Drk: worst designed class

You cant use UWU as an excuse for DRK.

Simply because the player even stated. He played DRK because that is his favorite class. When countless of groups even his own teammates stated they probably could have cleared it sooner if he chose a different tank. That speaks volumes.

imo the biggest thing drk needs is an actually good emergency CD.. holmgang and pld's equiv are great... drk's... not so much

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Originally Posted by Adventica6

While you are using globals to even make your job work, a pld or war just presses a skill that does a function, without needing to use resources, Gcd etc, literally just press a button and something happens, drk has to self buff with DA then press a button, it's terrible design.

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It is not terrible design per se, though I agree it can be way better. But pushing a button that gives X seconds of Y% more damage is not that much more entertaining either.

It would be terrible if they remove the "DA spam" and make DRK a slow paced tank. Cause we already have PLD and WAR.

I mean the only slow paced tanks is war more or less because there are no really god ogcds. Pld has at least 2 you use constant and a debuff that you don’t want to lose or refresh to early. This is were pld feels the best you can optimize the fight in the way that magic can be better used for phases were every has down time. Drk can safe mana and dps when there is the buffs up

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Originally Posted by Mortex

I mean the only slow paced tanks is war more or less because there are no really god ogcds. Pld has at least 2 you use constant and a debuff that you don’t want to lose or refresh to early. This is were pld feels the best you can optimize the fight in the way that magic can be better used for phases were every has down time. Drk can safe mana and dps when there is the buffs up

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Actually as a warrior you have a lot of fun managing beast gauge, with infuriate on top of it you have to use the gauge all the time. This what makes fun on warrior.
Also there are 3 effective rotations to use, damage increasing one to refresh it once in a while, healing and pure damage enmity.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

Actually as a warrior you have a lot of fun managing beast gauge, with infuriate on top of it you have to use the gauge all the time. This what makes fun on warrior.
Also there are 3 effective rotations to use, damage increasing one to refresh it once in a while, healing and pure damage enmity.

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Yeah but to be fair you normally don’t need the aggro combo more then 1 to 2 times per fight. And yeah the hardest part is not to waste gauge with infuriate but the just refresh storms eye every 25 to 30 seconds and then spawm the crap out of Stroms path for the most gauge

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Originally Posted by Mortex

Yeah but to be fair you normally don’t need the aggro combo more then 1 to 2 times per fight. And yeah the hardest part is not to waste gauge with infuriate but the just refresh storms eye every 25 to 30 seconds and then spawm the crap out of Stroms path for the most gauge

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Still better than paladin in wow, gosh classes in wow are simplified and boring to the bone comparing with ffxiv :P

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Also, why do we keep derailing these discussions with mentions of the ever-so-tragic WAR 2.0? We're talking about a single patch, five years ago, at a point when most of the active playerbase wasn't even playing the game, and when there probably weren't really any longstanding "WAR mains" to speak of. It doesn't justify the past five years of near single-handed dominance that the job has enjoyed over PLD and DRK, and it certainly shouldn't protect you from a long-awaited, good old-fashioned re-balancing.

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Because the OP had it in their thing, and it's an easy thing to point at and chuckle at when this is the umpteenth thread on DRK in the past however many months since SB came out with another rousing set of observations that have been made so frequently it's like you're beating a horse to death with 'The Sky is Blue'. Even if this thread went so far off the rails you wound up in the ocean there are still a consummate number of drops in said ocean to match the number of threads of people complaining about DRK which somehow haven't been consolidated into one megathread.

People are angry because they don't want to see yet another WAR-dominated expansion. We want to see a change. If people are quiet, that's a bad sign. It means that they've given up on the game. Stifling their views and derailing their discussions is not the answer.

Ignore the playerbase at your peril.

Looking at the only form of public record we have for this game and dark knight numbers are down. If anything is speaking louder than the forums it should be how often the player base is choosing a class to run content. At the start of the expansion we saw warrior and dark knight and paladin being run at approximately the same rate, with the exceptionally strong paladin being run most frequently. Both jobs wanted buffs and adjustments, but only one job got it.

