Dark Knight Megathread

Im honestly surprised that TBN is still 7 seconds. You would think the bare minimum change once servers are live is to make it 8 seconds so it lines up with the other tanks, job exclusive cds but I guess that was too much to ask prior to 6.05.

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Originally Posted by Bhearil

More like wait for the next expansion because at most they will give some bandaids at best in between. They will never make a rework mid expansion

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I was under the impression that several jobs received reworks mid expansion. MNK comes to mind, or am I wrong?

Regardless, I suppose that in a strange and roundabout way DRK is my dream class again. DRK with its two combos with multiple finishers, the parrying mechanics that both affected MP gain and gave procs. The class that despite being worse than the other two tanks on release was FUN without a doubt and gained many a fan, which is more important. I know it will never be what it used to be but hell, even the SFX IMO has lost its edge. Gone are the blacks with red OR blue hues replaced by purples and fuschia vomit. I thought I should make a thread about it some day, I can't be the only one noticing, but eh.

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Originally Posted by Tetsujin

I was under the impression that several jobs received reworks mid expansion. MNK comes to mind, or am I wrong?

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NIN and WAR, too. 5.0 NIN got its rotational elements halved and its core oGCD stuck on the GCD with 5.1. 4.1 WAR made way for the meme that is 4.15+ Inner Release (and then 5.0+ Delirium).

So, mid-expansion reworks are possible... so long as their aim is to shallow the job.

But, that begs the question... can DRK really be shallowed any further?

I'm not holding my breath. We're only getting tweaked in PVP if Stormblood was any sign.

Some personal bullet points:

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As a DRK main since mid HW, here's my personal and incomplete take on the problems with the job.

We need our branching combo from HW back. With a finisher that gives HP and another that gives MP. To compensate, you could make each finisher grant more HP or MP than they do now. That makes us choose and adds depth and if you make it powerful, it will feel and play GOOD. What DRK hasn't had forever.

Terrible kit prior to 70, arguably 80. TBN should be unlocked at 50. Stalwart Soul around the same time. Salted Earth should have a lower cooldown and be available every pull OGCD.

The Blood Gauge is tacked on. Just remove it or make BloodSpiller and Quietus more rewarding for it to be there.

Living Dead needs a retouch. If you really, really want it to kill us then make it more powerful or make it recharge faster.

Many of our job actions are considered spells. Since you won't place Spell Speed in our weapons natively, then make them skills. The GCD is awful and plays badly.

Blood weapon needs charges or lasts longer. Better yet, make it do something else also.

All the Endwalker actions feel and play underwhelming save for Shadowbringer. Some things straight up feel like they got added as a joke.

You took away our identity into Stormblood. You added a little with TBN but never built on it. We remain weird WARs with a magic shield. Either bring us back to HW or keep adding to that new post-TBN identity each expansion don't think just TBN is enough.

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Rough expansion for Dark Knights, the new jobs giving it a kicking while it's down.

Sage got old dark arts, augmenting abilities, and new dark arts, a charge on shield break.

Reaper made off with the remaining style factor, completely blowing Dark Knight out of the water in terms of raw edge.

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Originally Posted by Jandor

Rough expansion for Dark Knights, the new jobs giving it a kicking while it's down.

Sage got old dark arts, augmenting abilities, and new dark arts, a charge on shield break.

Reaper made off with the remaining style factor, completely blowing Dark Knight out of the water in terms of raw edge.

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I just about killed over when I seen Reaper had a last survivor effect. Why did DRK need to lose that button again?

Reaper is really really fun and is everything that DRK could have and should have been, down to the Shroud 'Darkside' aura.

Tanking in this game is a lie. The red arrow makes you feel important every once and a while, but bosses either position themselves or take up the entire arena such that you can't position them if you tried. Melee dps is the same thing, just a lot more fun and probably slightly less forgiving. You'll never look back, outside of maybe farming tokens.

Reaper has a lot of things DRK wish it had. Enshroud reminds me of the frantic weaponskill spam under blood weapon, tbh that's what delirium should be.
Even the 70 to 80 story has DRK vibes...

