DRK Consolidated Feedback Thread

Raid wise i'm more familiar with Dark Knight.

I can tell Warrior has a lot more upside.

For all other content, I am using Warrior.

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Originally Posted by SplittingSkies

Hi Hi o/
I'm one of those people who haven't switched yet, and I think some of that can be put down to the fact that obviously, there are still some groups out there that don't follow the speed run meta religiously.
A lot of minorities are the ones who say "Play what you enjoy." or there some out there that don't want SE to think DRK has been completely snuffed out and everyone else is in favor of the other two.

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Hi, I’m one of the people who was asked to switch despite what I enjoy. However, I would not ask people to switch, but at this point I would have switched just from the lack of attention the job gets now.

There's no point in switching to PLD unless you speedrun, and speedrunners are really minority in the community. DPS meta will really make the biggest difference in the party vs tank meta, better to switch to PLD if your group speedruns AND already has the god comp. Any casual to midcore group without the DPS meta that asks you to switch from a tank class you enjoy should really take a good look in the mirror first.

It’s not only dps but also mitigation and utility. Paladin simply brings more in shielding and party mitigation.

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Originally Posted by akisya

There's no point in switching to PLD unless you speedrun, and speedrunners are really minority in the community. DPS meta will really make the biggest difference in the party vs tank meta, better to switch to PLD if your group speedruns AND already has the god comp. Any casual to midcore group without the DPS meta that asks you to switch from a tank class you enjoy should really take a good look in the mirror first.

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This so much.

Maybe I've just been fortunate. My group has never forced anyone to switch. In the past weve run 2x Brd+Nin No str melees. Ive been running as War throughout regardless of its status (2.0 shit version up till now). The only time we force anyone to switch is to maintain 2 tank, 2 heal, 1 melee, 1 ranged support, 2 anyDPS. We all play what we like, regardless of the balance because we realize that no minor (and lets keep some perspective, balance issues in this game are comparatively minor vs other games. People like to say 'unplayable' but that's honest hyperbole. All classes can clear content without excessive burdon. Just not speed clear/world 1st true balance). And some of our setups have been truly bad lol. Yet we still clear content. Everyone gets their dreadwyrm before echo. Were on track to also get V4 down this cycle. Maybe we could have made it a week earlier for bahamut 2 years ago. Whooptie friggin do. It gets done. You get your shinies. And you can enjoy it too without being under the heel of some arbitrary dumb meta.

I would never recommend changing jobs based on current balance. Play what you love. Master it so it doesn't matter. I suppose that's just my oldschool thinking. Keeping up every couple months with the current bandwagon balance changes is just silly imo. Between FFXI, StarCraft, League, dungeon crawlers, or whatever else ive played over the years, I find it much more satisfying to play what you actually enjoy instead of chasing the meta all over the place. Just because the pros do something doesn't mean you have to do it that way. You can be entirely successful at the regular level of play and play the style you enjoy without worrying about who gets 2% more this or 3% less that.

Just because things need to change doesn't mean you need to abandon the play you find fun. This isnt beastmaster in FFXI or something that is literally 'unplayable' for many events no matter how hard you try. The buff cycle comes and goes. Youll be on top and bottom and in the middle, but as long as they are all playable (within reason) then just do what you like. Screw what some gamer pro that spends the entire week doing speed runs to rank on the Logs List does. Doing 5% less damage or whatever doesn't ruin the game unless you let it.

I play drk and warrior side by side currently but I'd be a fool to choose drk over warrior for the current hard content. I enjoy drks power boosting playstyle more than being a fel cleave cannon. As a MT drk does not have enough emergency situation skills. War can instantly pop 2 different HP skills or even an inner beast for HP+mitigation. Been doing shinryu EX and as a drk I just find myself not being nearly as good or useful to the party but on warrior its a whole nother story. Self sustain on drk is a joke and I hope we don't have to wait till 5.0 to see changes. Hopefully they have just been experimenting with drk up till now to find something that works and will put it into a patch when they can.

