Dark Knight Megathread

I wouldn't say disaster it's just gonna be shb drk with a couple of unnecessary extras. The devs have made it very clear they want tanks and healers dumbed down for accessibility reasons even though it's making veterans of said roles leave to dps (like me). That being said, the roles are obviously attracting more new and inexperienced players and let's be honest, a lot of people just love the drk esthetic and edginess regardless of how boring and dry the job actually is.

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Originally Posted by RinaB

I wouldn't say disaster it's just gonna be shb drk with a couple of unnecessary extras. The devs have made it very clear they want tanks and healers dumbed down for accessibility reasons even though it's making veterans of said roles leave to dps (like me). That being said, the roles are obviously attracting more new and inexperienced players and let's be honest, a lot of people just love the drk esthetic and edginess regardless of how boring and dry the job actually is.

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Nothing accessible about a trash rework with nothing to expand on. An idiot can play this job; if they actually expanded on it at all they would've added charges to Bloodweapon among other quality of life improvements. Or fix Living Dead, for once. It's a fundemental given. Even inexperienced players will see the better difference between LD and Holmgang for instance. And they will choose accordingly, an aesthetic theme and a little bit of purple won't change that.

Dumbing down doesn't mean bad job design. It means reducing the entry skill ceiling in exchange for smoother skill expression and an easier learning curve. DRK in 6.0 however, is what happens when you just don't give shit anymore.

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Originally Posted by Shin96

Yes, this is yet another DRK thread among endless threads, but for the sake of simplicity, I wanted to create a Megathread containing all criticisms and possible improvements players may have for DRK in case a SE representative may ever stumble upon it.

Here are a few questions to get started.

1. What issue with Dark Knight do you have since 5.0?

2. Is there a viable solution to your problem? If so, write it down.

3. What did you like about previous iterations of Dark Knight?

4. How did DRK capture your interest while playing FFXIV?

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The short answer to OPs 3 and 4 is lore and aesthetic reason as well as the fact that I quite dislike the lore and aesthetics of PLD and WAR. GNB is better but not quite there.

Now for 1 and 2, the problems I have and possible solutions I'd offer, that's a bit longer.

- The first thing is that it just feels a bit unfinished when it comes to resource management. There's this whole new job gauge that's full of nothing. There's a Fray timer that's completely unnecessary as you can't interact with it in any way. There's a Darkside timer that you don't have to pay any attention to and the mana gauge that also plays itself for the most part once you realize this. Having any kind of build up on this foundation where you could spend your darkside to do something but then have to use mana again to not drop darkside but would then have to use blood to rebuild your mana would make it a lot more interesting. It would be hard to design tho so I'm not sure how viable I'd call it but there's people being paid to design these jobs as far as I know.

- DRK could have something going on between its burst windows. Pressing BS every now and then to not overcap isn't the most interesting thing by itself. What I said in my first point could be the solution but here's another way simpler one: introduce a Drill like GCD into DRKs rotation on 20 or 30 sec cooldown. Something that you wanna keep on CD. It's not much but having another button does break the monotony by a lot already. As a bonus, I'd say that DRKs getting pretty stacked on OGCDs on their burst window so they could even go ahead and rework C&S for this role. This would free up some ogcd space for more interesting buttons in the future while giving us a more interesting rotation while also allowing us to actually see the C&S animation. The mana that it currently gives could be baked into something else easily. If you wanna fill up the current OGCD burst slots then make AD 30 sec cooldown with 2 charges. Obviously tweak potencies of both so the damage stays where it's intended to be. AD thingy would also give people more of the self healing that they seem to be craving for, although only for mobbing.

- Some individual skill woes.
Living dead, fix it already. This is getting beyond ridiculous and tiresome.
Bloodweapon really should have stacks instead of a timer but if it does stay on timer then make it stay up as long as current Delirium does (over 10 seconds) instead of less than 10 seconds.
Unleash, Stalward and Unmend are spells. This means that they are on 2.5 second recast no matter your SkS. This is problematic for non-stacks Bloodweapon but at the end of the day it's also just very annoying that a part of the kit isn't in any way interacting with one of your substats. Could either change them to weaponskills because other than flavor it really doesn't matter anywhere or could just condense SkS and SpS materia into one thing. Either would fix this.