What did we see going into UCoB after patch 4.1? We saw a precipitous decline in dark knight being taken into content as Warrior received adjustments and dark knight did not. The calls for adjustment to dark knight were made through 4.1, and we saw more heavy handed warrior adjustments, and minor dark knight adjustments. What was the playerbase's reaction? Less people running dark knight in 4.2.

Recognizing that dark knight had issues we saw some more minor adjustments to the dark knight cooldown kit, giving the job a major advantage towards magic mitigation and boosting our general mitigation, but none of the adjustments the community asked for, but gave a statement that a redesign would take 6 months. Correcting half the problem do we see dark knights being run in content more now? No, numbers are still down, and are at the lowest rate so far in the expansion.

I hope someone is reading the community feedback and realizes that simply making dark knight the poster child for 5.0 isn't a fix. Say what you want about 3.x dark knight, but people enjoyed it.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

I hope someone is reading the community feedback and realizes that simply making dark knight the poster child for 5.0 isn't a fix. Say what you want about 3.x dark knight, but people enjoyed it.

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Did people play DRK because they truly enjoyed it, or did they play 3.X DRK because it was meta, and PLD as a third option simply wasn't viable? There was a GROSS discrepancy between dark knight DPS and paladin DPS in every patch cycle of 3.X, it's not fair to draw a comparison between pick rates from different expansions.

Can you be certain people would be equally as fond of 3.X DRK if PLD in the same time could block magic, have access to its current iteration of cover, and do equal DPS?

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Originally Posted by Hierro

Did people play DRK because they truly enjoyed it, or did they play 3.X DRK because it was meta, and PLD as a third option simply wasn't viable?

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I played it because I found it to be the most enjoyable of the three options. A number of people I had met in game also felt the same. But of course this information would be difficult to determine without polling done at the time. Despite paladin being an actual hindrence in 3.x in many circumstances, people still ran it and played it. Despite not being meta it saw a similar play rate, but not a similar clear rate pointing to the need for adjustments of some sort. Contrast with now, Dark Knight is capable of clearing content, but is being run less than half of the expected rate.

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Originally Posted by Hierro

There was a GROSS discrepancy between dark knight DPS and paladin DPS in every patch cycle of 3.X, it's not fair to draw a comparison between pick rates from different expansions.

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There is no reason it wouldn't be considered fair. This point must be justified. Despite paladin being almost certainly the lesser of the two options in HW its funny that looking at the play rate people played paladin at a rate which would be considered similar to dark knights. Despite paladin's status in 3.x people still played it based on pick rate. Contrast to the situation now, Dark Knight is certain viable in every sense of the word, yet people aren't playing.

Play rate didn't mean paladin didn't need adjustments, but it does mean that people enjoyed the playstyle which was, by and large, untouched in 4.x. We saw some adjustments to our dot, and a small adjustment to our rotation to take enmity out of the equation, but nothing really changed. Block now blocks magic, cover reduces damage, casts are no longer interrupted on a tank who gets hit for a living, all changes which were necessary but no massive changes to our rotation other than adding a second burst window which thematically fit with the class.

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Originally Posted by Hierro

Can you be certain people would be equally as fond of 3.X DRK if PLD in the same time could block magic, have access to its current iteration of cover, and do equal DPS?

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Certainty isn't where I would set the bar on most things outside of mathematics. Nothing is certain. However, if reprisal were still a dark knight exclusive, had an int debuff, had its animations restored, as well as gaining its stormblood abilities, and having the QoL adjustments that we have waited 3 years for, along with the kit adjustments we've seen this expansion, and as well as other improvements the community is still waiting on... Then yeah I would be pretty happy to play dark knight again and I think most people would enjoy the class more.

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Originally Posted by Hierro

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This is revisionist history, but I'll forgive you that because a lot of it predates your character.

In Heavensward, there were no raiding "DRK mains" or "PLD mains". You were a PLD/DRK, and you were expected to switch depending on the fight. In early Heavensward, DRK was actually thought to be a liability, and the forums were full of threads like this one. A3S/A4S was really the turning point where people started more seriously looking at DRK.