My ideas, some of them have been brought up.

Sole Survivor: Places a debuff on the target. Every time the caster damages the mob, it restores 1% HP to the party. If the mob dies during the cooldown it will immediately give the caster 25 Blackblood. 12s Duration.

Dark Passenger: Remove the MP cost for the ability. Using Dark Arts increases potency to 140 and guarantees a critical hit.

The Blackest Night: Casts a shield around the user, or the party that absorbs 10%/20%. MP reduced. Using Dark Arts casts the shield on the entire party. 10% Damage absorption. If one of the shields are broken. Grants 50 Blackblood.

I'm 1 of those few people who will keep playing my favorite class to play under the condition that they fix all of the more noticeable problems with DRK that everyone all agrees on as well giving DRK the identity of the tank that it needs... both thematically and mechanically...

I've been thinking about ways to realistically change DRK for the better (aka no big rework that isn't happening until 5.0), and here are my thoughts. Would take any combination of these, all would be great but not necessarily needed:

Bloodspiller: Increase potency so it's the clear winner of how to spend Dark Arts outside of Carve and Spit in or out of Grit, and make it absorb a portion of the damage as HP (both in and out of Grit). This would act as our version of a Clemency or Equilibrium (just because SE took Mercy Stroke out does not mean Sole Survivor is a Clemency/Equilbrium, it's still Mercy Stroke lol) but we'd have access to it without DPS loss since it's part of the rotation, so balance the HP restore accordingly.

Dark Passenger: Add a 10% damage debuff to Dark Arts, make the Blind effect in the base version. Claire_Pendragon mentioned this also and it was my exact thought for it; it will give DRK utility, cover a hole in their defensive kit AND make DADP's high cost actually worth it.

Sole Survivor: No longer an enemy debuff, self buff instead. Gives HP and MP back like it did when you killed a target immediately, and adds a HP steal to all attacks akin to Bloodbath (but much more potent). Basically, a way for a DRK to attempt to save themselves/help healers in the Walking Dead state, and more fitting for the name of the skill as you would be more self sufficient while active. Increase the timer of the CD to compensate as it would be a pretty strong CD, I'm thinking 3 minutes.

The Blackest Night: 6-8 seconds on the shield (most folks agree 6 would be fair so I'll go with that), Dark Arts version shields the party.

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Originally Posted by Crater

The numbers for Shinryu are probably most telling; DRK has an 'advantage' in clear statistics for Omega since people used it for prog and many groups just stick with their prog strategy/compositions.

Right now PLD and WAR are the #1 and #2 most popular classes for Shinryu clears, with DRK sitting at about half the clears of either, which is a pretty piss-poor showing considering that Shinryu is actually a really "good" DRK fight with plenty of opportunity to use Dark Mind.

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The numbers you're referring to, for additional impact:

Warrior 170
Paladin 191
Dark Knight 87

Christ, that is awful.

What happens when you make 2/3 tanks have a party wide HP shield defensive skill and give a new primal that has lots of aoes and heal checks?

I wonder who in SE's staff thought that was a great idea for balancing tanks.

I remember in 1 interview they stated that they won't focus on adjusting all jobs at once anymore but actually focus on just a few per patch.
You could argue that unbalancing the tanks now won't have much of an impact as we are in an odd numbered patch and raid pogression is not a thing at the moment. But then you realize Coil Ultimate will be added in 2 weeks and that you can expect lot's of raid wide damage from it.
Let's see how this will work out.
As I'm not a savage raider anymore it doesn't impact me as much as others though I'm starting to lose trust in SE when it comes to balancing DRK with the other tanks.
I really wish to get some inside view of a developer on the topic.

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Originally Posted by akisya

What happens when you make 2/3 tanks have a party wide HP shield defensive skill and give a new primal that has lots of aoes and heal checks?

I wonder who in SE's staff thought that was a great idea for balancing tanks.

