Core Issues With 4.x Dark Knight

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Yeah, read the tooltip : Deals additional damage with a potency of 75 after each auto-attack. Damage affected by weapon delay.
Or do the math...
The current weapon delay of 2.24 change the effective potency of SwOath by the same calculation of auto-attacks. Why should I use a value that can't even be used in real situation, since no Sword has a 3s delay ?

In real situaiton, SwOath with a 2.24 gives 56 potency to the additionnal attack, not 75.

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The bonus attack from SwOath is not calculated on the AA damage of the weapon, but on physical damage like a special attack.

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

See, right here is when it should have clicked that this is a topic for another thread, but instead you're poisoning the well in here. It has no bearing on a discussion of core issues with 4.x Dark Knight because it refers to core issues with 4.x tanking (if you even agree that this is an issue, which is far more open to debate than DRK needing several fixes/buffs). When you make such a topic a point of contention in a thread like this one, you dilute the discussion by bringing the other tanks and the meta into a discussion about a job's design in and of itself, which just derails the thread as you can plainly see.

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Yeah, sure...or maybe you could check who started the wrongful claim in the first place, for which I was only saying that it wouldn't benefit DRK even if it were true...

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Originally Posted by MauvaisOeil

The bonus attack from SwOath is not calculated on the AA damage of the weapon, but on physical damage like a special attack.

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The base potency is. But you're right, not the damage, which is exactly why you can add its potency to those of weapon skills instead of counting it with a different formula.

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

Back on topic...
Cursory overview of core issues as I see them:

*1. DPS
->Lowest sustained DPS, lowest burst DPS, no contribution to raid DPS, meaning having a DRK in your party is a 100% DPS loss assuming a given player can play WAR/PLD with an equal degree of skill or there is another player available that can do the same. Tank stance DPS is not a metric because it does not represent a measurable ceiling since sitting in tank stance for 100% of a fight (either by virtue of maintaining excessive mitigation that is not beneficial, or if mitigation is needed, by virtue of not utilizing swaps and thus giving both tanks equal DPS stance uptime) is essentially playing the job incorrectly, a situation around which we should not balance design decisions for any job or jobs, as that is how we got into this mess in the first place.

*2. Utility
->TBN as a utility is undertuned and cannot be accounted for by healers anymore than Parry investment could have been in 3.x
->A party is simply missing a massive amount of raid mitigation in the absence of either PLD or WAR.
->Tertiary or personal utilities (things like having high mobility, extra stuns, gap closers, CC, extra AoE or ranged DPS potential, etc.) were largely eradicated as a balancing metric between the tanks with the introduction of the CR ability system and new skills like Onslaught, essentially amounting to a healthy dose of homogenization.

3. Mitigation
->Reliance on defensive CDs tuned for spike damage to mitigate sustained damage.
->Piggy-backing off of the above, CDs are short in duration and mostly lengthy in recast.
->Mitigation outside of TBN is very poor, a symptom of balancing decisions intended to orbit TBN's design, which is problematic for reasons discussed in the resource management section.

4. Resource Management
->Blood gauge is poorly balanced by everything costing 50 gauge and no less.
->Conversion from Blood to Mana is on a 120s CD whereas the reverse conversion is on a 15s and entangled with a primary mitigation tool in TBN, meaning the choice is typically already made for us on our resource management via this ability as per whatever the current mitigation needs are at a given moment. In essence, in order to effectively utilize TBN at most basic level, we need to A. Need the mitigation, B. Have a surplus of mana, and C. have a shortage of Blood, which is FAR too many checkboxes to mark off every 15 seconds.
->Mana has been cemented as a standardized DPS resource whilst still being used to pay for mitigation; no other tank has this problem, in fact very few jobs in general have this problem.
->Blood gauge consumption is never a greater gain than an equivalent consumption of Mana, and occasionally is a loss, making "not capping out" the sole motivation for dumping the resource at all. The logic of its usage is circular.

*Mitigation and Resource Management are problems and are in many ways intertwined with DPS and Utility. However I have *'ed DPS and Utility due to these core issues representing a 100% loss to a group utilizing a DRK in lieu of either alternative, and therefore I believe these two areas are in the most dire need of addressing.

