4.3 Dark Knight Feedback

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Originally Posted by TouchandFeel

I believe you may have misunderstood what I meant in regards to Delirium.

I was saying that it would have everything that it currently has and also place a buff on the player that increases the additional potency from DA.

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You are correct, I did miss that you were still extending the use of blood weapon. In which case it is not a nerf but I don't think it is a huge buff to burst damage, at least not so high as to be meaningful. Personally, I like the idea of longer duration of blood weapon over adding a small amount of burst. However, I do like Lyth's suggestion about double applying dark arts.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

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My issues with the idea that Lyth presented is that by turning Delirium into just a boosted Blood Weapon a la Berserk/Inner Release, it actually removes an ability from our kit which I would prefer to avoid for the most part as I feel that the DRK kit was already trimmed from too much with SB.

Also it leaves the under-performing Blood Price in an even worse spot than it currently is since Delirium would no longer affect it.

Additionally, the "double DA" aspect is effectively the same as what I proposed with increasing the DA potency boost, just with it being a +100% boost (while abolishing any gains from the current Delirium) as opposed to the numbers I just put out there as examples.
As I stated, the numbers I threw out earlier as examples were low-balled and what I personally would prefer would be a DA potency boost of around 50%, so a normally +140 potency boost would become a +210 potency boost when buffed by Delirium.


In regards to the duration, while I put the lowball of 10s out there, I feel that somewhere around 10s-15s would be fair, so maybe 12s like Requiescat?

So basically +50% to the potency boost from DA for 10-15s (12s?), +10s to Blood Weapon (2s more than now), +15s to Blood Price (1s less than now) and 2400 MP restored instantly for a cost of 50 Blood every 80s.

Although I still would like to see some adjustment to the DRK recast timers as the 40s/80s recasts for Blood Price/Weapon and Delirium are just a bit odd as to how they line up with the recasts of similar abilities on other jobs as well as party buff windows.

Anyways, I believe you, Lyth and I are in agreement as to wanting a change to Delirium so that it feels more impactful and creates a stronger potential for boost damage by increasing the strength of DA while under its effect, we just disagree on how exactly to go about achieving that.

Personally i still don't see the reason DRK should have a burst phase. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I'd rather see DRK be the smoother, more streamlined and consistent damage dealing tank.
Sure that would then mean in some fights DRK is outclassed DPS'd by WAR's (IR) and PLD's (requieche) burst phases, but I feel like that's already the case with how DRK still has Dark Mind.

Make the interplay between the skills more meaningful, like with WAR's kit. Level out the MP costs and ability timers so we don't have these odd "well, this skill returns a percentage of the MP needed to use another skill," "this still has a duration/recast that makes it hard to align with party buffs/cooldowns," et al. Unrestrict certain actions from being used within certain conditions where it's peers face no such lockout to their own abilities (PLD can FoF any time, WAR is a half argument with skills tied to Defiance, others to Deliverance, yet those skills still mesh with the overall rest of the job's kit).

Stop trying to force double-weaving, for the love of god. I know I'm preaching to the wind since the game's main demo is the japanese playerbase, which has amazing ping/latency on the JP servers, but in this day and age I don't feel like that's a just argument to make anymore for why you don't take into account the ping of regions besides your home when your product is sold far beyond your home.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I think Sole Survivor is fantastic as it is. The resource gain is nice, but the really interesting part is the timed heal.

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The only thing I'd change about new SS is shortening the duration to 10 seconds. I understand the 15 seconds were there to give some leeway when it still required the target KO, but I think it could be reduced now that we always get something out of it. Still, it was a very nice change.

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I do think that having it cleanse Walking Dead would be a nice addition.

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SS being a 120 seconds cd would completely remove the downside of Living Dead, given you choose to save it for it. I believe it essentially reducing the healing requirement to 80% is good enough. That said, LD could maybe use a QoL change of being removed when encounter ends. Not for raiding, just to make it a bit more usable in dungeons and solo.

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At the very least, I do want to see some sort of a UI change to Living Dead that shows the amount of healing still required.

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An easy way to solve this issue would be changing Walking Dead's "can't be killed" effect to an actual damage invulnerability. It would be a slight buff, but you'd still have to get down to 1hp and heal through all of it. Main perk would be that your hp bar would give healers a clear indicator of how much healing is still required and thus help utilizing the skill better without using Benediction.

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The other issue that springs to mind is that Dark Passenger is still just shy of being dps neutral in single target because of Slashing, but I personally think the solution to this is to keep it as it is for now, and just get rid of those awful 100% uptime buffs (Slashing/Piercing) in the next expansion.

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While I agree slashing/piercing debuffs should be removed at some point, we could at least get DP changed to slashing damage for now.

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Originally Posted by WhyAmIHere

Personally i still don't see the reason DRK should have a burst phase. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I'd rather see DRK be the smoother, more streamlined and consistent damage dealing tank.
Sure that would then mean in some fights DRK is outclassed DPS'd by WAR's (IR) and PLD's (requieche) burst phases, but I feel like that's already the case with how DRK still has Dark Mind.

