Dark Knight Megathread

The direction they're going with DRK doesn't feel me with much hope of them doing anything to actually fix the complaints players have had with ShB DRK. Its more accessible sure but it lost a lot of its fun factor and basically ruined what most old DRK mains liked about the job. If ShB DRK is anything to go by, they'll dumb down the job even more come Endwalker.

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Originally Posted by Keagian

The direction they're going with DRK doesn't feel me with much hope of them doing anything to actually fix the complaints players have had with ShB DRK. Its more accessible sure but it lost a lot of its fun factor and basically ruined what most old DRK mains liked about the job. If ShB DRK is anything to go by, they'll dumb down the job even more come Endwalker.

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Yea can't wait to have our single 1-2-3 combo (heck that's still too many buttons for some of yall) and one ogcd. I'm hyped.

Far too many people equate complexity and challenge.

HW DRK wasn't engaging because it was complex. It was engaging because it was a fast, uptime-focused job. Hit stuff as it comes off cooldown, keep scourge running, and keep your MP in an appropriate range. Simple enough. But it was the fights and the mechanics that kept it exciting and fresh. It doesn't take much to create a mechanical skill differential.

The Stormblood iteration was more 'complex'. You had the unnecessary addition of a second resource meter to manage. There were different potency trade-offs between blood and MP. You had more unnecessarily forced double weaves. Yet it was widely disliked. At the end of the day, it was slower, more clunky, and more ineffectual. And worst of all, it just wasn't fun.

What I want to play is a tank that is just purely uptime focused. Stay glued to the boss. Use movement tools (gap closer/gap extender/blink) to dance from target to target. Baseline haste with high APM. Minimal burst, maximum sustain, every GCD counts. Pretty much any degree of challenge that you want should just come naturally out of fight design.

Defensively, I want revenge procs and design that rewards a thorough knowledge of the boss' damage patterns. That knowledge is one of the few things that differentiates tank gameplay from melee dps. I also want cooldown management to be a thing again, and I think the best solution is to just remove invulns from the game. It's pretty much the best way to fix Living Dead.

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Originally Posted by Keagian

The direction they're going with DRK doesn't feel me with much hope of them doing anything to actually fix the complaints players have had with ShB DRK. Its more accessible sure but it lost a lot of its fun factor and basically ruined what most old DRK mains liked about the job. If ShB DRK is anything to go by, they'll dumb down the job even more come Endwalker.

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I highly doubt you can dumb down this job any more. I can say with 90% certainty that they won't, they would have to do something outright insane for this job to get more dumb. I'm talking, delete the blood gauge-level nonsense. Then again, SE tried to delete Energy Drain off SCH with no replacement, we lost Haste with no replacement, so maybe that's not TOO far-fetched.

I digress. When you're at the absolute rock bottom of the entire game in terms of interesting gameplay mechanics, you got two options. Either you move nowhere, or you go up. We have no GCDs to remove. We have two (technically three?) very limited MP and Blood spenders. We have a resource economy that is strictly limited and time-gated to prevent people from using too many skills. I think if Salted Earth was removed most people would be happy, not like it does anything useful anymore. The only real thing they can easily mess with on a design perspective without throwing "successful" ShB DRK in the conceptual trashcan is Darkside and Dark Arts, and both of those things are wasted potential at best, and outright non-mechanics at worst.

I have a vague IDEA of where they are going with the job, but for a Level 80 job, what we have right now is barely a Level 70 on other jobs, it is a skeleton, a framework of a job. It never should have released this basic, this empty. There's zero skill expression, there's no reason for someone to say "Yeah, I main DRK." and actually feel good about it, outside of that stupid TBN crutch. There needs to be more, or people are just going to keep saying, "Eh, but TBN right?

Wish more people would talk about how truly screwed tanks got this entire expansion. I can't get as hyped for the Endwalker as I would've been otherwise because I'm viewing the game through the lens of a jaded DRK main. Really hoping the Job Action trailer will change that, and I think it will, if they finally give DRK more things than they take away for once.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

What I want to play is a tank that is just purely uptime focused. Stay glued to the boss.

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I like the idea, but, isn't that effectively an identity based predominantly on a far-worse-than-average restriction -- on, a weakness?

Granted, we could say the same for Monk, and it kicked ass until they decided to move away from that weakness... I guess my concern is more that, nowadays, how would one sell that idea (to those other than veteran Monks), given that we've gone the way of even gutting job identities as needed to placate those who'd complain about exactly this kind of weakness, or any identity based upon it?