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This reminds me how bad TBN actually is, as a 'kit defining ability'. 15s is too long for some short large damage windows, but it can't be made more powerful because it is 15s, all while costing a large chunk of MP.

I found it useful for Akh Morn, but if it were 30s I would not have noticed the difference because I can only cast it once per Akh Morn, and for the most part his autos won't break the shield in the 5 second duration it is up.

It's like they balanced the skill as if it cost no MP at all.

I would prefer it if they up the cooldown between 20-35s, but make it always 20% on primary target (and gives blood when only the primary shield breaks), and give all allies within 10y a 10% shield, and increase the duration to 6-8s (up 1-3 seconds, depending on how long the cooldown becomes), just to compensate for lag and maybe allow bosses to get another auto attack within the duration.

Since 4.1 WAR also has a party defensive buff. Which leaves DRK with little utility aside from TBN. So I came with maybe Dark Passenger to change into a Party Defensive buff with 50 gauge cost instead of mana.

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Originally Posted by Crossu

Since 4.1 WAR also has a party defensive buff. Which leaves DRK with little utility aside from TBN. So I came with maybe Dark Passenger to change into a Party Defensive buff with 50 gauge cost instead of mana.

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I'd rather it be sole survivor, keep DP as an attack, have it use blood instead of mp.

DP can still be an attack with the lvl 70 trait of defense buff.

What do you all think about making dark passenger damage scale with our current hp. For example it could deal base 150 potency while at full hp, up 350 at 1 hp. Make it like a reverse spirits within

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

What do you all think about making dark passenger damage scale with our current hp. For example it could deal base 150 potency while at full hp, up 350 at 1 hp. Make it like a reverse spirits within

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Nah I'd make a separate skill called Minus Strike. A skill that does more damage based on missing percentage of HP. Dark Passenger aka Dark Wave has always been about doing damage to multiple enemies or rather all enemies in a encounter. Decent damage too.

Unfortunately the concept of minus strike is more or less keep HP low so you could dish out attacks that resulted in massive damage. So at one HP minus strike would deal 9999 damage each time it was used.

And minus strike is a rather new skill for Dark Knights only prominent in the Bravely Default series that uses the FF3/FF5 job system.

But alas this is XIV where the holy trinity and lolbalance is the metric for everything. And pushing out a crapton of damage that can't be controlled or scripted into a cookie cutter boring ass skill rotation is a big no no. Whatever.

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I'd also love to see passives akin to "See you in Hell" from BDFF as well. Where if the Dark Knight died it did AoE damage to all enemies in the encounter. Just imagine if the DRK died during Walking Dead and they blew up for 40k damage. It would be super fun.

But that seems to be the issue here. If something is made fun they generally take it away.

I would love to see character level and job mastery levels separated this way as you level up the job you get passives and skills pertaining to that job and make it feel rewarding for picking that class. Here they tie everything to the weapon. UGH! Infuriating!

I just updated my post on page 50 which is at the very bottom of the page for anyone interested in looking at it...

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Originally Posted by DRKoftheAzure

I just updated my post on page 50 which is at the very bottom of the page for anyone interested in looking at it...

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May wanna repost it as a quote

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Originally Posted by 347SPECTRE

May wanna repost it as a quote

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Unfortunately I can only go up to 1000 characters for whatever reason, even though I'm using browser and PC...

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Originally Posted by DRKoftheAzure

Unfortunately I can only go up to 1000 characters for whatever reason, even though I'm using browser and PC...

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initial posts sure, but you can post something and just edit it a second or two later and it can bypass that 1k limit.

I hate how posting on forums works with character limits and I need to bypass is somehow...

