Dark Knight Megathread

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Originally Posted by Archwizard

I distinctly remember foolishly Manashifting onto a DRK as a baby BLM who didn't yet understand any other job because I saw their MP had been exhausted, only for them to be Immune to it. Good times.

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Same, but with Astral Fire. I wanted so badly for Manashifting from other casters back onto BLM just after they'd already used Flare to be a thing. Would it be damn powerful, especially in dungeons? Sure. But it'd also require careful tracking on the other casters' part to give the MP to the BLM at the right time anyways.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

You said it yourself. You're unable to articulate what exactly it is that you dislike about the job's gameplay loop. And that's perfectly fine. But if most of the feedback we're providing is 'I don't like this job', then you can't really complain when the devs start ripping out core job features to try to make people happy. Maybe they decide that you don't enjoy the oGCDs, and they just remove Edge and Flood, and turn Darkside into a Storm's Eye combo. And then you come back in complaining about how the job 'feels bad' to play and is constantly being simplified. I don't want to see that happen here.

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The problem with the job is that it's too simple...you're spamming a single combo, using Blood moves when ready, and spamming Edge/Flood when you don't need TBN. That's it. There's no complexity, no synergy with the system at all, there's nothing that makes the big hits feel weighty (compared to WAR's Fell Cleaves) or makes it feel like you're actually having to micromanage a bit (PLD, GNB, and even WAR have more complexity). Adding a second GCD combo alone would at least add a little complexity. Making us have to worry about our Darkside timer is another thing that would add some complexity and make it feel like you're actually having to manage multiple things. The vast majority of the oGCDs wouldn't even need to get touched much. The problem with DRK is easy to understand...what's hard is coming up with a solution because there's so many paths you can take the job down to make it better.

I think there's been plenty of concrete and specific feedback to DRK's issues in this thread, if the devs read it and conclude people think the class needs to be stripped down then I would say that's a failure on their end.

One think that has stood out to me is that drk seems to not get nearly as many mitigation options as any other tank. My first concern would be that it needs some form of damage mitigation earlier since dark mind doesn't work for everything only magic damage. My thought goes back to the lore and how it's related to dragoon. Why isn't blood weapon also acting as a self sustain or it have some kind of blood siphon type ability that is similar to dragoon's and other dps abilities to heal on damage to make it feel more unique why not make it an offensive ability that also serves to use the gauge on self sustain with it using the power of darkness to siphon enemies blood? There is a lot about it that I'm sure can use improvement but I think the first priority should be to improve the core job itself with it's mitigation and self sustain to be on par with other tanks. It just doesn't quite seem right that other tanks get more group utility while also having more mitigation and in one case even more damage. One other possibility is why not give dark knight two modes? Give it a dps and a tank mode as it was a dps in ff11. I think that might actually help some for it's identity as well since it was meant to deal a lot of damage and if it doesn't have more utility then pump up the damage or give it more utility is what I'm personally thinking.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

The problem with the job is that it's too simple...you're spamming a single combo, using Blood moves when ready, and spamming Edge/Flood when you don't need TBN. That's it. There's no complexity, no synergy with the system at all, there's nothing that makes the big hits feel weighty (compared to WAR's Fell Cleaves) or makes it feel like you're actually having to micromanage a bit (PLD, GNB, and even WAR have more complexity). Adding a second GCD combo alone would at least add a little complexity. Making us have to worry about our Darkside timer is another thing that would add some complexity and make it feel like you're actually having to manage multiple things. The vast majority of the oGCDs wouldn't even need to get touched much. The problem with DRK is easy to understand...what's hard is coming up with a solution because there's so many paths you can take the job down to make it better.

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Indeed.

"Here's a solid enough base, I guess? But we have no ****ing idea what to do with it."

Almost anything could feasibly work, but the hurdle seems huge because those ideas would also have to come up with an anchoring identity / cohesive thread, as the base supplies none.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

You said it yourself. You're unable to articulate what exactly it is that you dislike about the job's gameplay loop. And that's perfectly fine. But if most of the feedback we're providing is 'I don't like this job', then you can't really complain when the devs start ripping out core job features to try to make people happy. Maybe they decide that you don't enjoy the oGCDs, and they just remove Edge and Flood, and turn Darkside into a Storm's Eye combo. And then you come back in complaining about how the job 'feels bad' to play and is constantly being simplified. I don't want to see that happen here.

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Unable? No, I simply am not giving feedback in regards to the core rotation of DRK because that is NOT what I am focused on. What I AM focused on are the nitpicks which should have obvious solutions (bring the level range of dark missionary down with heart of light so it's usable in older expac content, change AoEs to weaponskills so skill speed can include them), which have not all been completely ironed out. I am of the mind that those should come first before I sit down and say 'ok, DRK is in such a spot where I can consider in depth exactly what my pain points are with it's overall kit and what I can try to do to fix them to be both engaging and viable', which would take a good amount of brainstorming to get to an agreeable state for most; in the meantime, you have plenty of very interesting suggestions from others in this very thread.