It has been since SB they take from DRK but don't give anything to compensate.

By now, we've gotten our legs and arms taken from us and given to someone else and we've gotten a thumb and toe in return. If only we had arms or legs left to ourselves anymore to begin with...

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Originally Posted by Kreyd

Anyways. I'll start counting how many of which tank I see in my duties, just to see how many players still even touch DRK. Feel free to join me.

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I kinda lost track at about 14 PLD's vs 1 DRK sprout. But right now it's about:

PLD: 20+
WAR GNB: about 10 each
Drk: 3

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...654/adpoam.png

Perhaps all the people dumping drk will force change. I for one dumped it for Sam a few months ago and never looked back.

Heh even if I wanted to it's difficult getting connected on Queuewalker Expansion unless it's 12am-6am PST for me to play DRK or GNB/PLD/WAR for the matter.

I managed to level up DRK to about 83 from Daily Roulettes & bit of early MSQ at 12am-6am PST so I can see the animation and mess with Oblation and not far at all in quests for Queuewalker Expansion.

But so far what I'm noticing from spamming Daily Roulette and dungeons is that DRK's lack of HP Sustain is really hurting more than usual and it's not just new Sprouts all trying out Sage spamming DPS skill(s), perhaps a combination of that, mob damage and stat squash etc.

Like TBN while it's up is Great but after it pops and other Mitigation skills come into play to decrease rate of HP loss from Mob damage we got 1 Abyssal Drain per fight to buy time on Mob Packs and if incoming heals are slow or lacking it's an undignified death while Rampart/Sentinel/Oblation is used up and Living Dead=Just Dead because no Benediction or some high cure potency alternatives incoming, again I had to take Living Dead off Hotbars. Many times I had to resort to 1-2-3 Souleater Combo on packs of 3+ Mobs to stay alive when TBN and Abyssal Drain were on CD.

Would it kill the DRK Devs to at least have some Cure Potency on the 2-AOE Combo, doesn't have to be much like 150-200 Cure potency at least whenever 2-AOE Combo is done on those mob packs. Even decreasing CD on Abyssal Drain/C&S to 30s would go a long way. Or Putting a Cure Potency heal on Crave & Split, 800-1000 at least for single target fights and keeping it separate 60s CD. Some on Demand HP sustain would really help.

On a side note: I love the WAR updates to Raw Intuition for pre-82 restoring HP on weapon skills when using it, super nice QOL change. The 10% Damage buff applied by using 2 AOE Combo also love it, 10/10 QOL changes :D Raw Intuition works on AOE, HP Sustain feels even more smoother than before because it's cure potency based now instead of damage done on weaponskills.

Yeah, they don't know what they are doing, and they especially didn't realize that they just ruined Dark Knight. It doesn't take much effort than to put yourself into the position of a DRK Main to realize that what they have done is rude and absolute bullshit.

Other tanks are way less fun to play, but the numbers make them factually more viable atm.

Hit 90, a couple of thoughts based entirely on the 'feel' of the job.

- The opener is messy as hell, even having removed Abyssal Drain from it. Following burst windows feel like a frantic "oh god what the hell is up right now" scramble where I'm staring at my hotbar trying to make sense of it all. Though, that may be down to me trying to figure out without looking at a guide
- Not only is it messy, it pretty much demands double weaving. It really brings the need for Blood Weapon to be on a charge system to the forefront
- Now that Abyssal Drain is locked in with C&S, we have basically no healing outside of Souleater. As if being reliant on a healer's input using Living Dead wasn't enough, I feel overly reliant on a healer's input in just normal gameplay on small pulls
- Please don't talk to me about Living Dead, by the way
- Oblation is an okay throwaway mitigation for autos, and I've actually made two clutch saves with it when I had emptied my mana, but it's still just disappointing that something that looks that cool do so little. I want to love it, and I want to hate it, but I can do neither.
- We got our red effect back on Darkside. Yaaaay
- I have not felt any real beneficial effect or enhanced gameplay with Enhanced Unmend.

I've also spent the last couple of hours listening to my PLD and SGE friends complain about how they have too much mana regeneration and so much healing. Kill me.

