Dark Knight Megathread

Hallowed Ground has mostly been considered the weakest of all the invulns going as far back as Heavensward, because the cooldown is so incredibly long that you're almost guaranteed to get one fewer use out of it in a given fight than any other invuln. The only thing it was ever really good for was that the actual 'incoming damage reduced to 0' will, occasionally, allow you to use it to bypass a mechanic that's still supposed to debuff you through LD or Holmgang - and Superbolide has eaten its lunch now.

I really think a lot of the discourse around invulns, and particularly around Living Dead, is completely off-base. In a vacuum, the healing requirement on Living Dead is not and never has been a particularly heavy burden. Despite all the histrionics you see whenever people talk about it, in any raid setting, even in a situation where things are kind of going sideways, it's pretty trivial to heal it off. The problem is only relative, when you compare it directly across to the other invulns and find that Holmgang is now strictly superior in every way (and, to a lesser extent, that Superbolide has just a few too many advantages over it for something that is only ever disadvantaged in fights with extremely specific durations that allow an extra use of LD over SB). The healing requirement doesn't need to be removed; it just needs to be respected.

I think if you moved LD down to a 240s cooldown, moved Holmgang up to a 300s cooldown, then squeezed SB and HG together so that Superbolide was at 330s and Hallowed at 360s, you would pretty much solve the balance equation, without having to resort to any more homogenization than we've already had inflicted on us.

Gonna clarify some things about Living Dead here, since that is being discussed actively currently, as I feel it's relevant to bring up just how much this ability sucks as a whole.


Upon activation, you enter into a state of Living Dead for Up to ten seconds.

If, at any point during those 10 seconds, you are hit by an attack that would have killed you, the following occurs.

Your status of Living Dead is immediately interrupted, and the effect ends.

You drop to 1 Hit Point, and now enter into a state of Walking Dead, for up to 10 seconds. You must be healed to 100% Max Hp Value, or you will die after 10 seconds.

To Elaborate on this: During those 10 seconds of Walking Dead, healers must heal you, for the total maximum HP recorded on your character sheet. You can take damage, that bit doesn't matter. So long as the healer meets your HP Max total, you won't die. So, if you have 250k max hp, so long as the healers throws out a total value of 250k healing in your direction, you won't die.

Now, here's the kicker.

Assuming the max value has been met, Walking Dead is now cleansed from you. Buuuuttttttt....you also lose your invuln.


This in turn, means the following scenario can happen.

You activate Living Dead. (I have a macro set up to blare out alarms with sound effects in party chat to warn healers that I am using it. Kind of messed up, if you ask me, that this is a necessity. But I digress... )

2 Seconds in, boss hits you and you would have died. Living Dead immediately ends, and you drop to 1 hp, and enter into a state of Walking Dead.

The healer throws out enough healing to reach your max hp value.

Walking Dead state now ends.

And so does your invuln

This means, effectively, that your entire invuln span could last literally all of 3 seconds. Sadly, I've had that happen on my own end several times where it lasted that long, since I run extremes with my Friends on Discord and warn them to be prepped for it's use.



Long and short is this. All of the other tanks always get the FULL benefits of their invuln.

Dark Knight is the only one that requires such, in my opinion, ridiculous rules to monitor for it's use, and we can lose it shortly after activation to boot.

While everyone's on the topic of Living Dead, I think you can keep the theme and make it a really good skill.

For starters, you should become invulnerable once you enter walking dead, as in you take no damage. Second, separate walking dead from the room mechanic by simply just placing Doom on your character along with the walking dead status. You become invulnerable for the duration of walking dead, can keep the invulnerable even if the Doom gets cleansed.

Would it be OP? I don't think so. You still have to get full cured or you die. I think it's a pretty good high risk high reward. You could say healing to full is easy, but you don't know how many times I've died to this bad skill because healers couldn't top me off even though they knew it was coming.

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Originally Posted by Dauntess

While everyone's on the topic of Living Dead, I think you can keep the theme and make it a really good skill.

For starters, you should become invulnerable once you enter walking dead, as in you take no damage. Second, separate walking dead from the room mechanic by simply just placing Doom on your character along with the walking dead status. You become invulnerable for the duration of walking dead, can keep the invulnerable even if the Doom gets cleansed.

Would it be OP? I don't think so. You still have to get full cured or you die. I think it's a pretty good high risk high reward. You could say healing to full is easy, but you don't know how many times I've died to this bad skill because healers couldn't top me off even though they knew it was coming.

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Doom mechanic, not room mechanic.

Honestly, I think the community's general opinion of DRK is way too low for what it really is. It can absolutely clear any content at minimum item level, TBN still gives our brains the good chemical, and now we stole GNB's DPS crown which is a neat brag. However "works" and "is good" are two separate concepts. People's main frustration, especially for healers, is the performance in dungeons and I think they could buff it's dungeon performance specifically by rolling back some 5.0 changes and twisting them a bit.