There are very likely not going to be major changes to the job until 6.2 at least, but realistically we likely won't see a rework until 7.0. So why not push for these minor pain points in between where they are far more likely to happen?

You keep thinking my complaints on the core kit are all I'm willing to say of the job from here and expecting the devs to do something with it as if it was meant to be constructive: I am not, I am simply stating my feelings in general. When I DO want to offer suggestions, I will state as such.

But I've indulged you long enough on this matter, you remain convinced I am doing one thing when I am actually doing something else.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

The problem with the job is that it's too simple...

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That's part of it from an attack perspective, anyway.

Simultaneously, you have the element that its mitigation style is more difficult than other jobs.
Dark Mind/Missionary have specific use cases, Living Dead still retains the highest demands of any invuln skill, Oblation is an extra oGCD we have to weave on top of TBN for partial value compared to what other tanks get out of their 25s CDs in one click now, and our only healing cooldown is a damage loss to us in single-target (on top of only being a fraction as potent as contemporaries available to other tanks).
This is to say nothing of the intricacies of TBN itself having potential for damage loss, comparing other tanks' on-demands, or how late it (much like GNB) gets many survival tools within the leveling process.

So you have the seeming paradox of the job having the least complicated attack rotation, and perhaps the one with the hardest time surviving at almost every level of content (aside from perhaps synched ShB content), which is arguably more important for a tank. Not incapable of performing the duties of a tank, just... harder on them.
It culminates in taking on a lot of risk, all for the reward of... doing slightly more damage than other tanks during your opener at 90 with an absolutely boring attack combo.

Granted, the damage makes it very attractive from a raiding perspective, but take that singular element away and you have the least attractive tank available.

I'd say the defensive kit isn't really complex as much as it is awkward.

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

I'd say the defensive kit isn't really complex as much as it is awkward.

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Honestly, there's a lot of overlap between those in this context.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

The problem with the job is that it's too simple...you're spamming a single combo, using Blood moves when ready, and spamming Edge/Flood when you don't need TBN. That's it. There's no complexity, no synergy with the system at all, there's nothing that makes the big hits feel weighty (compared to WAR's Fell Cleaves) or makes it feel like you're actually having to micromanage a bit (PLD, GNB, and even WAR have more complexity). Adding a second GCD combo alone would at least add a little complexity. Making us have to worry about our Darkside timer is another thing that would add some complexity and make it feel like you're actually having to manage multiple things. The vast majority of the oGCDs wouldn't even need to get touched much. The problem with DRK is easy to understand...what's hard is coming up with a solution because there's so many paths you can take the job down to make it better.

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I think that the discussion around DRK's GCDs is reasonable. As I said earlier, we have 4 single target and 3 AoE GCDs. Pretty much all of the action happens through oGCDs. I think that it's reasonable to want a second combo, but if you're introducing it at Lv. 100 it should be something more impactful and more interesting than the standard maintenance combo that most jobs copy paste over at Lv.50.

Complexity and synergy are buzzwords that people throw out there frequently but don't carry any meaning. When you talk about the 'weight' behind hits, that's by and large a hitstop effect - WAR's fell cleave looks more impactful than Bloodspiller, which is why it feels more satisfying to use. Decimate doesn't, which is why Quietus is on a more level playing field. Pretty much all of RPR's animations use varying degrees of hitstop, which is one of the reasons why the job is still overwhelmingly popular despite not being FoTM. I think they realize this and we'll start seeing a lot more moves designed with hitstop in mind.

Pretty much every iteration of DRK has by and large been about unloading a swathe of oGCDs under burst. Part of the reason why Salted Earth is sitting at an odd 90s is just because they don't want to overload you with oGCDs. It's actually easy to make it even more oGCD intensive, all you need to do is increase the rate of MP generation and reduce the potency of Edge/Flood accordingly. But I don't think that would make the gameplay more fun. There are also limitations on how much you can add to the resource management part of the job without simply adding more resource bars. You can only have one on-demand action per resource (for single target and AoE). You can sort of work around this by doing something with the 'Dark Arts' gauge as I suggested with making a second resource-gated combo, but all that does is move DRK into being a three resource system job. Exchanging resources (MP for Blood) is a nice idea, but all this actually does is surreptitiously increase the rate of resource generation, which just translates into more Edge/Bloodspiller spam.

In short, none of this is really new ground as far as discussions go, but most of the changes that you could make would change the job less than you might think. I think a second combo could be really fun, given our paucity of oGCDs. If you did that in 7.x, you'd probably have to spend most if not all of our three new expansion actions to do so (two for single target, one more for AoE unless you pushed that back to 8.x). If you were going to do that, it had better something more interesting than Eye or Goring. It'll of course have hitstop. I think the best way to do it is to actually use Dark Arts as a third resource.