Dark Knight Megathread

I mean most complains come from DRK in casual content. We all know they do suffer there compared to the other tanks and this needs to be adressed. I think that is where most people agree.
Some take it so far to say that DRK is in a bad spot in general, which is not entirely true. DRK does really well in raids TBN is as strong as ever because the shield is huge. Living dead is suffering and inferior to the other tank invulns, always has been and needs a change, like if you die let Fray take your spot, standing on the spot you would've died and take the hits for you, class fantasy saved.

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Originally Posted by Atreides

I mean most complains come from DRK in casual content. We all know they do suffer there compared to the other tanks and this needs to be adressed. I think that is where most people agree.
Some take it so far to say that DRK is in a bad spot in general, which is not entirely true. DRK does really well in raids TBN is as strong as ever because the shield is huge. Living dead is suffering and inferior to the other tank invulns, always has been and needs a change.

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While that could possibly be true, the vast majority of the players are doing the casual content. It's dangerous territory to ignore the vast amount of the community for the sake of the minority that are pushing for World first etc

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Originally Posted by Archwizard

Exactly this!

No dev wastes time, money and resources making a job they hate and just want to demolish, much less make it a posterboy for an expansion and add a new job to the same role in that time.

At worst, they think their experiments with the job have been successful; feel free to dispel those notions as they come with actionable feedback. Even if they wouldn't revert an expansion's worth of changes, you can still offer suggestions on how to build on or adjust what they have.

But they wouldn't try to make it worse. That would actually be a waste of their time.

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It is funny that you mention this, because in ShB, DRK got, despite being the Posterboy, completely outshined by GNB which was not only a new Tank to the Rooster, but also advertised in a very flashy way by Tankred in the Trailer.

And to add Salt (and Darkness) to injury, Reaper also feels like at least half of its Toolkit was suppoest to be in the dreamed DRK rework everyone was hoping for, only for Squeenix to change their mind by thinking "these new Skills are so good, we might as well make it a new Job!", and lo and behold, Reaper was born, from a DRK corpse who failed his Living Dead.

Honestly, speedrunners opinions shouldn't be listened to too much. A job can be broken, they'll say it's fine if it's DPS is the highest.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

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Restating a complaint doesn't alter its merit.

While you can't expect anything of a damage balancing patch, you're just seeing the symptoms of a deeper problem of the development team that doesn't engage with player concerns. They seem happy enough to ignore many years worth of feedback about issues in Living Dead's design, for example, as long as it stays out of sight in these relatively obscure forums. But if you look at the influencer front, it's always 'Oh, Square Enix is really receptive to player feedback, their development team enjoys playing various jobs in their free time and directly talks to the playerbase to stay in the know.' That's a nice ideal to sell, especially if they're willing to put in the effort to live up to it. But sooner or later that bubble will burst.

When Warcraft was at its peak, their class balance team regularly made blue posts on their own forums. One of the things that really impressed me about Koji Fox on first impression back in ARR was seeing him take the time to make lore posts directly on the forums and interact with people. I know that nowadays that level of interaction from devs is impossible in games, with every bit of communication probably needing to be triple checked and filtered before being released. But I do see smaller game devs who have more to lose spend a lot more time answering player questions and talking about game design philosophy behind balance decisions. I hope that SE revises its communications strategy with the playerbase, because this current approach won't retain players in the long term. A revolving door approach only lasts for so long before even prospective players catch wind of trouble.

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Originally Posted by Atreides

I mean most complains come from DRK in casual content. We all know they do suffer there compared to the other tanks and this needs to be adressed. I think that is where most people agree.
Some take it so far to say that DRK is in a bad spot in general, which is not entirely true. DRK does really well in raids TBN is as strong as ever because the shield is huge. Living dead is suffering and inferior to the other tank invulns, always has been and needs a change, like if you die let Fray take your spot, standing on the spot you would've died and take the hits for you, class fantasy saved.

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Totally agree if we are just talking about viability. The biggest problem is wall to wall in dungeons, right? Unlink c&s from AD. Make AD a gcd with a mana cost and done. That doesn’t make them a sustain tank bcs it does nothing for single target. And as so many have said dungeons aren’t real content - there opinions, not mine.

Hell, you might even be able to cleanse walking dead like this.

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Originally Posted by Archwizard

Exactly this!

No dev wastes time, money and resources making a job they hate and just want to demolish, much less make it a posterboy for an expansion and add a new job to the same role in that time.