-Give it back the old function of Dark Arts, even if you give it a new name, and make it like Eukrasia
-Burn twice the mana on "Eukrasian" Flood of Shadow and it blinds enemies hit, dropping their accuracy
-Abyssal Drain has no recast to speak of, but an MP cost of maybe 1500 to just do damage or 4500 for the "Eukrasian" version to restore HP
-Where do we get all this MP? Bring back Blood Price, which restores MP based on number of hits received, doing very little for you in single target but keeping you nice and topped up on a wall to wall pull
-Players comfortable with current DRK's kit will ignore burning more MP for HP and take the DPS gain of more Floods, clearing dungeons even faster as a reward, and use the non drain version of abyssal drain to guarantee enmity of entire mobs as they sprint from wall to wall
-Bring back 3.X Delirium, again it can get a new name, but it was an alternate 3rd hit of your combo like Goring Blade or Storm's Eye but it debuffed the boss to do less magic damage. It was literally just Dark Missionary with potentially 100% uptime if you're willing to give up a bit of potency every few combos (and learned 26 levels earlier so syncing back in a roulette would suck less). Giving that back would act as a notional improvement to it's ability to tank with the flavor of also being beneficial to the whole party and satisfy people upset at the fact that it has only the 3 GCD combo buttons. Give it the Power Slash animation as a treat for old fans

Honestly though I would give up any of those changes to just get them to shuffle the level you learn certain abilities. Playing a Heavensward job in Heavensward content shouldn't feel this boring and gutted. Also not getting your party mitigation until Shadowbringers really hurts. Paladin get 1 of theirs in HW, and the other 2 get theirs during Stormblood. Also also, Unmend used to have a 30% chance to give you a free AoE spell, though it cost MP itself. Now that it's free, make it a 15 or 20% chance and there's your "Enhanced Unmend" instead of the Plunge thing

Here are my wishes fix for the new year:

- Rework delirium, im tired of spam bloodspiller the same way WAR spam fell cleave, no more clone mechanics on the job.
- Fix Blood weapon, make it true 10s of duration or just make it 5 stacks to make his execution less problematic, would love if the recast is halved to 30s too.
- Rework the whole Darkside structure, stop making it a buff that keep himself, make his Gauge something usefull we have to pay attention and not something pretty but useless on our screen.
- Sinergy betwen our skills, make our skills feel conected somehow like only MP skills build Blood and blood skills grant extra MP or Allow the use of new weaponskills that grant more MP.
- Re-purpose living shadow, make it grant a 3-5% extra damage to all our weaponskills or upgrade our weapon skills so we execute an special combo or something that make his duration feel more than being damage over time without any interaction with and by result make his representation on the Darkside gauge being usefull.
- Re-estructure the skills learning order so DRK learn early a usefull defensive buff before lvl 70 and make it better at those levels, make it learn stalwart soul way more early so we don't spend 72 levels spaming unleash at the same bring Dark missionary early like the rest of the tanks.
- Do something to Dark mind, the skill is really useless in practically most of the content, make it evolve to obliation or grant it a healing effect, just anything neutrat so we can use it more.
- Do something to the downtime of the job, is the worst gameplay experience of the game and is basiaclly the phase where DRK spend most of the time, doing only souleater combo for 45s is not fun.
- Do something with salted earth, his execution is worse and more limited.
- Rework Livind dead or grant tools to dealt with walking dead by ourself once for all please.
- More weaponskills, make Shadowbringer a weaponskill or bring back older ones, scourge, Power slash, anything that breack the enless souleater spam boredorm.
- Make all oGCD being part or contribute on something, make them being a proc of something or add effects that make them be more that simple skills that offers nothing but low/flat damage (Plunge, Carve and spit, Abyssal drain, salted earth, shadowbringer).
- Delete plunge and Living shadow's traits and make new ones that actually offer something more than just numbers up or extremly niche and useless effects, add true gameplay effects.
- Make TBN 100% grant Dark arts when the shield is consume by time or by breaking it and add a new defensive effect like a regen if the shield is succesfully breaked.
- And the most important one, have some real direction on the job, make it have unique gameplay mechanics, stop leaving it with just a combo and a bunch of fluff oGCD and a buff that keep hilmself, make his gauge mean something, make his skills feel conected make the job evolve with each expansion like BLM, DRG, PLD, RDM, ect, ect, make DRK tecnical and unique again.

I really will apreciate if DRK is rewoked and fixes all this points, happy new year all, for a better DRK for all.

DRK is a joke that has been beaten death, raised from the dead, and beaten again. Rpr exacerbated the joke to new levels of fuck you and if given mitigation, would make DRK utterly pointless. Stop putting the laziest procrastinator in charge of it who gets drunk every night and spits out some last minute bullshit. I don't care about a dps increase, it's a tank, not a dps. The reward for playing everything right should not be the bare minimum of what a tank is supposed to do. The pvp buff DRK got post SHB would make healers not hate us entirely. I want to play DRK and PLD interchangeably and as equals, but DRK is inferior as all hell and I can't bring myself to punish the healer (especially if it's a Sage or Scholar).

They had 6+ years to decide if they wanted to change LD. Despite all the negative feedback around it. I dont expect any changes to it anytime soon. If anything we should be striving for change we know can happen such as Blood weapon, sustain, dark mind and TBN.

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Originally Posted by Derio

They had 6+ years to decide if they wanted to change LD. Despite all the negative feedback around it. I dont expect any changes to it anytime soon. If anything we should be striving for change we know can happen such as Blood weapon, sustain, dark mind and TBN.

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I'm praying usage numbers are below acceptable limits (for once) and DRK finally just gets a rework.

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Originally Posted by WhyAmIHere

I'm praying usage numbers are below acceptable limits (for once) and DRK finally just gets a rework.

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Should be, DRK is the least played by over 40k compared to WAR, 20k compared to GNB. If this doesn't say they're doing something wrong, I don't know what will.

Take this with a grain of salt, as this is just coming from FFLogs.

https://i.imgur.com/ZTXpnMi.png