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This is a really good and on topic post, I agree that the first two issues are our biggest priority for fixing. From a design perspective I think that our resource management and dps are so closely tied that they could probably be combined into a single issue, but I can also see why you would list them separately for clarity.

What do you think about us generating less mana in dps stance over grit?

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

From a design perspective I think that our resource management and dps are so closely tied that they could probably be combined into a single issue, but I can also see why you would list them separately for clarity.

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So, in my opinion, DPS issues can be addressed by simple math and crunching the numbers. Its a numeric deficit. There is an incongruency between DPS<=>Mana due to the latter's usage by defensive abilities, and an incongruency between Mana<=>Blood due to potency values and huge discrepancies in opportunity to dump and/or convert these resources, which makes fixing resource management a bit more involved. TBN is a big smoking gun here. I guess the reason I wanted to list them separately is because I believe one can be completely fixed without touching the other and vice versa. You could trim costs and returns across the board, remove effects from certain abilities and apply them to others, and lower the CD/effects of things like Delirium and make Resource management much more fun, active, and enjoyable without actually netting an overall DPS gain.

Basically DPS can be fixed by raising or lowering numbers (like potencies or costs, respectively), whereas resource management can be fixed by simply rearranging/redistributing numbers, if that makes any sense.

That being said you could obviously introduce changes that would fix both in the same fell swoop, but at this point I'm considering every possible avenue and layout of potential changes and how they could be implemented with minimal unforeseen consequences, and I think the distinction between DPS and resource management in that context is actually of considerable importance.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

What do you think about us generating less mana in dps stance over grit?

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I don't think that we actually do, overall, considering the massive return of Blood Weapon. In 15s out of Grit with BW of spamming Syphon-Souleater we gain roughly 8500 mana, whereas in the same amount of time in Grit with BP and Syphons, we see something more like 5500 (roughly, again).

The additional mana from Grit-Syphon is only about 2/5ths of the overall gain from BW in a similar timeframe (BW/BP's 15s duration), which means that to be balanced in ST, BP would have to make up that remaining 3/5ths in the same window, which, HAhahaha... it isn't even remotely close to doing. In Heavensward, this is PRECISELY how it was balanced. If BP were brought up to about 720 mana per tick (rendering it equivalent to HW BP, about 1.5x a BW tick), then you would gain about 3600 mana in a 15s window, which combined with the 4800 mana from Grit Syphon, would equal out to about the gains from BW+Syphon out of Grit. Interestingly, without the buff to Syphon, HW BP didn't do this either. If you made BP proportionate to its HW values and also kept the SB Grit Syphon buff, THEN (and only then) our mana generation in Grit would be equivalent to our mana generation out of Grit. But obviously, SE has no idea how to balance this in AoE.

At this point I'm all for them just cutting the crap and making BP a vanilla refresh, which would instantaneously fix this problem, or perhaps applying the Mana return in much the same way as the Blood, where we get, say, 120 mana per instance of damage taken, and 500-600 per server tick. It honestly frustrates me in a very real, IRL sense to realize how obvious the solutions are to people PAYING for the game, but not to the people getting PAID for the game.

That being said, its a bad decision on SE's part as it robs them of a single controlled variable that is constant between stances. Any changes to Syphon or BW/BP or even Delirium now warrant an equal and opposing change to eachother which just opens up more points of failure or details that SE could miss when making adjustments (and miss them they almost assuredly will...)

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

I don't think that we actually do, overall, considering the massive return of Blood Weapon. In 15s out of Grit with BW of spamming Syphon-Souleater we gain roughly 8500 mana, whereas in the same amount of time in Grit with BP and Syphons, we see something more like 5500 (roughly, again).

The additional mana from Grit-Syphon is only about 2/5ths of the overall gain from BW in a similar timeframe (BW/BP's 15s duration), which means that to be balanced in ST, BP would have to make up that remaining 3/5ths in the same window, which, HAhahaha... it isn't even remotely close to doing. In Heavensward, this is PRECISELY how it was balanced. If BP were brought up to about 720 mana per tick (rendering it equivalent to HW BP, about 1.5x a BW tick), then you would gain about 3600 mana in a 15s window, which combined with the 4800 mana from Grit Syphon, would equal out to about the gains from BW+Syphon out of Grit. Interestingly, without the buff to Syphon, HW BP didn't do this either. If you made BP proportionate to its HW values and also kept the SB Grit Syphon buff, THEN (and only then) our mana generation in Grit would be equivalent to our mana generation out of Grit. But obviously, SE has no idea how to balance this in AoE.