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Originally Posted by DRKoftheAzure

List of personal DRK changes:

• Hard Slash: Add Dark Arts potency of 300 and generates 1 blood
• Spinning Slash: Add Dark Arts combo potency of 350 and generates 3 blood
• Blood Weapon: Remove Grit restriction, add the effects of "increase damage dealt by 10%" and "convert physical damage dealt as HP" while also adding "Cannot be used with Blood Price" and reduce recast to 30 seconds. Grit effect would be "Ignores Grit damage dealt penalty"
• Power Slash: Add Dark Arts combo potency of 420 and add the effect "increase targets damage received by 10%." baseline with Dark Arts effect "Increase damage dealt by 10%" And generates 10 blood
• Syphon Strike: generates 3 blood.
• Blood Price: Remove Grit restriction, add the effect additions of Blood Weapon but with the effect of "increase HP recovery via healing magic by 10%" instead of "Increased damage dealt." Also add "Cannot be used with Blood Weapon." and reduce recast to 30 seconds. Grit effect would be the same as Blood Weapon
• Souleater: Make "convert physical damage into HP" baseline, have Dark Arts be "Increase damage dealt by 10%" and add Grit effect of "Reduce targets damage dealt by 10%"
• Dark Passenger: Change Dark Arts effect from inflict blind to "Reduces damage dealt by 10%"
• Dark Mind: Add "decrease physical vulnerability."
• Dark Arts: Remove "Dark Arts fades upon use" restriction on all effects that are affected by Dark Arts, remove timer on Dark Arts and add the effect "Darkside fades when MP reaches 0"
• NEW Weaponskill at level 49: Scourge Delirium, combos off of Syphon Strike with combo potency off 300 and Dark Arts combo potency 400 with Damage over time potency 50 for 30 seconds baseline effect with Dark arts effect of decreased targets damage dealt by 10%." and uses the Heavensward Delirium animation because it looks cool. Also have it generate 10 blood and 5 blood per DoT tick
• Abyssal Drain: increase potency to 150 and make "Convert Damage dealt into HP" baseline with Dark Arts potency of 350.
• Sole Survivor: add "increase targets damage recieved by 10%." Any enemies that would be nearby in 10yalms radius would be marked with Another Victim that lasts 30 seconds and Increases the damage they recieve for 30 seconds.
• Delirium: change name to "Blood Force" and change effect to "Restores HP and MP by 10%" with Dark Arts effect 20%.
• Quietus: change cost from Blood gauge to TP.
• The Blackest Night: Additional shield break effect "increase HP recovery via healing magic and damage dealt by 5% and decrease damage taken by 5%." Dark Arts effect of making it party/raid wide shield that lasts 10 seconds

These changes can be done in gradually so that way the devs don't have to work on JUST DRK.

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Going to leave this here since the thread it was in got super sidetracked.

The balance of tanks is appalling, especially given this is the expansion in which tank balance was to be given a priority. The problem is these promises were not delivered, what actually happened is one tank was buffed tremendously while the others were stripped of their utility while war had some of its utility restored.
Dark Knight is far out of balance with respect to the other two tanks and needs actual attention.

Mitigation: Boils down to two things:
1) TBN as a buff is too short. This needs to shield for at least 6 seconds and needs a mana cut of 600 mana.

2) Shadow Wall is a bad form of sentinel and and vengeance. There is no reason this should be on a 3 minute cooldown. It should either have a 2 minute cooldown or have an additional effect to justify the three minutes. This is not a new complaint, and its time someone actually did something other than ignore this request for 2 years.

DPS: We are behind both paladin and warrior while mitigating less and bring less utility to the team, while other classes got to keep their procs for blocking, ogcds, and dots and even received entirely new buffs and powerful skills, ours were stripped and the new skills do not make up the difference of what was lost.

1) Delirium is disappointing as a buff. On a two minute cool down this should double our damage output while also doubling the effects of blood price or blood weapon.

2) Dark Passenger is in a ridiculous state where most darks are taking it off their hotbars since they cannot justify the mana output for the damage and mitigation returns. Please cut the mana cost of this skill by half while not cutting the potency.

3) Our dps buffs blood weapon and blood price line up for every other party dps window. Please take 10 seconds off their cooldowns to give them better synergy with trick attack and other 1 minute buffs.