Tis time to put the down the Copium/Hope and walk away, Jobs dead and we already seen from past experience that they don't care about the job.

If even the Japanese players can't make them look at the job and administer changes, then nothing will.

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Originally Posted by RatCopter

I've also spent the last couple of hours listening to my PLD and SGE friends complain about how they have too much mana regeneration and so much healing. Kill me.

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I know how you feel. As a WAR I have too much healing and my MP never drops below 10k, its insane :O

Jokes aside anyone who read the LL notes knew that DRK was gonna get messy. It has way too many ogcds for a tank and I'm guessing they expect you to double weave again since shadows spam is on a 1 sec recast which was ironically what DRK players complained about in SB. It's literally instead of pressing DA you press shadow and another ogcd like shadowbringer or maybe a clutch TBN. Honestly I'm not a fan but I'm still leveling it after getting WAR to 90 and so far all my predictions have been right.

Imo TBN needs to be on a shorter cd if they want to make DRK the "damage negate" tank so you have less in between time to prevent damage you can't heal back outside doing your rotation. You could also put TBN on a charge system but at this point they didn't even the bare minimum I was expecting them to do, which was change TBN's duration from 7 to 8 seconds to match the other tanks.

Biggest complaint for the job so far after hitting a dummy for an hour at 90

>Carve and spit & Abbysal drain - it being on the same timer "together" its stupid and i think it should get reworked back to being on seperate things
>Delirium - stacks (3) good concept, rather bump it up to 4 but it works well and tying it in early to use -after syphon strike
>shadowbringer - its a nice 2 stacks, but i think it should replace the flood skill or just Abbysal drain entirely, its literally dark passanger v.4 without the blind
>bring back StB Quietus- cause we aint getting jack for heals WE MIGHT AS WELL GET EXTRA MP

good things
>Oblation is great, getting +2 mini ramparts

in practice subtle changes, and honestly not anything note worthy or already talked about above

concidering HW- to now
>Blood Price needs to make a come back (restores mp upon getting hit for x amount of time) with that being said, it is a trade off from all the other tanks getting mp back
>Sole Survivor (kill a target with in 15 seconds you get a 20% back of your total hp/mp) if anything i'd swap it out for -10% def but faster or higher mp regen rate

in either case, thats my take. Also, no I'm not gonna debate anything with anyone if theres a tag/reply even if someone thinks im wrong.

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Originally Posted by Cro93

in either case, thats my take. Also, no I'm not gonna debate anything with anyone if theres a tag/reply even if someone thinks im wrong.

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I also feel the same way because there's no point except to waste time, the DRK Devs will do whatever the hell they want regardless of how much we rationalize, nitpick, debate or argue.

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Originally Posted by Kreyd

I kinda lost track at about 14 PLD's vs 1 DRK sprout. But right now it's about:

PLD: 20+
WAR GNB: about 10 each
Drk: 3

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...654/adpoam.png

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That DRK looks like he used Living Dead and is now just Dead.

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Originally Posted by RatCopter

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Yea I mean, well yea messy is the right word for it.
-I like how chaotic our opener is but blood weapon definetely needs to change because it makes it way too clunky even with the loss of a ogcd. But once again we are stuck with doing absolutely nothing for a solid minute.
-I think I'd rather have shadowbringer be chargeless and just put on a 30 second timer. Salt and darkness is "fun" to use, but it feels very whatever. It should shorten the CD of salted earth or something.
-Oblation unironically feels good to use and it looks very good so props to them on that.
But I don't even know what to feel at this point. I don't know if having almost all of our ogcds on a 60 second cooldown makes it clunky or is it just me. Our self-sustain is very bad atm also. I don't know why they didn't think of adding a "stalwart soul combo reduces abyssal drain CD" trait or something. But I guess thinking isn't really on the table as seen with Unmend+Plunge.