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Looking at a 15 second window BW will hands down beat SS and BP, no contest. But over the full 40 second interval of the cooldown Siphon Strike and Blood weapon return about the same amount of mana, with blood price just being extra, or am I looking at this the wrong way?

Clearly it is very desireable to have all that mana front loaded, I'm not debating that; I tend to feel dark knight's issues stem from not being able to dark arts enough, so I tend to be a little biased towards resources.

I see what you mean there. That's something I didn't consider.

In a 40s window, assuming an average of 6 Syphon Strikes (spit-balling here, accounting for stray Bloodspillers and such):

Grit: 2400*6+(~600BP)=15000
No-Grit: 1200*6+(~6300BW)=13500

However, if we consider that maybe out of Grit, BW enabled you to squeeze an extra Syphon into that window, it becomes closer, at 15000:14700.

So sure... that's actually relatively balanced I suppose. Although I never really considered BP/BW/Syphon respective of Grit/No-Grit to be a huge issue for the job, even back at the beginning of 4.x's launch when it was such a shock to the system that the returns had been so wildly re-adjusted, it didn't really bother me much compared to the litany of other issues I was noticing. Basically, I personally don't consider it a "core issue" as it were.

That being said, there are other aspects of resource management that I feel DEFINITELY need changing, and changes there will likely trickle down into a need for changes to BP/BW/Syphon, as I touched on earlier by describing the lack of a static variable in MP regeneration that is consistently static between stances, with high uptime, unaffected by other points of failure in the design. But I think we're splitting hairs here.

Wouldn't mind Dark mind giving the party a magical shield when dark arted. dark passenger and sole survivor being useful outside of their niches would be good too. having more than one combo, and a larger blackblood toolkit would be nice as well.

can my edgy greatsword class not be physically painful to do any sort of content with?

It's hard for me to imagine any raid mitigation added to DRK that isn't *free*. Yes, a cost-free ability... ..radical concept for Dark Knight.

But having DA as an requirement on DM or TBN for raid mitigation is even more needlessly 2-step than confession stacks / lilies; more stress and DPS tax on a resource already stretched thin.

Just make it free. If from Dark Mind, then from base DM gives 10% DR to all nearby members. + old reprisal or some similar damage down debuff on target. Prefer not to see MP shoulder another responsibility,

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Originally Posted by Xenosan

Just make it free.

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Something free for DRK? Hydaelyn forefend.

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

Something free for DRK? Hydaelyn forefend.

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Yeah, a demonstration to the front door and exit.

Core Issue 1: Lackluster Toolkit Cohesion

Relative to Heavensward DRK or even the current WAR, many parts of the DRK toolkit feel slightly disjointed; very few of the tools seem to have a fluid presence across its gameflow. While 3.x DRK suffered from what might be called anti-synergy (which could still be considered a worthy trade-off so long as the sum of power across the toolkit would otherwise be overpowered, which many have argued to be the case when simultaneously taking magic and physical damage), Dark Arts at least had a broad presence, such that mana spent for offense meant reduced mana spendable on defense; this concept now sees more branches in Quietus and Bloodspiller, but these options feel largely redundant compared to the Dark Dance synergy lost, causing Dark Mind (our only surviving defensive DA-spender unless you count Abyssal Drain) to feel more tacky and punishing than it feels a integration of some unique and pervasive DRK mechanic.

To put it another way, DRK feels like one of the classes that has the greatest potential for enjoyable depth, even if limited to relatively few keys, and yet very little of that potential has been tapped into.


Core Issue 2: Especially high dependence on double-weave.