4) Bloodspiller potency should always be 140 potency above our average GCD to make TBN worthwhile. This is a no brainer.

Utility: TBN is only situationally useful at best, having one tank have a cost on a defensive utility while the other two can mitigate as much or more for free is a formula for pushing dark knight out of statics and pf. We need a party utility that actually brings something to the table.

1) Make sole survivor a party regen buff turning the parties dps into a HOT and mana refresh. This would pair well with the other tanks shields, while staying true to dark knight lore.

We see patch after patch of being ignored, or the only issues being fixed being bugs. People are already being asked to switch their mains for savage content, and the lack of attention will only make this worse. If this continues the only reasonable change to dark knight will be deleting the class since the people who main it will have switched or unsubbed, but I suppose that when that happens tanks can finally be balanced.

Well one way of looking at it bros... PLD got 4.0'd War got 4.1'd... Maybe drk is 4.2'd. One can only hope they are working on us this time. Pray to whatever god you believe in that we dont have to wait till 5.0 to make DRK great again.

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Originally Posted by Mycow8me

Well one way of looking at it bros... PLD got 4.0'd War got 4.1'd... Maybe drk is 4.2'd. One can only hope they are working on us this time. Pray to whatever god you believe in that we dont have to wait till 5.0 to make DRK great again.

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These kinds of buffs need to come in partial patches i.e. 4.15. Waiting for 4.2 pretty much rules out use of DRK in Ultimate, if it truly is as hard as they say, groups will want every last molecule of party mitgation and DPS they can get, and PLD/WAR is the comp that brings it. Too much happens in a patch for that.

Also I'd argue WAR got some pretty significant buffs/fixes (depending on your perspective) prior to 4.1 so perhaps there is hope that 4.2 isn't the waiting period.

Sorry for the double post, but I noticed the trend isn't slowing down:

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Originally Posted by Crater

The numbers for Shinryu are probably most telling; DRK has an 'advantage' in clear statistics for Omega since people used it for prog and many groups just stick with their prog strategy/compositions.

Right now PLD and WAR are the #1 and #2 most popular classes for Shinryu clears, with DRK sitting at about half the clears of either, which is a pretty piss-poor showing considering that Shinryu is actually a really "good" DRK fight with plenty of opportunity to use Dark Mind.

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

The numbers you're referring to, for additional impact:

Warrior 170
Paladin 191
Dark Knight 87

Christ, that is awful.

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Here's Syz with the weather! -Update to the FFXIV Tank Usage forecast:

Shinryu - 1 week:
*****
|Class|----------|DPS|-----|Max|----|Parses|
Warrior---------2,837.4---3,342.6----1,104
Paladin---------2,736.2---3,310.5----1,332
Dark Knight----2,630.4---3,213.4----523

Less than half the usage of WAR and just a shade over a 1/3rd the usage of PLD.

I mean, Yoshi did say "wait til raid," and we did. Maybe it wasn't the right one though.

Shinryu is a good fight, and is an opportunity to use Dark Mind. But there are so many better uses for WAR and PLD to shine with their group mitigation tools and overall higher DPS.

Yoshi did say wait until 4.1 for the additional changes but I think he was only talking about WAR since WAR did need some fixes.

But that leaves us back to unbalanced tank jobs.

Maybe we would get a response if we went to all the main cities and cast Salted Earth around the aetherytes.

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Originally Posted by 347SPECTRE

Maybe we would get a response if we went to all the main cities and cast Salted Earth around the aetherytes.

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Doubt it...

The only way we will possibly get a response is to keep threads like this going. It hasn't been too effective so far, but giving up and shutting up DEFINITELY will not get a response.

The thing with these devs is if you want a response they only look at statistics. The devs here just can't be bothered to feasibly communicate with their community on the official forums they made. Sad.

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Originally Posted by MagiusNecros

The thing with these devs is if you want a response they only look at statistics. The devs here just can't be bothered to feasibly communicate with their community on the official forums they made. Sad.