Hey y'all first time poster here on the forums but been playing since patch 3.3. I've gotta say its nice to see so much feed back on this job. i wanted to post here to keep this thread going. With that said, I don't think I've seen this opinion yet but why is dark side a resource? I've seen posts saying to expand on it but i have to disagree with that. It is brain dead easy to keep up and should honestly be a passive trait at this point, if thats done then the blood gauge/MP aspect of the job could be looked at and expanded upon and give some kind of resemblance of what this job used to be. In any case I've been enjoying reaper, even if i may be a bit upset it's gotten everything i wanted for drk and more.

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Originally Posted by FelixFujiwara

Yeah, they don't know what they are doing, and they especially didn't realize that they just ruined Dark Knight. It doesn't take much effort than to put yourself into the position of a DRK Main to realize that what they have done is rude and absolute bullshit.

Other tanks are way less fun to play, but the numbers make them factually more viable atm.

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Sorry bud, but the only reason you enjoy DRK is because of aesthetics and nothing else.

"Other tanks are way less fun"? Massive amounts of copium.

Could Dark Mind be reworked into a MP regeneration boost similar to Lucid Dream ? The name is fitting, and it'd be a useful tool.

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Originally Posted by RinaB

Perhaps all the people dumping drk will force change. I for one dumped it for Sam a few months ago and never looked back.

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Sadly I think this is actually the only way DRK will get fixed.

I do get the feeling they look at player metrics when deciding whether a class needs reworks or buffs. Most reworks have only come for classes with a low participation rate. Classes that are popular, perhaps due to ease or simplicity are unlikely to ever receive attention even if their toolkit is objectively inferior to other classes. Healers are a great example of this, with WHM (being both the weakest but also most popular healer) being nerfed and receiving almost no new toys, while AST (ridiculously strong but less popular due to higher apm) got buffed even further.

DRK has always been reasonably popular among casual players due to aesthetic, thus the devs glance at the metrics, see it has a high population and assume it's fine and doesn't need attention. They hardly seem to even look at the toolkit and gameplay.

Dark Knight feels pretty meh, oblation is the only thing mildly interesting that has appeared and all it is is a 10% mit on two charges. Not exactly a breakthrough. Meanwhile all the issues dark knight had were just left untouched like TBN, dark mind and living dead. Delirium is still just an exact copy of inner release aswell, it even also got the change into charges while bloodweapon stayed on a timer. Abyssal drain was made into an aoe version of carve&spit for no discernable reason.

The clearest indicator how little thought was put into dark knight this expansion however is without a doubt enhanced unmend. What a joke of a trait. Probably gonna swap to pld if nothing changes until savage.

Imagine Oblation healing you for a portion of the damage mitigated. Proccing early if you are under 20% HP or stuff. Now that'd be a good skill.

After some testing and such i just felt that DRK is even worse that SHB in terms of gameplay, not only for the obvious gameplay loops its shares with WAR more painfully similar now both jobs base they gameplay on wait until inner delirium and use they fell spillers with all they oGCD and buffs aviable there, but how empty and swallow the downtime is, like seriously just pure 45s of unalterated souleater spam and a ocasional bloodspiller/salted heart is basically PLD ARR levels of gameplay engagement.

The job seems to fullfill his duty in terms of numbers but god lord the gameplay, i never belive DRK will reach such levels of braindeadness and boredorm on what is 3/4 of his gameplay loop considering his story on this game and previous gameplay design, basically you performance will be solely determinated if you have the ping to do all the double weaves on the burst with all the fluff it have every min.

I agree. I'm half tempted to macro plunge, salted darkness and and shadow bringer into every keybind.

As pathetic enhanced unmend is or whatever, I must be thankful it procs on something I only use ever so occasionally, otherwise I'd have to plunge on everything.

For the First time I decided to creep into the forums myself and offer a bit of input on the issue. I want to bring up a few things I've learned bouncing between all the tanks and what maybe the devolopers could do to address Dark Knight's identity crisis.