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Use movement tools (gap closer/gap extender/blink) to dance from target to target. Baseline haste with high APM. Minimal burst, maximum sustain, every GCD counts.

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Damn that sounds fun, though. (Even if it's exactly how I pictured... Gunbreaker, instead, while I've always thought of DRK as deserving to be the job with the most deliberate and rapid changes in pace.)

I can agree a lot with Lyth's above comment... Not quite my own preference, but I like how it reads, and while I will no longer play the current Dark Knight, I would for certain play that...

My own selfish desire is for Dark Knight to be more like the Dark Warrior.. not WAR Clone, I mean a fantasy subclass archtype from a few decades ago,
or at the least, I want FFXIV's Dark Knight to be a remaster improvement of the original 3.x version, that also more resembles the Dark Knight as it did appear in other FF games of the FF franchise.

It would also interest me a lot to see the Dark Knight be the full sustain, little burst, "Speed" type of the Tanks, whether that be literal low-GCD speed,
or better than that, the illusion of speed; through constant oGCD weaves and the always-active thrill of full sustain attacks, instead of being held back by "just wait for the burst" and "it is all in the burst".

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Originally Posted by Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai

I can agree a lot with Lyth's above comment... Not quite my own preference, but I like how it reads, and while I will no longer play the current Dark Knight, I would for certain play that...

My own selfish desire is for Dark Knight to be more like the Dark Warrior.. not WAR Clone, I mean a fantasy subclass archtype from a few decades ago,
or at the least, I want FFXIV's Dark Knight to be a remaster improvement of the original 3.x version, that also more resembles the Dark Knight as it did appear in other FF games of the FF franchise.

It would also interest me a lot to see the Dark Knight be the full sustain, little burst, "Speed" type of the Tanks, whether that be literal low-GCD speed,
or better than that, the illusion of speed; through constant oGCD weaves and the always-active thrill of full sustain attacks, instead of being held back by "just wait for the burst" and "it is all in the burst".

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Contrary to how greatswords are depicted in most media, they would've been reasonably fast weapons (as were most tbh, can't really afford to be slow in a fight) since 1) they were heavy, but not unreasonably so 2) being a two-handed weapon meant more control and leverage. Hypothetically, if the other tanks (particularly WAR and GNB) didn't exist I could've seen DRK being a speedy glass cannon, able to sustain itself not through defence but life leech (steal it from WAR) and other skills of the sort

They didnt even make LD new player friendly. I dont think dark mind will be adjusted either. Hopefully they will at least fix blood weapon and replace salted earth with an AOE version of scourage.

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Originally Posted by Tsiron

Contrary to how greatswords are depicted in most media, they would've been reasonably fast weapons (as were most tbh, can't really afford to be slow in a fight) since 1) they were heavy, but not unreasonably so 2) being a two-handed weapon meant more control and leverage. Hypothetically, if the other tanks (particularly WAR and GNB) didn't exist I could've seen DRK being a speedy glass cannon, able to sustain itself not through defence but life leech (steal it from WAR) and other skills of the sort

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A spadone, montante, zweihander, etc., can be deceptively fast--especially when maintaining momentum--but that's a far cry from the "greatswords" we typically see wielded here by most FF iterations of DRK.

Historically, FF's Dark Knight job has always centered iconically on slow but seriously meaty hits, more in keeping with temporary bursts of (magical) strength by which to use otherwise unfeasible weapons.

That would be the case, yeh... My own thoughts are along the lines of FFXIV's Dark Knight takes those Dark Magic enhancements, and puts the inhumane strength into fast and constant sustain, instead of slow and heavy burst.
Wield that GreatSword like no normal mortal ever could, with a speed that defies reason and sense.

What I meant by FFXIV's Dark Knight more to resemble other Dark Knight versions across the FF franchise, was a reference to the self-sacrificial Blood Magic. A lot of Dark Knight versions sacrifice their own HP for power, and it would interest me to see FFXIV Dark Knight use that kind of self-sacrificial Blood Magic, dare to spend the HP bar as a resource.

Dark Knight could also have strong self-healing to sustain the risk and reward, or.. since the Dev Team insists that Healers heal more and DPS less,
then Dark Knight could just have this high heal-demand that forces Healers to heal more often.