Even still, PLD still had room to excel. Pretty much everyone progged A7S on PLD instead of DRK. There was a minimum of one PLD WF in every tier in Heavensward. And the dps discrepency between DRK and PLD was nothing compared to the advantage that WAR held over the other two tanks. Interestingly, the closest that the dps difference between DRK and WAR has ever been was at 4.0, prior to all WAR's unnecessary buffs this expansion. And even there, it was advantage WAR.

WAR was what you played because people picked the job. DRK/PLD was what you played because people picked the player. There was a certain satisfaction in just about outperforming your WAR co-tank, and knowing full well that you had to be playing at least 20-30 percentiles higher to do so. "How on earth are you beating the WAR?" was one of the best reactions to get.

Would people have played DRK in 3.x if PLD could block magic? Absolutely. When you played DRK on a physical fight, you were generally at a cooldown disadvantage compared to PLD. Your extra dps was a reward for performing nearly double the number of actions per minute of another tank (WAR was BLM level slow). There were enough little things (an exclusive gap closer offering you unparalleled mobility, Reprisal, Delirium) to give us our own little niche and offset our weaknesses. What did Stormblood take away? Our uniqueness.

Besides, DRK has history behind it. Jobs like WHM, BLM, and even BLU draw interest because they're a part of Final Fantasy's blood. These are jobs with a twenty to thirty year legacy behind them. We grew up with them. That's the reason why people care, even now.

DRK is still unique class to play and really strong to be honest, the thing is DRK has limited amount of resources which limits his potential.
Simple increasing the amount of resources gained will fix him easily, no matter he has worse cooldowns, when he is able to pull off so much damage and use shield all the time basically, they could take the cooldowns away from him, he will still have super strong design as long as he has resources to use.
We need more blood and mana, thats all what we need.

Maybe remove the mana regen penalty, make blood price and blood weapon into one cooldown ability or even toggle costing HP each second, that would fix everything.

DRK was more fun in HW. Very button mashy and a fast fluid reactive Tank class. I enjoyed it.

Now it's just clunk city where every other ability works against each other.

I also enjoyed the Dodge tank combo we used to have and the 15 seconds of spamming DA Abyssal in mass pulls.

Then they took that away and gave it to Steel Cyclone and thus I play as WAR now.

Maybe in 5.0 they will boost Hard Slash potency by 10. Should fix everything. Clearly.

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Originally Posted by Hierro

Did people play DRK because they truly enjoyed it, or did they play 3.X DRK because it was meta, and PLD as a third option simply wasn't viable? There was a GROSS discrepancy between dark knight DPS and paladin DPS in every patch cycle of 3.X, it's not fair to draw a comparison between pick rates from different expansions.

Can you be certain people would be equally as fond of 3.X DRK if PLD in the same time could block magic, have access to its current iteration of cover, and do equal DPS?

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I leveled Dark Knight last of all my tanks. I swapped to primarily Dark Knight because I found it more fun. Paladin was a non-option in most fights, but I had no qualms with Warrior or the power it put out. I just found Dark Knight more interesting.

I just wish I could say that still felt true outside of BW-Quietus spam situations, which are still pathetic compared to IR-Deci spams.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I leveled Dark Knight last of all my tanks. I swapped to primarily Dark Knight because I found it more fun. Paladin was a non-option in most fights, but I had no qualms with Warrior or the power it put out. I just found Dark Knight more interesting.

I just wish I could say that still felt true outside of BW-Quietus spam situations, which are still pathetic compared to IR-Deci spams.

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It feels like too few enemies make it not really worth it, but too many will break the poor DRK in half, and in the end, it still feels not-as-strong as IR-Decimate/Steel Cyclone.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

DRK is still unique class to play and really strong to be honest, the thing is DRK has limited amount of resources which limits his potential.
Simple increasing the amount of resources gained will fix him easily, no matter he has worse cooldowns, when he is able to pull off so much damage and use shield all the time basically, they could take the cooldowns away from him, he will still have super strong design as long as he has resources to use.
We need more blood and mana, thats all what we need.

Maybe remove the mana regen penalty, make blood price and blood weapon into one cooldown ability or even toggle costing HP each second, that would fix everything.