I: 5.X and 6.X

As of the current iteration of dark is a modified iteration of the old warrior model from shadowbringers, lets talk about that first, the whole "Warrior clone" business. Back in shadowbringers Warrior was universally seen as a "braindead" tank class due to the incredibly simple rotation structure warrior had as a result of loosing aggro rotation. I moved from WAR to darknight because I noticed that dark knight in Shadowbringers was actually warrior but more fleshed out mechanically. Yes, I said it. Drk was a more interesting warrior than warrior was. You had two meters to juggle with blood gauge and MP, meaning compared to warrior having a single build up phase, Dark Knight had a follow up phase that in the same way summoner had dreadwrym trance and summon bahamaut. As a player this was kinda a big deal to me. But for long time dark players I understand the frustration. Especially since it's evident that Gunbreaker is modeled after 3.0 Dark Knight's "Dark Artes Spam" As you can see, Dark Knight is having a problem that WHM suffers from, a lot of it's abilities are being poached by other classes, robbing it of identity. This is evident with the 6.X tanks getting universal targeted mitigation tools due to (in my opinion anyway) the overwhelming positive feedback from usage of The Blackest Night and what it can offer to trials to make this more common.

II: What does Dark Knight have now that it can call it's own?

From playing all the tanks enough to understand the general "gist" of what each one is trying to emphasize. Dark knight unfortunately has only a handful things it can call it's own right now. The first is The Blackest Night, the Targeted Mitigation tool that rewards proactive mitigation in the form of a refund to it's MP cost, and is an absolute centerpiece of the Dark Knight toolbox.

The second thing is Esteem, Dark Knight's Simulacrum. a pet-based damage over time ability meant to be a force multiplier and call into play one of Dark Knight's most defining story traits. This one in particular is a win for the developers as it's effectively a dot that doesn't actually clog the debuff bar on the opponent's status. Overall it's a real crowd pleaser, and it's pretty damn good at what it's job is.

Finally we have the less flashy aspects, Dark knight is still the only tank with a two stage burst phase rotation, and one where meter management actually matters even in it's "Warrior but not Warrior" interpretation. It sounds bad, but mechanically Dark Knight has much room for expression still, there's a reason why it still keeps being a favorite of world first clears. The second being that it has the most off global weaving of all the tanks.

III: Where do we go from here?
Ultimately I personally think dark knight has four possible futures we could delve into to for the class. two of which are promising, and two which are less exciting but effective.

The first path the role design team could focus on for DRK is to focus on one of Dark Knight's biggest star players, Esteem. Dark knight could use Living Shadow as a form of job maintenance to stand out from the crowd. Instead of being a Burst Phase Tank, Dark Knight could use it's rotations to maintain Living Shadow on the field, The blood gauge could be repurposed into an Esteem Meter, and using MP on moves like Bloodspiller and Quietus could go to keeping this gauge filled, while we maintain our primary damage buff through Edge of Darkness and Flood of Shadow normally used to maintain Darkside. Naturally this would mean overall potency would drop across the board as Esteem would be effectively doubling it with his continued presence, skill expression can still be maintained by balancing your Esteem maintenance and Darkside maintenance with other damage abilities.

The second path could be a focus on the theme of retaliation, and emphasize more on the retaliatory nature of The Blackest Night and the themes of endurance from spells like Living Dead. Likewise we could amusingly enough steal from warrior Vengeance and utilize the ability to turn boss auto attacks into more damage. The Blackest Night would be your primary means of extra damage, and we could expand that concept of absorption into reflection with party wide retaliation skills, such as Dark Missionary converting raid wide damage into MP or more directly reflecting it back to the target. There's a lot of ways to transform dark's defensive cooldowns into offensive bonuses for aggressive and proactive mitigation. giving it a nice contrast to the reactive nature of Paladin with healing and parrying. The Blood gauge or the Darkside timer could instead be turned into a The Blackest Night HP counter for determining how much more damage it needs to break. We've already seen how sheilds breaking can be turned into a class mechanic with Sage. Perhaps Dark Knight could be our first Barrier Tank to contrast with Warrior's Regeneration.

The Third Path is to bring back Dark Arts, using Dark Arts as a tool to modify and enhance existing skills at the cost of resource to make our abilities more interesting. Sound familiar? this is what Gunbreaker does with Continuation. We can however turn this into a plus if we could look at what we can enhance with Dark Arts, such as non damage spells like The Blackest Knight. If we're going to be a diet version of another tank, I would rather us be diet Gunbreaker

The Fourth path is to maintain current course, and keep levering on the emphasis on two stage burst with a smattering of GCDs to keep the rotation busy. This means though that Carve and Spit and Abyssal Drain need to be decoupled. And Enhanced Unmend needs far more than just a cooldown reduction to plunge, This wont cut it.

