Dark Knight Megathread

II: What does Dark Knight have now that it can call it's own?

From playing all the tanks enough to understand the general "gist" of what each one is trying to emphasize. Dark knight unfortunately has only a handful things it can call it's own right now. The first is The Blackest Night, the Targeted Mitigation tool that rewards proactive mitigation in the form of a refund to it's MP cost, and is an absolute centerpiece of the Dark Knight toolbox.

The second thing is Esteem, Dark Knight's Simulacrum. a pet-based damage over time ability meant to be a force multiplier and call into play one of Dark Knight's most defining story traits. This one in particular is a win for the developers as it's effectively a dot that doesn't actually clog the debuff bar on the opponent's status. Overall it's a real crowd pleaser, and it's pretty damn good at what it's job is.

Finally we have the less flashy aspects, Dark knight is still the only tank with a two stage burst phase rotation, and one where meter management actually matters even in it's "Warrior but not Warrior" interpretation. It sounds bad, but mechanically Dark Knight has much room for expression still, there's a reason why it still keeps being a favorite of world first clears. The second being that it has the most off global weaving of all the tanks.

III: Where do we go from here?
Ultimately I personally think dark knight has four possible futures we could delve into to for the class. two of which are promising, and two which are less exciting but effective.

The first path the role design team could focus on for DRK is to focus on one of Dark Knight's biggest star players, Esteem. Dark knight could use Living Shadow as a form of job maintenance to stand out from the crowd. Instead of being a Burst Phase Tank, Dark Knight could use it's rotations to maintain Living Shadow on the field, The blood gauge could be repurposed into an Esteem Meter, and using MP on moves like Bloodspiller and Quietus could go to keeping this gauge filled, while we maintain our primary damage buff through Edge of Darkness and Flood of Shadow normally used to maintain Darkside. Naturally this would mean overall potency would drop across the board as Esteem would be effectively doubling it with his continued presence, skill expression can still be maintained by balancing your Esteem maintenance and Darkside maintenance with other damage abilities.

The second path could be a focus on the theme of retaliation, and emphasize more on the retaliatory nature of The Blackest Night and the themes of endurance from spells like Living Dead. Likewise we could amusingly enough steal from warrior Vengeance and utilize the ability to turn boss auto attacks into more damage. The Blackest Night would be your primary means of extra damage, and we could expand that concept of absorption into reflection with party wide retaliation skills, such as Dark Missionary converting raid wide damage into MP or more directly reflecting it back to the target. There's a lot of ways to transform dark's defensive cooldowns into offensive bonuses for aggressive and proactive mitigation. giving it a nice contrast to the reactive nature of Paladin with healing and parrying. The Blood gauge or the Darkside timer could instead be turned into a The Blackest Night HP counter for determining how much more damage it needs to break. We've already seen how sheilds breaking can be turned into a class mechanic with Sage. Perhaps Dark Knight could be our first Barrier Tank to contrast with Warrior's Regeneration.

The Third Path is to bring back Dark Arts, using Dark Arts as a tool to modify and enhance existing skills at the cost of resource to make our abilities more interesting. Sound familiar? this is what Gunbreaker does with Continuation. We can however turn this into a plus if we could look at what we can enhance with Dark Arts, such as non damage spells like The Blackest Knight. If we're going to be a diet version of another tank, I would rather us be diet Gunbreaker

The Fourth path is to maintain current course, and keep levering on the emphasis on two stage burst with a smattering of GCDs to keep the rotation busy. This means though that Carve and Spit and Abyssal Drain need to be decoupled. And Enhanced Unmend needs far more than just a cooldown reduction to plunge, This wont cut it.

DRK just needs a party of Sages and they won't have sustain problems anymore.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...jjnwsh5481.png

I think its time for the swap myself. Just finished leveling PLD and the difference in versatility is just insane. I miss the old HW DRK the most, at least it had a solid core gameplay. Current DRK is just slam oGCDs in ur burst window for 6-7 GCDs then a solid 1-2-3 rotation. Has less self sustain and healing than GNB as well which makes absolutely no sense. They put so much focus on Living Shadow making your 88 and 90 traits buff it and its kind of a dumb mechanic, like its literally just a DoT with a fancy animation. Enhanced Unmend as well is nice on paper but doesn't change game play really or add any extra plunges at all.

Currently DRK has;

Lowest Single Target DPS

Lowest Self Sustain/Healing

Second to last on AoE Damage

Worst big defensive

Outside of TBN, which is not as amazing in practice as it is on paper, the worst defensives

Minimal raid utility outside a raidwide 10% magic dmg reduction

Oblation is not a good spell, its 2 oGCDs other tanks literally get for 1


They should add lifesteal to Quietus, Bloodspiller and CnS as well as make it so everytime we use one of the 3, it reduces the cooldown of Shadowbringer. Ditch Oblation and make it so Dark Missionary gives a small amount party wide lifesteal for its effect. This would get the DRK in line with its thematic sense, the "leech" tank, whereas Paladins have always been the buff/heal tank. It keeps them polar opposites and maintains their individual identity. Also they should make Living Shadow copy your abilties, but with lower potency, its literally called "Living Shadow" but it doesn't shadow you at all, its just a DoT with a fancy animation.

Just bumping the thread again to throw in the 2 cents that I've been repeating in here for some time. Add healing to Blood abilities and to delirium. Also give Carve n Spit some healing potency akin to Abyssal Drain and add charges to Blood weapon so I can actually hit 5 gcds during aoe or single target without melding a stupid amount of Skill Speed on A TANK.

For adding to the discussion, my own meddling on the class with the actual toolkit gives me 2 clear impressions 1st button bloat 2nd conflicts and duplicated skills, how I'll give a fix without a full rework, merging skills and using procs, example: 1st remove carve and spit and roll it into abyss drain give the treatment of 500 pot on single target 50% less on surrounding and upping the healing to the damage done, 2nd combining blood weapon and delirium 10s removing the delirium charges and just make it to be able to spam 4 quietus or blood spiller on necessity, 3rd turning shadowbringer into a proc activation on abyss drain and blood weapon when you use either you get 1 stack of shadowbringer which will overwrite flood of shadow and edge of shadow until spent, with that you get 3 less skills in bars and remove duplicate/conflictive skills improving the general flow

Gotta admit though.

As disappointed as i am, people are slightly overreacting, atleast the non-tank players.

Yes, the invuln is still trash.

Yes, dark knight still isnt braindead for healers like all the other tanks.

Yes, DRK might have weaknesses in dungeons.

But I know for a fact, that if Healers know how to play their class properly, and the Tank is mitigating right, you literally wont have that much issues.
Everytime i read stuff like "DRK needs self-heal" or "DRK should have a different skill like TankXYZ has" i really dont feel so good anymore, to say the least.

Ever heard of class-diversity? DRK is in the worst state is have ever been in, but if it was really really really bad, they would probably know and I much rather play an underrated class, than a class that is no longer itself.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dracosavarian

Well, that effectively seals my decision. I’ll complete Endwalker, and my journey as a Dark Knight, at the conclusion of story. After that, I am abandoning Drk as my Main and switching over to Reaper. Until they fix the problems with Dark Knight, I will not be utilizing the job.

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I swapped to Gunbreaker and enjoy it so much.

It's literally the worst but not unplayable. Cool.