Though less an issue than in 3.x due to Bloodspiller and Quietus remaining on the global cooldown, and Delirium best being used on the global after BW (unless you would lose an AA over the duration by delaying to the latter half of the oGCD gap), the way DA's control has been implemented leaves it a frequent cause of necessary double-weaving, and now that the rate of DA has increased (outside of BP usage) that part has only gotten worse. Moreover, the need to enhance skills means that one is often potentially forced to delay an oGCD (DP or DM, generally) by a half-gap, and the game's netcode combined with the loss of oGCD queues on any desync can put DRK in a bind second only to NIN when a DA-consuming oGCD is followed by a DA-consuming GCD, which now account for all but two weaponskills.


Core Issue 3: Miscellaneous Instances of Relative Undertuning or Reduced Functionality

TBN sees relatively rare use, and is far from free. Its breadth of usability also faces anti-synergy with defensive tools. To a degree, this seems like it could add some desireable complexity to the job, but in actuality, it makes TBN a relatively poor choice on which to spend mana in a few too many situations. I don't know if it needs to see an adjustment to functionality or simple retuning, but it feels faintly off right now.

Similarly, DM is painfully costly to make more evenly powerful relative to the closest analogs in WAR and PLD's toolkits (which are far from clear even then).

Shadow Wall, worse still, stands as simply an inferior version of Sentinel or Vengeance. If it's being paid for via DM, then I have to ask what's covering its cost in physical mitigation and why DM is as expensive as it is, and if not... why? Why does it have the worst each of refresh speed and mitigation percentile, relative to its WAR/PLD counterparts?

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Though less an issue than in 3.x due to Bloodspiller and Quietus remaining on the global cooldown, and Delirium best being used on the global after BW (unless you would lose an AA over the duration by delaying to the latter half of the oGCD gap), the way DA's control has been implemented leaves it a frequent cause of necessary double-weaving, and now that the rate of DA has increased (outside of BP usage) that part has only gotten worse. Moreover, the need to enhance skills means that one is often potentially forced to delay an oGCD (DP or DM, generally) by a half-gap, and the game's netcode combined with the loss of oGCD queues on any desync can put DRK in a bind second only to NIN when a DA-consuming oGCD is followed by a DA-consuming GCD, which now account for all but two weaponskills.

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It breaks my heart, it really does. In HW double weaving was FUN. You felt fast and furious, hacking, slashing, spewing dark energy and kicking shit in the face. Those moments when all your oGCDs would come off recast at the same time and you could dump all of them like a ton of bricks. Brings a tear to me eye. Now its a bloody chore. Out with the pewpew and in with the QQ.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

TBN sees relatively rare use, and is far from free. Its breadth of usability also faces anti-synergy with defensive tools. To a degree, this seems like it could add some desireable complexity to the job, but in actuality, it makes TBN a relatively poor choice on which to spend mana in a few too many situations. I don't know if it needs to see an adjustment to functionality or simple retuning, but it feels faintly off right now.

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I personally am a huge advocate of indirectly adjusting TBN by reducing Blood Gauge costs. Bloodspiller/Quietus/Delirium are great and all, but none of them pack the punch to warrant a whopping 50% of any resource. Bloodspiller isn't like Fell Cleave, its not a massive gain over the nominal PPGCD, and there are no buff windows native to the job to fit it in, so there's really very little reason why it needs to cost 50 gauge. If it was less, TBN would feel better to use by proxy, I feel.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Shadow Wall, worse still, stands as simply an inferior version of Sentinel or Vengeance. If it's being paid for via DM, then I have to ask what's covering its cost in physical mitigation and why DM is as expensive as it is, and if not... why? Why does it have the worst each of refresh speed and mitigation percentile, relative to its WAR/PLD counterparts?

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I can really only furiously nod my head in agreement. Who thought it was a good idea for DRK to have only 2, ...TWO... T-W-O.... native cooldowns, that will mitigate physical damage, the overall most common form of incoming damage in the game by a landslide? Whoever it was, they need a bloody vacation. The CR options DRK is literally required to bring to close this wound are an almost insultingly obvious band-aid.

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

It breaks my heart, it really does. In HW double weaving was FUN. You felt fast and furious, hacking, slashing, spewing dark energy and kicking shit in the face. Those moments when all your oGCDs would come off recast at the same time and you could dump all of them like a ton of bricks. Brings a tear to me eye. Now its a bloody chore. Out with the pewpew and in with the QQ.