DRK just needs a party of Sages and they won't have sustain problems anymore.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...jjnwsh5481.png

I think its time for the swap myself. Just finished leveling PLD and the difference in versatility is just insane. I miss the old HW DRK the most, at least it had a solid core gameplay. Current DRK is just slam oGCDs in ur burst window for 6-7 GCDs then a solid 1-2-3 rotation. Has less self sustain and healing than GNB as well which makes absolutely no sense. They put so much focus on Living Shadow making your 88 and 90 traits buff it and its kind of a dumb mechanic, like its literally just a DoT with a fancy animation. Enhanced Unmend as well is nice on paper but doesn't change game play really or add any extra plunges at all.

Currently DRK has;

Lowest Single Target DPS

Lowest Self Sustain/Healing

Second to last on AoE Damage

Worst big defensive

Outside of TBN, which is not as amazing in practice as it is on paper, the worst defensives

Minimal raid utility outside a raidwide 10% magic dmg reduction

Oblation is not a good spell, its 2 oGCDs other tanks literally get for 1


They should add lifesteal to Quietus, Bloodspiller and CnS as well as make it so everytime we use one of the 3, it reduces the cooldown of Shadowbringer. Ditch Oblation and make it so Dark Missionary gives a small amount party wide lifesteal for its effect. This would get the DRK in line with its thematic sense, the "leech" tank, whereas Paladins have always been the buff/heal tank. It keeps them polar opposites and maintains their individual identity. Also they should make Living Shadow copy your abilties, but with lower potency, its literally called "Living Shadow" but it doesn't shadow you at all, its just a DoT with a fancy animation.

Just bumping the thread again to throw in the 2 cents that I've been repeating in here for some time. Add healing to Blood abilities and to delirium. Also give Carve n Spit some healing potency akin to Abyssal Drain and add charges to Blood weapon so I can actually hit 5 gcds during aoe or single target without melding a stupid amount of Skill Speed on A TANK.

For adding to the discussion, my own meddling on the class with the actual toolkit gives me 2 clear impressions 1st button bloat 2nd conflicts and duplicated skills, how I'll give a fix without a full rework, merging skills and using procs, example: 1st remove carve and spit and roll it into abyss drain give the treatment of 500 pot on single target 50% less on surrounding and upping the healing to the damage done, 2nd combining blood weapon and delirium 10s removing the delirium charges and just make it to be able to spam 4 quietus or blood spiller on necessity, 3rd turning shadowbringer into a proc activation on abyss drain and blood weapon when you use either you get 1 stack of shadowbringer which will overwrite flood of shadow and edge of shadow until spent, with that you get 3 less skills in bars and remove duplicate/conflictive skills improving the general flow

Gotta admit though.

As disappointed as i am, people are slightly overreacting, atleast the non-tank players.

Yes, the invuln is still trash.

Yes, dark knight still isnt braindead for healers like all the other tanks.

Yes, DRK might have weaknesses in dungeons.

But I know for a fact, that if Healers know how to play their class properly, and the Tank is mitigating right, you literally wont have that much issues.
Everytime i read stuff like "DRK needs self-heal" or "DRK should have a different skill like TankXYZ has" i really dont feel so good anymore, to say the least.

Ever heard of class-diversity? DRK is in the worst state is have ever been in, but if it was really really really bad, they would probably know and I much rather play an underrated class, than a class that is no longer itself.

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Originally Posted by Dracosavarian

Well, that effectively seals my decision. I’ll complete Endwalker, and my journey as a Dark Knight, at the conclusion of story. After that, I am abandoning Drk as my Main and switching over to Reaper. Until they fix the problems with Dark Knight, I will not be utilizing the job.

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I swapped to Gunbreaker and enjoy it so much.

It's literally the worst but not unplayable. Cool.