Having said all that I do like 5.0 DRK overall. I think it fixed a lot of jank from 4.0. It's laid a solid foundation to build on without probably having to completely redesign the job every expansion which I don't think they'll be doing again no matter how much the HW DRKs want to. It's just still got some QoL problems that I'm a bit baffled haven't been touched already and these 5.0 foundations actually do need to be built on instead of just ignored. Also, I didn't specifically mention Delirium in there as I'd consider that something that could be built on to make it more interesting if only SE was willing.

EDIT: Just as they seem to be unwilling to change this stupid character limitation of 3000 on their posts on these forums. C'mon...

EDIT2: Forgot to mention the leveling experience / being synced down. Stalwart should be moved to an earlier level and that would help a ton. Alternatively, I'd imagine you could even take the mana regen from Stalwart and give it to Unleash as a trait on some pre-50 level and it'd be OK. Not being able to generate mana in AOE on sub-72 is the biggest hurdle I think the job has on earlier levels. I personally don't have an issue with TBN staying at lvl 70.

At this point, I don't have anything more to say that hasn't already been said. I don't think I've seen anyone pitch the idea of lifesteal while under the Walking Dead effect, so I'll throw it out there and bow out until I've done some lvl 90 content.

I can't say I'm at all enthusiastic about it, though. I'm going to be playing GNB a lot more from now on, because I don't have much interest in playing a job that's carried by one skill and edgy aesthetics.

Players years ago that cared about Dark Knight being more like Dark Knight did suggest Walking Dead giving 300% increased potency associated with heals to make it less draining on Healers. But no one really cares and the argument has always been that outside of raids you don't need LD to clear content so why bother. Another idea was putting the old Sole Survivor effects on a Dark Knight or a Doom counter above their character that counts down to signify they need to be healed but that didn't happen either.

But then you can get into situations where your dungeon group made very big mistakes and the only Tanks that can solo content is Paladin and Warrior with their mitigation and large amount of self heals. Dark Knight and Gunbreaker have low sustain.

Only way LD can function properly is good comms with your healer.

This!! There is absolutely no reason we shouldn't have more of it in general really, soul eater heal is insult to injury due to how low it is. DRK is basically a terrible version of warrior (i also don't understand why warrior even has lifesteal as part of their kit). "DRK needs to be dependant on healers" okay so should everyone else by that logic.

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Originally Posted by MagiusNecros

Players years ago that cared about Dark Knight being more like Dark Knight did suggest Walking Dead giving 300% increased potency associated with heals to make it less draining on Healers. But no one really cares and the argument has always been that outside of raids you don't need LD to clear content so why bother. Another idea was putting the old Sole Survivor effects on a Dark Knight or a Doom counter above their character that counts down to signify they need to be healed but that didn't happen either.

But then you can get into situations where your dungeon group made very big mistakes and the only Tanks that can solo content is Paladin and Warrior with their mitigation and large amount of self heals. Dark Knight and Gunbreaker have low sustain.

Only way LD can function properly is good comms with your healer.

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I like that idea of increased healing received. It does not lose the concept of it. It does not break the balance. It does not require effort of re-designing a skill.

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Originally Posted by Aword3213

I like that idea of increased healing received. It does not lose the concept of it. It does not break the balance. It does not require effort of re-designing a skill.

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and yet it's been asked for since stormblood.

Honestly at this point we would all be better off slamming them with tickets till they listen. As annoying as it sounds, you want to be heard, hit them where they can't turn it off. Just in case they "forget".

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Originally Posted by Sacrilegion

Honestly at this point we would all be better off slamming them with tickets till they listen. As annoying as it sounds, you want to be heard, hit them where they can't turn it off. Just in case they "forget".

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seeing how that went for GNB and the solid barrel combo sound effects... you're better off just not playing DRK.

If SE sees a significant drop off of DRK players in content they'll start to *maybe* consider looking into why.