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This was one of the things that most surprised me going into 4.x. In 3.x, I had Low Blow proc after Low Blow proc to time in with usually on-cooldown Dark Passenger, meaning that I was double-weaving considerably more often (except during Grit Syphon + extended BP in mass AoE), and yet somehow it just felt a bit more satisfying, more... DRK, compared to what I'm hitting in 4.x. Maybe it was the "in your face" nature of Low Blow, or that our (imo) signature ability (DP) could still be used in single-target, idk, but it felt strangely divorced from what I was used to even when I'm forced into Grit and am getting massive returns from Delirium - Blood Price such that DA is filling up my oGCD almost as much with its DA spam. Our maybe it was just that I could more easily avoid spending my DA on a weaponskill, so I only really had to worry about DP coming off CD before my augmented skill to-be.

I've often considered how the DA might feel a little less clunky. For instance, if it was instead a trait that allowed any of the skills it would normally augment a secondary effect at mana-cost by making a temporary form of the skill or spell oGCD or of the ability available on cooldown, such that you could DA a Souleater to eat souls for a brief damage buff, DA after an AD for the self healing, DA after a DD/DM for spike enhanced usage of an already powerful ability, after a PS to activate, separately, that second shadow blast portion of the skill... That said, that would only fix the issue of feeling like your DA is being eaten up in unintended ways, much like NIN mudras during net desyncs, but that issue can be mostly passed over with practice alone. Double-weaving requires instead that simply DA, Plunge, and certain other oGCDs just have shorter animation locks.

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

I personally am a huge advocate of indirectly adjusting TBN by reducing Blood Gauge costs. Bloodspiller/Quietus/Delirium are great and all, but none of them pack the punch to warrant a whopping 50% of any resource. Bloodspiller isn't like Fell Cleave, its not a massive gain over the nominal PPGCD, and there are no buff windows native to the job to fit it in, so there's really very little reason why it needs to cost 50 gauge. If it was less, TBN would feel better to use by proxy, I feel.

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I don't actually mind that one TBN = 1 Blood skill, or that we can only hold exactly two of any of our Blood skill. It's simple and clean while still giving (in the later case) definitive urgency to avoid overcapping in combination with TBN, and while that wouldn't normally mean much to me, I just don't see Bloodspiller's giving, say, 125% of a Blood skill instead (giving 50 while each costs 4) would make a significant difference. Heck, there's probably a way for TBN to feel perfectly fine and function viably even if it gave no Blood, or even came at the cost of Blood instead of mana (though I do actually like the exchange of resources to whatever degree can make Blood=Mana=HP, so that would sadden me). That much is all in the tuning.

That being said, I don't see why TBN's Blood gains needs to be all or nothing so long as its tuned to a point where its use, even if restoring the 50 Blood, is situational. At that point it might as well generate resource continuously as it's consumed, or at the end of duration based on the portion consumed (no loss of urgency or need for pre-spending).

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

I can really only furiously nod my head in agreement. Who thought it was a good idea for DRK to have only 2, ...TWO... T-W-O.... native cooldowns, that will mitigate physical damage, the overall most common form of incoming damage in the game by a landslide? Whoever it was, they need a bloody vacation. The CR options DRK is literally required to bring to close this wound are an almost insultingly obvious band-aid.

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I think my main issue is less that we have fewer physical cooldowns as it is with having an anti-magic CD at all. No one else has that, so it can only serve to either niche us, balancing us around being overpowered in content with magic tankbusters or just viable in such content and/or leaving us underpowered elsewhere. Why provide a typal CD that no one else has, and with no counterbalance (such as DD, if on a shared recast time) at that?

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

double weaving, tbn/blood, our crappy mitigation

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On double weaving - I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Low Blow and DP had extremely short animation locks, and Syphon didn't have a DA effect. On THAT note...

Now that I think about it... Syphon having a DA effect can be seen as the outlet of a long string of f***ing AWFUL decisions on SE's part. Let me lay that out for you:

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->Delirium removed as a combo ender

-->nerfing BP/making BP Grit exclusive

--->BW and BP can no longer be combined

---->BW MP return increased to compensate (it is now 20% of a DA per proc. It used to be 13%.)