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Well if they're looking at statistics we're in luck because the statistics show us being in the gutter. Hell you could make a whole thread breaking down the statistics from 4.0's launch to now. I never wrote anything down, but I remember looking through fflogs for the exact moment at which WAR started surpassing DRK in usage, and I believe it was around the first week of August? DRK started out being used more than WAR, but was never far ahead, but maintained its lead up until late August. This was looking at 2-week intervals snapshotted from individual days, i.e August 15th and the preceding 2 weeks, August 16th and the preceding 2 weeks, and so on. At that point not only did WAR continue to in usage but DRK usage also saw a marked downward turn. Both were seeing about 20K+ parse uploads, and WAR continued to trend upwards of that, and DRK fell to about 18K over the next few 2-week intervals.

Just dipping through the forum pages, the last few weeks of July and into August was where we saw the biggest surplus of WAR feedback threads and replies on them. IDK, make of this what you will. Fix DRK SE.

For Omega Savage... Here is the period where people started using WAR more:
Warrior Aug 21 - Sep 4 65.3 68.7 24,690
Warrior Aug 20 - Sep 3 65.2 68.5 24,422
Warrior Aug 19 - Sep 2 65.1 68.5 24,252
Warrior Aug 18 - Sep 1 65.0 68.4 24,166
Warrior Aug 17 - Aug 31 64.9 67.8 23,988
Dark Knight Aug 21 - Sep 4 62.2 65.2 24,345
Dark Knight Aug 20 - Sep 3 62.2 65.2 24,215
Dark Knight Aug 19 - Sep 2 62.1 65.2 24,235
Dark Knight Aug 18 - Sep 1 62.2 65.2 24,201
Dark Knight Aug 17 - Aug 31 62.1 64.9 24,199

And leading up to the patch...
Warrior Sep 30 - Oct 14 66.6 70.9 25,408
Warrior Sep 29 - Oct 13 66.8 70.9 25,594
Warrior Sep 28 - Oct 12 67.0 70.2 25,729
Warrior Sep 27 - Oct 11 66.9 69.9 25,882
Dark Knight Sep 30 - Oct 14 61.9 65.5 19,281
Dark Knight Sep 29 - Oct 13 62.1 65.5 19,441
Dark Knight Sep 28 - Oct 12 62.2 65.1 19,506
Dark Knight Sep 27 - Oct 11 62.4 64.9 19,934

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Originally Posted by MagiusNecros

The thing with these devs is if you want a response they only look at statistics. The devs here just can't be bothered to feasibly communicate with their community on the official forums they made. Sad.

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Not so sure about that, we've got this ignored neat and tidy package of feedback compared to front pages being spammed with little complexity other than being upset. Seems like recognition is only out of a necessary response to outrage, the devs feel more like they fix things as a PR move than anything.

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Originally Posted by Kalocin

Not so sure about that, we've got this ignored neat and tidy package of feedback compared to front pages being spammed with little complexity other than being upset. Seems like recognition is only out of a necessary response to outrage, the devs feel more like they fix things as a PR move than anything.

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Metallica, Metallica, Track 2

Just becuse I have seen a few people say that dark knight complaints are only recent I went back to find the earliest complaint post I could find: June 1st found my answer. http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-in-Stormblood

We are over a week past 4.1; how frequently is dark being brought into raid settings compared to the other tanks in the past week?
WAR: 12,770
PLD: 16,117
DRK: 8,790

Every week it seems like we see less and less dark knights running savage content. Something needs to be done.

New raid is out and conditions for unlocking are going to be very difficult for DRK mains... Well DRK playerbase is definitely going to drop now because of the pre-requisites of unlocking Unending Coils of Bahamut in 1 week, ESPECIALLY if some DRK mains are trying to get into the Savage mode content...

I was expecting much from the 4.11... Just a few bug resolved and a new raid... Don't know what to think... It seems that the difficulty is higher and higher but Drk stand still... We need some serious power up if we want to be a match for other tanks