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That's a terrible idea, increasing the resources generation will increase the number of dark arts per minute we have to cast to the point we even need to double weave dark passenger to dealt with the resources surplus, this will just make the double weaving problem even more severe and turn it to a triple weaving when we have to mitigate half of the time.
DRK already have problems of overflow of MP and blood in certain delirium windows so no, more resources that our skills can manage it's worse in all sense and will make DRK become a brainless overflowing tank, and I don't know how "taking away" his coldowns will help or being a good thing at all, TBN is good but alone is useless against TB.

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Originally Posted by shao32

stuff

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I am all for triple weaving and using all actions all the time. More resources mean more mana and blood to use, more energetic gameplay and more button mash, this will be excellent.
This class has been designed for button mash, you cant say it should not, its like saying a truck shouldnt have so many gears and brakes to work with because i dont like it, well there are normal cars to drive also if you catch the grip.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

I am all for triple weaving and using all actions all the time. More resources mean more mana and blood to use, more energetic gameplay and more button mash, this will be excellent.
This class has been designed for button mash, you cant say it should not, its like saying a truck shouldnt have so many gears and brakes to work with because i dont like it, well there are normal cars to drive also if you catch the grip.

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no one here sugest DRK should be slower, part of his identity was being a fast paced tank and im all for it, but one thing is being a fast-fluid job and other enchancing the current awful desing since we cliping some animation with double weaving i don't wanna try triple weaving, in fact i don't think this game support triple weaving in any degree, animations will need to be so short that you can't apreciated and thats another charm of DRK who have one of the best animation kit of the game.

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Originally Posted by shao32

no one here sugest DRK should be slower, part of his identity was being a fast paced tank and im all for it, but one thing is being a fast-fluid job and other enchancing the current awful desing since we cliping some animation with double weaving i don't wanna try triple weaving, in fact i don't think this game support triple weaving in any degree, animations will need to be so short that you can't apreciated and thats another charm of DRK who have one of the best animation kit of the game.

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They could change the DA animation to be just like the sword enchancment, cutting down the power up part, then it will be ok.
Dealing with animation timing is also a part of class.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

They could change the DA animation to be just like the sword enchancment, cutting down the power up part, then it will be ok.
Dealing with animation timing is also a part of class.

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All of this for what? Just a dps buff? Increase the pontency of certain skills instead not fill every single action with dark arts something that most old DRK mains hates, our main complains is dark arts is no longer fun and interesting to use, ppl hate DA spam and leave the job for that between other things.

Also animations are part of the satisfaction of use the skills, if they turn dark arts in just a buff that don't do anything then they can remove it from the game entirely for me, for my part I don't want something that is so boring to use and see just for the sake of have more apm.

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Originally Posted by shao32

All of this for what? Just a dps buff? Increase the pontency of certain skills instead not fill every single action with dark arts something that most old DRK mains hates, our main complains is dark arts is no longer fun and interesting to use, ppl hate DA spam and leave the job for that between other things.

Also animations are part of the satisfaction of use the skills, if they turn dark arts in just a buff that don't do anything then they can remove it from the game entirely for me, for my part I don't want something that is so boring to use and see just for the sake of have more apm.

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Is there is something more boring than warrior? =P
Yet he is being played the most of all three tanks, because he is effective.
Tanks cant be complicated, their job is enough complex.
And DA is just an enchancment, nothing more. Increasing resources pool for drk will open up more options for different rotations, even dark passenger would be used in this case with DA.
I will say it all the way, drk needs more resources, it will affect the effeciency of mediocore players a lot, and as for better ones they will have to find a way to play around animation clip, i believe they will handle it, still they will gain a lot of additional dps.
Its not like drk has enough mana and blood to use frequently bloodspiller and other enchanted with da skills.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

Is there is something more boring than warrior? =P
Yet he is being played the most of all three tanks, because he is effective.
Tanks cant be complicated, their job is enough complex.
And DA is just an enchancment, nothing more. Increasing resources pool for drk will open up more options for different rotations, even dark passenger would be used in this case with DA.
I will say it all the way, drk needs more resources, it will affect the effeciency of mediocore players a lot, and as for better ones they will have to find a way to play around animation clip, i believe they will handle it, still they will gain a lot of additional dps.
Its not like drk has enough mana and blood to use frequently bloodspiller and other enchanted with da skills.