----->Darkside MP drain removed

------>BW buff with Darkside drain removal resulted in an apparently unforeseen surplus of MP.

------->DP nerfed out of ST rotations, removing yet another mana dump.

-------->Suddenly DRK is swimming in mana with not enough ways to dump it.

--------->TBN is implemented as a further dump

---------->TBN has to be given a resource conversion mechanic so as to avoid smearing our faces in the fact that we have to pay for mitigation in DPS.

----------->TBN has to be balanced such that it isn't spammed for DPS gains, making it a less frequent and consistent mana dump

------------>DRK still swimming in mana.

------------->Syphon Strike gets an utterly idiotic and needless DA effect.

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When one looks at it like this, its hard to see how DRK's SB design passed QA. You can literally plot out a veritable topology of BAD decisions, which then continue to snowball into more ...BAD decision after BAD decision, each one having to band-aid over the ramifications of the one before it. Now, one could argue that I've re-ordered the chain of events here to prove a point, but any way you look at it, its hard to logically imagine a series of decisions that started with the choice to give Syphon a DA effect. That change screams "We had to do this to cover a bunch of other changes that are clearly mistakes but we're gonna roll with 'em anyway."

Phew. Excuse the tangent. Some very difficult-to-swallow food for thought, though.

On TBN, I agree that a Blood return proportionate to a percentage of the shield absorbed is a neat idea, but it seems like a more complicated solution, and one reason I'm in favor of reducing costs is to allow us an effectively larger pool of blood to stockpile, opening the door to triple or quad Bloodspillers, which would give us something vaguely resembling burst damage. You could offset this by also reducing returns (BW returns 2 blood per tick, BP 3, Souleater 5, etc.)

Not much I can add to the continued discussion of how poorly balanced our mitigation is. DD+Reprisal's removal from the job was a really stupid move, as was standardizing Mana-to-potency through all of these needlessly homogenous DA effects in such a way as to ensure spending a DA for defensive purposes is a horrible idea.

Blood Gauge should have a main tank/offtank ability, instead it has a weak 120 second recast ability, weak in the context of how long it takes to use again when compared to PLD's options and an offensive ability.

PLD actually get a Main tank/offtank ability, one that guarantees a shield block on top of restoring their MP every 5 seconds and another that grants a 10%-15% dmg reduction on target for 6 seconds every 10 seconds. The extra 5% coming if Rampart/Sentinel are active at the time.

Bloodspillers only gimmick is based around what abilities you have active at the time to increase it's potency. instead it should work similar to WAR's Inner Beast but rather than be a dmg mitigation it applies a "Dmg dealt by target" decrease for 6 seconds. It would magically change that ability from pure offensive to a main/off tank ability.

This is a delayed response because I had surprise sleep last night.

I see the dark arts of siphon strike less as a mana dump and more of an expansion of our self buffing. Warrior‘s buff was cut but they now have oGCD toys to play with as well as a buff to enhance their resource spending, paladin’s gained a second buff on top of their already existing buff which also saw a cooldown reduction. To keep up we need to be able to actively buff ourselves more often. My issue with this is that even with dumping my mana after my first two blood weapons my mana tends to dry up significantly, even keeping it there and buffing myself to the max I don’t hit paladin level dps. I think this points to an issue with the tuning of our resource gain.

The situations where I'm capped on MP and need to Dark Arts a Syphon Strike to not overflow is vastly outweighed by the maddening frustration I get when I plan to Dark Arts something in a GCD or two to not overlap a million off GCDs, and either run shy of MP by like....20, forcing me to Syphon Strike and consume the Dark Arts, or otherwise wasting a weaving opportunity (dark arts + TBN -> syphon strike -> any other cooldown + dark mind/carve & spit/abyssal drain SHIT). You can think of many scenarios.

Syphon Strike being so stupid awkward with Dark Arts and MP either in or out of Grit is the reason I use ethers about 10x more than I did in Heavensward!

I have...many strong negative feelings about dark arts Syphon Strike. It still boggles my mind why that couldn't have been a spot to utilize Dark Passenger if MP needed a dump. Any benefit its design serves now is, like Syzzle Spark said, some strange band-aid after other bad decisions were approved.

