Dark Knight under review: Feedback to the Developers and Community Team

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Gameplay
Recommendations:
-DRK relies on a lot of double weaves. Revise and shorten the animation locks on oGCDs, especially Dark Arts and Plunge.
-Consider making Dark Passenger a potency gain in single target, for variety.
-Make Dark Arts only expire on the next GCD, allowing you to activate both the oGCD before it as well as the GCD itself, rather than forcing you to sacrifice one for the other.

Situational Skills
Recommendations:
-Convert Sole Survivor into a HP/MP drain over time. Consider making mob death reset the cooldown to keep the timing element.
-Make the Souleater lifesteal stance independent. If the amount of healing from this bothers you, just make the lifesteal into a Dark Arts property, not a Grit property.
-Make Blood Weapon and Blood Price stance-independent. Consider just reworking Blood Price into something different, because it seems like you're unable to tune it simultaneously for both single target and AoE. It's pretty much worthless in single target.
-Consider removing either the MP cost or the GCD cost on Grit.
-Consider either removing the MP toggle cost on Darkside, or make the ability into a trait.

Burst
Recommendations:
-Rework Delirium. Remove the Blood cost. Consider merging Delirium and Blood Weapon (i.e. treat Delirium as an upgraded form of Blood Weapon). Consider having Delirium boost Dark Arts potency while active instead of just dumping an extra DA worth of MP into your pool.
-Increase the MP pool size relative to the cost of Dark Arts. If you are able to 'store' more Dark Arts, capping becomes less of an issue.

Balance and Identity
Recommendations:
-Shorten the animation lock on Plunge. Increase the range to at least parity with other gap closers. Consider adding in an enmity effect.
-Return Reprisal as a DRK job skill. Perhaps increase the recast to keep it in balance with the other party-wide defensives.
-Add an additional effect to Shadow Wall. It's very pretty, but very bland.
-Remove the healing penalty from Living Dead. Consider just having it negate both damage and healing instead, if you need to tie in a penalty.

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My two cents:


- Blood Price: Unlimited MP for the duration or breaks after absorbing 20% of DRKs MaxHP. When broken, gives 50 Blood.
- Dark Arts: Definitely think that this should be a stack resource to counter the MP overflow. (Have been having this thought after an exchange with a fellow forum member on another DRK thread a while back.)
- Quietus: Seriously needs a potency buff, the MP gain is not an equivalent offset considering the low potency it has.
- Plunge: I'd rather see it have a damage boost and a stun like MNKs OIP than an enmity addon.

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Originally Posted by Aniya_Estlihn

I'd hope so, but I am more bothered by the fact they wait till each new content update to release job changes;I probably should have clarified that. Once they're done tuning job changes for any class they should roll them out just like any other mid-patch hotfix.

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mmm yeah pretty true, im worried about that too, but for the other hand if we want a proper rework like the WAR one i think it will be worthy leave the devs have time to make the changes and test it for the 4.35 rather that just another "reduce the recast of X skill" now in a few days, but i dont think they need a lot of time to do that or yes? thats something i dont really know.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

-Remove the healing penalty from Living Dead. Consider just having it negate both damage and healing instead, if you need to tie in a penalty.

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Or maybe keep the initial effect + add big lifesteal under Walking Dead (+ a buff to overall damages actions)

Great write up +1 for me Lyth always love your posts <3

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

I love the ideas, however you would end up with DRK exceeding in DPS over two other tanks.

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And they probably should considering their lack of party support abilities. Unless they make Reprisal DRK exclusive again there's nothing in this write up that gives them an edge in party support (unless I missed it). Per the dev's own balance objectives - DRK needs to have more DPS to make up for lack of party utility.

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Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

And they probably should considering their lack of party support abilities. Unless they make Reprisal DRK exclusive again there's nothing in this write up that gives them an edge in party support (unless I missed it). Per the dev's own balance objectives - DRK needs to have more DPS to make up for lack of party utility.

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Yep totally agree on this DRK needs to have more DPS to make up for it's utility as it is just not in a great spot, I remember during A12S i'd be MTing during the time crystal phase I could: Delirium/Dark Dance then Reprisal the incoming laser on the group and provide so much mitigation while doing the damage that was necessary. Now it's the opposite we've lost so much and gained so little that even our personal DPS lacks in comparison with our toolkit.

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Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

And they probably should considering their lack of party support abilities. Unless they make Reprisal DRK exclusive again there's nothing in this write up that gives them an edge in party support (unless I missed it). Per the dev's own balance objectives - DRK needs to have more DPS to make up for lack of party utility.

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Utility is all situational, DPS is the biggest and the most important deal in this game.
With all those changes DRK will probably be able to sustain himself all alone against Sigma 1 and 2.

Soul eater drain on DPS stance, with enchanced dark arts and soul survivor along with TBN would make him tank on his own and deal more damage than other tanks. With skillspeed maxed out, this thing would be soooo broken to the bone. I cannot imagine DRK, healing himself for soul eater potency, with dark arts usable for SS and SE and soul survivor drain+dps at the same time.
There is reason why SE is taking babysteps in DRK balance, they dont want to break him and put him above warrior.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

Utility is all situational, DPS is the biggest and the most important deal in this game.
With all those changes DRK will probably be able to sustain himself all alone against Sigma 1 and 2.

Soul eater drain on DPS stance, with enchanced dark arts and soul survivor along with TBN would make him tank on his own and deal more damage than other tanks. With skillspeed maxed out, this thing would be soooo broken to the bone. I cannot imagine DRK, healing himself for soul eater potency, with dark arts usable for SS and SE and soul survivor drain+dps at the same time.
There is reason why SE is taking babysteps in DRK balance, they dont want to break him and put him above warrior.

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There are no numbers here, it isn't the point of this discussion. The proposed ideas may need number tweaking, but represent what the community sees as issues and what players could get behind as changes that they would want to see on Dark Knight. This is your second post pointing out that this could be a balance issue, but that is impossible to actually analyze without numbers. Tweaking may be involved on SE's part, but something like 25% healing on Soul Eater out of Grit would still feel alot better than 0% and would not be nearly as game breaking as you imply since with potency differences included this would be weaker than warrior's rotation self heal.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

There are no numbers here, it isn't the point of this discussion. The proposed ideas may need number tweaking, but represent what the community sees as issues and what players could get behind as changes that they would want to see on Dark Knight. This is your second post pointing out that this could be a balance issue, but that is impossible to actually analyze without numbers. Tweaking may be involved on SE's part, but something like 25% healing on Soul Eater out of Grit would still feel alot better than 0% and would not be nearly as game breaking as you imply since with potency differences included this would be weaker than warrior's rotation self heal.

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Don't mind him. He always does that in every thread. For some reason he thinks that any change will break DRK and make him completely OP. Of course most of the suggestions here are conceptual and we only will be able to say how it will impact DRK's DPS after we know more numbers. Also we all know that we won't have all of those changes implemented. It was pointed out almost every design problem that DRK has right now if the devs hear us and fix half of them it would already be something amazing.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

snip.

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why its a problem to DRK being above the other tanks on dps? why is a problem DRK have fluff mitigation in form of self healing like WAR with path?
i remember you souleater dont heal the full potency of the attack already so SE can balance that too, even if we end above WAR it will not break him, WAR have utility, WAR still have the best defensive kit and tank stance.

so tell me why its ok WAR dealt 200-400 more dps that the other 2 plus alll what they have but its not ok for DRK being on par and dealt more dps to have a niche?