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I personally agree. I don't want a traditional burst phase on DRK in the fashion of IR and Req, I feel that makes them different. The only thing I'd change in that respect would be to make them outdamage the other two since they don't do anything for the party

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Originally Posted by InfiniDragon

I personally agree. I don't want a traditional burst phase on DRK in the fashion of IR and Req, I feel that makes them different. The only thing I'd change in that respect would be to make them outdamage the other two since they don't do anything for the party

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The main issue with this is that nearly every other class in the game is designed around a burst phase. And with the meta being to perfectly line up all party buffs with Trick Attack, the lack of a burst phase only serves to further exacerbate the DPS gaps we currently have. I am not at all in favor of homogenization, but many of the mechanics in this game greatly reward jobs with burst DPS potential.

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Originally Posted by Tex_Mex

the lack of a burst phase only serves to further exacerbate the DPS gaps we currently have. I am not at all in favor of homogenization, but many of the mechanics in this game greatly reward jobs with burst DPS potential.

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Couldn't have said it better myself. If just about every class in the game has a burst phase and their main DPS output comes from maximizing that burst with raid buffs, then DRK should be no exception. One could argue that Carve and Spit is DRK's "burst" but you're not breaking from the monotony of using your combo repeatedly unlike with PLD and WAR's burst phases. Bursts not only help a job to do more damage when done right, but it's also fun to do something else instead in your rotation.

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Originally Posted by Saeno

Couldn't have said it better myself. If just about every class in the game has a burst phase and their main DPS output comes from maximizing that burst with raid buffs, then DRK should be no exception. One could argue that Carve and Spit is DRK's "burst" but you're not breaking from the monotony of using your combo repeatedly unlike with PLD and WAR's burst phases. Bursts not only help a job to do more damage when done right, but it's also fun to do something else instead in your rotation.

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The difference between DRK and most of the other jobs is that you choose when your burst phase is. You pool mana and blood, as much as possible without overcap, to unleash everything during raid boosts.

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Originally Posted by Saeno

If just about every class in the game has a burst phase and their main DPS output comes from maximizing that burst with raid buffs, then DRK should be no exception.

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Why do you want all jobs to revolve around the same concept ? If other tanks have burst phases, it would in fact help DRK to be different, provided it has a higher DPS output in the long run. Burst phases are useful when you have a small window to skip a specific mechanic, or when you have a tight DPS check, or an add...so even with a smaller overall DPS output, a burst tank is still a valuable asset.

I can't remember who suggested it, but it could be interesting to have a burst DPS tank, a steady DPS tank and a raid-DPS tank.

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Originally Posted by Megguido

The difference between DRK and most of the other jobs is that you choose when your burst phase is. You pool mana and blood, as much as possible without overcap, to unleash everything during raid boosts.

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I'd posit that such is not fully true due to a couple of factors and the interplay between them.

First is the size of the resource pools, they are really quite small in regard to the number of actual usable amounts fit within the whole pool, being 2 uses per full Blood Pool and ~4 DA/TBN uses for a full MP pool.

Second is the speed and cadence in which you gain these resources. DRK gains Blood and MP in two ways, actively in large chunks through the usage of abilities such as Syphon Strike and breaking TBN and then in the more passive slow trickle through things like the Blood gain from Soul Eater and Salted Earth. With both of these working in tandem, the resource gain for DRK is much faster and less controlled than jobs like PLD and WAR which results in the situation where the moment you are hitting a full pool of MP or Blood you are pretty much guaranteed to be losing resource gain and overcapping.

Because of these two factors it leads to it usually being best to not try to pool your resources at all and to try to use them up as much as possible, with the exception of sometimes leaving a TBN-sized cushion for MP, simply because you want to keep your resources low enough that you don't run into the danger of overcapping.

DRK also gets no additional passive bonuses for pooling resources like WAR does with the Beast Gauge, so there is no real incentive to pool resources versus using them up as quickly as you can and so it basically becomes a game of resource limbo where you see how low you can go without toppling over.

Unfortunately this design runs pretty counter to being able to pool up resources to create your own burst phases. You can sort of do it, but the amount of potential overall gain that you currently get from it is likely minimal in comparison to normal usage, especially considering the likelihood of overcapping from trying to fill up your resource pools.

While I too am overall against excessive homogenization of jobs, I realize that there are certain things that have to, or at least should be, present across the board and with the way that combat is designed in this game, burst dps and burst phases are an integral part of that design and therefore one of those things that needs to be factored in to the way the damage-dealing aspect of jobs should be designed.

I will say though that they could make the concept of pooling your resources to be able to create your own burst phases possible on DRK and could do it relatively easily by increasing the size of the resource pools so that there is room to let the pools fill up more to be saved for the right time and not be caught in the current cycle of trying to empty them out as fast as possible that we have now.
That is something that I would be perfectly happy with seeing as a solution to provide DRK with some way to have burst potential, but if they went that route I would still like to see something done with Delirium to make it feel more impactful to use.
In fact that may be the best way to implement burst potential for the job without creating a hard-line burst phase in the basic rotation like WAR and PLD. You can pool and burst when needed while just spreading your resource use and damage otherwise.