Edit: Sorry, this is easily one of the top 3 issues for me personally that contributes to Dark Knight's playstyle feeling clunky and awkward at times. I think everyone's got a couple of those things regarding Dark Knight right now.

I would say that being able to DA Syphon Strike is actually good conceptually but terrible in it's current implementation.

Pros:
It allows you to burn MP for boosted DPS fast which gives a greater ability and control to do burst damage.
It provides another weaponskill/gcd ability to use DA on.

Cons:
It messes with the ability to pre-prep a DA to use with another OGCD ability like Carve and Spit, often forcing ogcd double-weaves. It provides no discernible positive difference to make it worth DAing instead of Soul Eater which has a higher potency and therefore could give greater gains if it lands a direct hit or crit as well as the bump to hp drain.

Potential Solutions:
The issue with double-weaving needs to get resolved and personally I feel that should be done by removing DA effects from OGCD abilities, possibly by just making the MP cost and additional effects and potency baseline, and bolstering/adding/improving DA effects for the GCD abilities.
Syphon also needs to gain a bit more from DAing it. The HP drain from Soul Eater is based on damage done and so it increases with the DA potency increase. Syphon is a flat MP gain and does not currently receive any benefit for being DAed. I feel this should change and that a DAed Syphon should give back a bit more MP than a regular, giving it a better MP to DPS ratio that a DAed SE. I also feel that a DAed Soul Eater should give a bit more Blood than a regular one. This then plays into the choices of boosting and managing different resources. Want more MP? DA Syphon. Want more Blood and some HP back? DA Soul Eater.

I still feel the 10 second duration of Dark Arts now is woefully underutilized for combo-weaving planning now compared to Heavensward. Unless as a pre-pull, I can't remember a time where I'm even allowed to hold Dark Arts for more than 2-3 seconds to use on something. Hard Slash is pretty much the only GCD you can hold a Dark Arts around, wasting planning potential of Dark Arts usage. I would vastly prefer Dark Arts being taken from Syphon Strike to apply to more meaningful things. Hell, even if you just completely took it away now with no replacement, I'd at least legitimately use dark arts + Dark Mind more! Perhaps that may speak to issues on Dark Mind's end, but Dark Arts roadblocks on every single GCD is not how I feel Dark Knight's MP usage should be regulated.

Well one possible solution is to give dark arts a stack up to 3? For example you use Dark arts and you get 10 seconds to use it... If you use dark arts again you got 2 stacks of dark arts and you get the timer reset to 10 seconds, if you used a souleater it will go down to 1 dark arts and timer reset to 10 seconds again. This would allow some MP dump in the case of overflow without a need for siphon strike to have a dark arts potency. It would help doubleweaving tremendously, it might even solve bloodweapons speed bonus clipping if you use the OGCDs correctly in this manner with darkarts requiring no change to blood weapon at all... Would need to actually test it though cause I cannot visualize how well it would play out in the middle of a rotation.

I don't have time to really flesh this out at the moment, but a stray thought:

Instead of Dark Arts being a per-use ability, it could give you 3-5 'Stacks' of Dark Arts (stackable up to 10 so you can still burn excess MP on it), which are then automatically consumed one-by-one per weaponskill to add 30-50 potency to that weaponskill (like Machinist ammo in 3.x), and are also consumed by DA-compatible oGCDs like Dark Mind, Dark Passenger, and Carve and Spit.

Pros: less reliance on double-weaving, Plunge is usable between more weapon skills, gives DRK back its consistent high damage identity from 3.x rather than pseudo-burst, allows skills like Dark Mind to consume less potency than a full Dark Arts 'cast'.

Addendum: Delirium: Dark Arts increases weaponskill damage by 150 potency instead of 50 for 20 seconds.

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Originally Posted by Crater

I don't have time to really flesh this out at the moment, but a stray thought:

Instead of Dark Arts being a per-use ability, it could give you 3-5 'Stacks' of Dark Arts (stackable up to 10 so you can still burn excess MP on it), which are then automatically consumed one-by-one per weaponskill to add 30-50 potency to that weaponskill (like Machinist ammo in 3.x), and are also consumed by DA-compatible oGCDs like Dark Mind, Dark Passenger, and Carve and Spit.