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fun is relative, most WAR i know they love the job for his simplicity and fell cleaves with is ok even if is not for me, and i doubt it will reduce the skill gap betwen average and top DRKs, more like it will increase it, DRK need a rework of the entire dark arts system and being equally impacfull in a fight like the other 2 not make it more clunky and akward to use.

Use Blood resource for more things. Thanks.

Your dps is not just a function of resource generation. It also depends on you being able to spend it fast enough. Let's say that you had unlimited MP. You're still just pushing out 140 potency Dark Arts. Having access to more resources improves your sustained dps, but doesn't really do much for burst. There eventually comes a saturation point where adding more resources doesn't translate into significant dps gains.

That's one of the big reasons why Delirium doesn't have anywhere near the same impact that IR and Req do. It doesn't actually make you hit harder. It just lets you sustain a more consistent rate of Dark Arts usage. What we really need are more actions that translate MP into a higher level of dps.

And yeah, the blood system is fairly underutilised.

There are several oddities on dark knight when you look at it from a class design perspective.

-Mana pool tuned to be 120 mp short of holding 4 dark arts. Why?

-Darkside is 20% damage increase but stops our regeneration of mana meaning it is indirectly weaker than 20%.

-Sole Survivor gives 20% HP and Mana, but that translates to 1896 mana. Single target this is a weird value to gain back. Stance swapping cutting gauge to a weird amount that forced overcapping was enough to remove the stance swap penalty on warrior and paladin.

-Blood Weapon dps benefits are all or nothing benefits with expected values less than one. A phase transition can completely wipe out any GDC/auto gains.

-DPS benefits given while in a defensive and penalized stance.

-Dark Arts is spammy and makes weaving difficult with higher speed builds, higher speed builds are also desirable on a class which centers around resource generation.

-Speed benefits on a class with forced double weaves, placement aoe, and a 2 second cooldown on dark arts means everything must be pressed with care. A 1 second recast would make dark arts far more friendly to weave and spam.

-Physical oGCDs not lining up with dps buffs (carve and spit and plunge both generate extra mana when used in blood weapon).

-Not having access to a single target HP drain out of tank stance.

This is without other considerations like fight design, risk and reward, or, when overall dps is the same, valuing burst higher since burst will usually come out on top in fights with forced down time, not to mention that for most of this expansion dark knight was also the lowest projected sustained dps tank and only recently pulled ahead. Does more resource generation help, sure, we aren’t at the point of forcing overcapping yet, but does it fix all of the above? No.

Also keep in mind that many of the adjustments which dark knight has received have come after nearly a year of complaining, and some predate the expansion to the original release of dark knight.
-Shadow Wall cooldown reduced to match vengeance. Despite vengeance having the same damage reduction, lasting 5 seconds longer, and giving a counter attack. This took 3 years to change.

-Plunge animation lock being reduced, again took 3 years to change.

-Dark Mind not having an associated cost, half the life of the expansion to change and only after the first two savage raids and first ultimate had passed.

-Sole Survivor being useless in single target situations. 3 years to change.

-The Blackest Night being too short with its animation. 7 months to change.

-Delirium being on too long of a cooldown. 7 months to change.

-Quietus gaining a mana regen. Few weeks to change, this is the only major change which was responded to in a short amount of time but only effects mass pulling.

Contrast this with other job changes this expansion.
-Warrior's have a relatively useless skill in the 60-70 additions. Replaced with a powerful tank shield. 4 months to change.

-Warrior's rotation is punishing and not getting direct hit crits feels bad in an opener. 7 months to change into one of the strongest cooldowns in the game.

-Tank stance swapping leaves us with a strange amount of gauge. Patched out before savage on both warrior and paladin.

-Unchained costing gauge and not useable at the start of a pull. Removed before savage.


Fine, I will grant that it will take time to sort through everything and figure out what to do with dark knight. I'll accept it. But if you want to know why people are annoyed, and why people aren't playing dark knight in raids, just look at what has, and equally importantly, what has not been addressed.