens on the 2 minute mark and subsequently happens outside our parameters making 7, and we get 292,586 shielding.

With these numbers if we apply both this leaves...

DRK and a remainder of 481,965.
GNB with a remainder of 524,001.
PLD with a remainder of 299,886.

Interestingly this means on paper GNB should put more stress on healers, but it doesn't. My theory about this is that GNB has longer durations for cooldowns so regen effects and Kardia/Fairy heals are enough to keep a steady maintenance. Basically GNB mitigation is more stable and less noticeable and higher in cumulative value, but DRK has TBN fall off and runs out of cooldowns and their heath spikes down, it's less stable and more erratic causing large dips even though DRK is reducing damage by a greater amount. I cannot be certain of this, but it is curious nobody thinks GNB sustain is a problem. It could have something to do with how I simulated diminishing returns as well, it should in practice be a larger damage reduction value from HoC but it shouldn't be so much that it makes a huge difference. Perhaps it has more to do with the timing of the healing from HoC as well, but I don't think raw math can calculate why DRK feels so much weaker. The theory I'd put my money behind is that the healing crit rate really effects it, which should be possible to calculate by isolating the value of heals that are critting and multiply them by the crit modifier, but the idea of augmenting chance into this irks me, especially with overheal being real.

This is why I think DRK would be fine if Oblation had a small 100 potency heal for 12 seconds and Dark Mind worked just fine.

EDIT Okay so tank crit rates in my ilvl should be 15%ish and I need to know. Crits are definitely about 150% healing (tested with Clemency) so now I have to do this, too...

Take PLD healing of 473,600 and calculate 15% at 71,040. This is the value that would have crit on average, amplify by 150% by multiplying this by 1.5 and subtract the 71,040 or just multiply by .5 and we have 35,520 additional healing, healing for 509,120.

Same process for GNB and get 17280 additional healing making 247,680 healing still leaving a larger discrepancy than DRK has. Crit healing is not responsible for the difference in feel. My guess is it's the consistency of damage reduction making it easier to heal them.

EDIT: Technically I think the 8th TBN falls on the 120s mark so the number should also be lower by 1 TBN if we're being fair, but also I should have taken away 3 Holy Circle casts instead of 2, so the healing should be 400 less potency as well, but this changes very little for how the numbers fare, changes adjusted. Just pointing that out now. A possibility to explain the GNB feeling tankier is the 50% parry rate for a collective 40s over that 2 minutes is probably doing a lot more work than I had assumed and I'd be curious to know more behind the scenes in the game how Parry and Block rates are determined (Does 50% in Camo mean my 10% parry rate becomes 15 or does it become 60? Pretty sure it's the latter but cannot confirm very easily, will require testing.). The other possibility for the discrepancy in tankiness from GNB to DRK is that healing always, well, heals damage that's been done, and DRK can't actually heal damage that has been done outside a 1 minute and 2 minute cd, so in those gaps the DRK takes damage that just sits there until healed where GNB has a regen effect on the most of the time. We should be able to see this in WAR as well since it also has similar damage reduction values to DRK (BW is better for reduction than Oblation by a long shot, but no other unique damage reduction tool, just healing) but WAR can heal for such absurd amounts that it doesn't really matter what their damage reduction even is. A third factor could be that DRK does have to drop defensives sometimes, especially if you do choose to stack some, so that damage all comes in at once and drops the DRK lower faster than the GNB who has a more steady drop rate, allowing for more time to heal the damage instead of requiring a lot of fast paced heals for a short time.

Lol dude lay off. TBN is literally the best mitigation in the game and the reason Dark was the best boss tank for most of EW. The problem is we got screwed on mana regen, less mana = less tbn = significantly less mitigation and less dps.

Right now Gunbreaker continues to be the best tank DPS, as it was in EW, and might have been in ShB too I don't recall. Either way everything past that is meaningless. Best Tank DPS = optimal for all savage as a second tank.
Paladin currently has the best mitigation, which means they are the easiest to keep alive. Best mitigation = best main tank for savage.

Warrior is in the same place it was in EW, great is newb friendly dungeon, not great in the hard content. Self heals don't matter in savage. Dark sadly went from being probably the toughest dungeon tank but great in savage to just being sub optimal all around. But again, if we get our mp regen back that will help with this considerably.

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Originally Posted by Karkarov

Lol dude lay off. TBN is literally the best mitigation in the game and the reason Dark was the best boss tank for most of EW.

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This statement has been false for years.

Anyone else feel the Delrium>Scarlet Delrium+Comeuppance+Torcleaver feels like a weaker version of the Confitieor combo?