Pros: less reliance on double-weaving, Plunge is usable between more weapon skills, gives DRK back its consistent high damage identity from 3.x rather than pseudo-burst, allows skills like Dark Mind to consume less potency than a full Dark Arts 'cast'.

Addendum: Delirium: Dark Arts increases weaponskill damage by 150 potency instead of 50 for 20 seconds.

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Ammunition unlocks the flow of gameplay for the MCH, this would sure be a bandaid fix, but it would really feel underwhelming to use...

Just make DM 30% baseline and consume a half or a third of a DA in MP to get rid of the too high cost, and double weave problem (Still present for DP/ C&S, but my guess is : oGCD consuming DA are the main problem, they could be simply tuned somehow else).

I'm not so sure that it would feel underwhelming, as long as it were in conjunction with some of the other ideas floating around. I kind of like the idea, if only as a "what if". I'll try to put up another thread a little later fleshing it out a bit.

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

Now that I think about it... Syphon having a DA effect can be seen as the outlet of a long string of f***ing AWFUL decisions on SE's part. Let me lay that out for you:

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All I really want is to feel the trade-offs more clearly, and to be able to make my decisions therefrom more fluidly. For instance, if DP were returned to 140 potency, even if remaining at DA cost, it would mean that it's still just as viable as the other choices (except C&S), unless you're in Grit and really need the added self-healing from a DA-SE.

I'd rather have a choice, with each viable global, to avoid spending DA on our weaponskill, but even without that, we don't have so many oGCDs now that it's particularly punishing. It doesn't feel good, but it doesn't feel outright bad either.

Ideally, I'd simply like to see Grit bridged towards non-Grit in some other way than by buffing Syphon Strike returns to a full DA's worth. I'd be happy with BW's returns being nerfed somewhat as well, so long as there's some other way to still reach about the same mana generation per minute.

I mean... if I were permitted to change DRK as much as I please, I'd rework it mostly from scratch to try to truly perfect its distinction, identity, and cohesion, but short of that, there doesn't seem to be all that much to do for how it plays at cap. How it plays during the course of leveling, however. Well, I'd certainly not want to go through 51-65 again...

I could tell there was something wrong with DRK as soon as I started levelling it. The Blood Gauge felt extremely pointless when unlocked, due to Delirium being the skill it's unlocked for, and that having a much longer cooldown than the time it took to reach 50 blood.

I can get it as far through savage content as I can my warrior, but it definitely feels crippled and unintuitive.

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Originally Posted by Ekimmak

I could tell there was something wrong with DRK as soon as I started levelling it. The Blood Gauge felt extremely pointless when unlocked, due to Delirium being the skill it's unlocked for, and that having a much longer cooldown than the time it took to reach 50 blood.

I can get it as far through savage content as I can my warrior, but it definitely feels crippled and unintuitive.

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Yeah my initial feel was that my hot bar was barren. In particular losing all those free oGCD means we were left only with skills we would need to pay for in order to cause damage. We have to give up damage to do damage, and SE seems to have forgotten this a number of times when they tuned our skills.

Made a thread highlighting a very specific flavor of problem with DRK http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...tional-Effects

Covers a lot of things, and DPS/Mitigation would be largely fixed if these points were addressed.

SE needs to realize that jumping through flaming hoops while rubbing our bellies/patting our heads and solving the Hellraiser puzzle every time we want to access beneficial effects on our mitigation/sustain and/or DPS cooldowns is not something we are going to enjoy if we are going to be the weakest tank in those regards even if we succeed at their little game.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

Made a thread highlighting a very specific flavor of problem with DRK http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...tional-Effects

Covers a lot of things, and DPS/Mitigation would be largely fixed if these points were addressed.

SE needs to realize that jumping through flaming hoops while rubbing our bellies/patting our heads and solving the Hellraiser puzzle every time we want to access beneficial effects on our mitigation/sustain and/or DPS cooldowns is not something we are going to enjoy if we are going to be the weakest tank in those regards even if we succeed and their little game.

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I was literally on my way to post your thread here. Scary.