At worst, they think their experiments with the job have been successful; feel free to dispel those notions as they come with actionable feedback. Even if they wouldn't revert an expansion's worth of changes, you can still offer suggestions on how to build on or adjust what they have.

But they wouldn't try to make it worse. That would actually be a waste of their time.

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From my point of view the Devs actually don't try to make DRK fun at all just balanced, they mess up so bad with it by strip him from his gameplay and his unique mechanics and skills that reverting and fixing all that mess would take aproximately the resources and the time of develop a new job from almost the scratch.

So what we have now? the worst designed job where no skill make sense and it's full of useless mechanics and heavely situational skills that are just a wasting of code space buuuut is balanced number wise, is very easy to see they don't actually wanna make DRK fun and cohesive job to play anymore, is just a job they just slap whatever thing on it and keep it as a balanced low manteinance trash design and don't care if that rise more complains, it's working right? we don't care about your feeling about the older versions.

Nothing I said inferred the devs are acting out of malice, or that I was expecting a full rework when they've just gone through hell trying to get these severs going, or any other kind of "crying".
All I said was I hope they don't keep kicking the can down the road, because the only thing they have said up to this point in reference to DRK is "no, we're not changing things" and "we didn't see any problems or complaints with this skill"

If we've been told anything different, I haven't heard it. I'm sick of waiting.

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Originally Posted by shao32

From my point of view the Devs actually don't try to make DRK fun at all just balanced, they mess up so bad with it by strip him from his gameplay and his unique mechanics and skills that reverting and fixing all that mess would take aproximately the resources and the time of develop a new job from almost the scratch.

So what we have now? the worst designed job where no skill make sense and it's full of useless mechanics and heavely situational skills that are just a wasting of code space buuuut is balanced number wise, is very easy to see they don't actually wanna make DRK fun and cohesive job to play anymore, is just a job they just slap whatever thing on it and keep it as a balanced low manteinance trash design and don't care if that rise more complains, it's working right? we don't care about your feeling about the older versions.

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I believe this is correct. It's so focused on homogenization and balance DRK cannot have it's own identity. All tanks for example if 100k DPS(bloated number) was the average they all must be doing around 100k. We will say that PLD/WAR do 100k, GNB 101k and DRK 102k but on average all Tanks are balanced across the board to do 100k DPS. So on average for the hardest content you'll have DRK maybe clearing 10 to 20 seconds faster?

I get the game is about damage but Tanks should be about defensives, mitigation and sustain and it's very clear that DRK is underwhelming on that front.

I mean if the other 3 Tanks only did about 100k average DPS and DRK was pumping out 120k DPS I could say yeah you know what DRK is weak defensively because it puts out uunga buunga damage like a BLM or SAM. And it would be much more forgivable.

But that's not the case. I just miss the high risk high reward style that came with Heavensward. Right now it's high risk low reward.

And you can argue that back in 3.0 after you built a enmity lead you could drop stance and have 20% boosted damage and end your typical 8 minute boss fight in 4 minutes instead. Very rewarding for high play.

And I think Reaper still has higher overall sustain with Bloodbath? Like the Arcane Crest nerf didn't even mean a thing. 50 potency less big whoop. 250 less potency over 5 ticks won't be missed. 20 seconds of Bloodbath is a lot of burst heals given most attacks Reaper has is physical damage including Avatar oGCDs with the exception of Gluttony and spells.

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

Honestly, speedrunners opinions shouldn't be listened to too much. A job can be broken, they'll say it's fine if it's DPS is the highest.

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It be fine if that was the direction they wanted to go for DRK, design it to be the high risk damage tank. And I'd be fine with it if that was the clear direction they wanted to design towards.
But the problem I'm seeing is DRK being highest damage isn't intended, hell I doubt it was even something they considered. Its a fluke and feels like a byproduct of the class having what...10 different oGCD skills that aren't even related to its central mechanics? I feel like we just accidentially hit a critical mass of "how many ogcds can a job have before its damage is the best", and not some brilliant design effort.

It really feels like an accident and not some decision or guiding direction for the job. Otherwise...why does the high damage tank have an invul linked to healing when we have the self heal tank who just has one that doesn't let its health drop to 0 on a lower cooldown to boot? (and no i am not saying give living dead to WAR I wouldn't wish that on anyone). And why does it have two buffs specifically for blocking magic damage? Whats that got to do with big number or job functionality?