Dark Knight Megathread

sustain issue just the tip of the iceberg

Some thoughts:

1) Rework the Walking Dead mechanic of Living Dead:
Instead of holding your HP above 1 and killing you unless you're healed for 100%, make it so you fully heal when Walking Dead activates and become immune to most external sources of damage, but it drains at least 10% of your HP every second during the immunity period.

This retains the core drawback of requiring healers to keep on top of you because its a 10s countdown to your death, and remains unique from effects like Holmgang and Superbolide while keeping the DRK's original "drain HP for power" theme, but also doesn't draw healers into the trap of prematurely removing your invuln by popping Bene or being powerless to fully heal you within the 10s window as a Barrier specialist.
Plus even an inattentive healer who isn't watching your debuffs will see your HP dropping like a stone.

2) Add a trait at 82 to extend the duration of The Blackest Night's barrier to between 8-10 sec, and heal its target based on the damage it absorbs during the first 4 sec.

This should hopefully bring it more in line with the upgrades the other tanks' 25s CDs received (effectively doubling its protection for the first 4 sec), without weakening its ability to grant Dark Arts.

3) Add life steal to Carve & Spit.
If it's going to share a cooldown with Abyssal Drain anyway, and Abyssal Drain already shares the MP recovery, then commit to making C&S the single-target iteration.

4) ... buff Oblation. I honestly don't know how specifically, but if it's meant to be DRK's response to Aurora or Cover/Clemency, then a mere 10% mitigation is vastly underwhelming by comparison.

honestly I like the imagination and enthusiasm people have for a LD rework but all it needs is no death penalty
that alone with still not make it somewhat unique

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引用元：Duskane

honestly I like the imagination and enthusiasm people have for a LD rework but all it needs is no death penalty
that alone with still not make it somewhat unique

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Then that'd just be Holmgang with a longer duration.

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引用元：Archwizard

Then that'd just be Holmgang with a longer duration.

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and Bolide is just hallowed ground that sets you to 1

Superbolide sets you to 1 and THEN is identical to hallowed ground.

If you remove the death penalty (which Walking Dead in its current state is dumb, let's not lie), however, Living Dead literally becomes identical to Holmgang. If it has the trigger of starting after you would drop to 0 hp, then it's just holmgang but frame-perfect; that's a lot closer to Holm than Superbolide is to Hallowed.

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引用元：Duskane

and Bolide is just hallowed ground that sets you to 1

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While I understand your point, I also think Hallowed Ground is too strong compared to its competitors, being the only one without inherent drawbacks or conditionals, cooldown aside.
But we already knew it was the best one, so it's not really adding much to the conversation.

I mean, there's prime opportunities to buff LD and bust HG to be in line with the other two, but since this is a thread about DRK, let's just focus on LD and leave HG for another.

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引用元：Zedrin

Superbolide sets you to 1 and THEN is identical to hallowed ground.

If you remove the death penalty (which Walking Dead in its current state is dumb, let's not lie), however, Living Dead literally becomes identical to Holmgang. If it has the trigger of starting after you would drop to 0 hp, then it's just holmgang but frame-perfect; that's a lot closer to Holm than Superbolide is to Hallowed.

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both are same regardless despite activation
bolide is just hallowed that sets you to 1
Living dead would be Holmgang with 10 seconds to proc minus the bind effect(granted is useless in raids anyway)

both have a small difference but are effectively the same

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引用元：Archwizard

While I understand your point, I also think Hallowed Ground is too strong compared to its competitors, being the only one without inherent drawbacks or conditionals, cooldown aside.
But we already knew it was the best one, so it's not really adding much to the conversation.

I mean, there's prime opportunities to buff LD and bust HG to be in line with the other two, but since this is a thread about DRK, let's just focus on LD and leave HG for another.

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Hallowed drawback is its CD 7 minutes
while holmgang is 4 minutes LD is 5 and Bolide is 6 all now last 10 seconds and end goal is the same
Holmgang has always proved itself the best due to its shorter CD even when it only last 3 seconds and ability to fit 3 and sometimes even 4 in a fight PLD is lucky if it can even use it twice

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引用元：Duskane

Hallowed drawback is its CD 7 minutes
while holmgang is 4 minutes LD is 5 and Bolide is 6 all now last 10 seconds and end goal is the same

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Living Dead does not last 10 seconds. It lasts up to <10 seconds minus the server delay by which a received heal is recognized and further delay to remove the Doom effect>. And that's assuming your healer is willing to lose uptime, or lucky enough, to finish off your last bit of required healing at the last possible moment. (They won't be, by the way.)

Neither their end goals nor end results are equal so long as LD is in that list.

On the larger topic, I'd be fine with Living Dead basically turning into a Holmgang, or a Holmgang that doesn't outright nullify would-be overkill damage, especially if Holmgang itself had a shorter duration. (I think Holmgang's duration ought to be shortened regardless, so long as it remains on a mere 4-minute CD. Its healing requirement is at worst merely equal to Bolide's while the health cost of Bolide matters incredibly little if the skill is played around, all while lasting just as long and somehow having only two-thirds the cooldown.)

Hallowed Ground has mostly been considered the weakest of all the invulns going as far back as Heavensward, because the cooldown is so incredibly long that you're almost guaranteed to get one fewer use out of it in a given fight than any other invuln. The only thing it was ever really good for was that the actual 'incoming damage reduced to 0' will, occasionally, allow you to use it to bypass a mechanic that's still supposed to debuff you through LD or Holmgang - and Superbolide has eaten its lunch now.

I really think a lot of the discourse around invulns, and particularly around Living Dead, is completely off-base. In a vacuum, the healing requirement on Living Dead is not and never has been a particularly heavy burden. Despite all the histrionics you see whenever people talk about it, in any raid setting, even in a situation where things are kind of going sideways, it's pretty trivial to heal it off. The problem is only relative, when you compare it directly across to the other invulns and find that Holmgang is now strictly superior in every way (and, to a lesser extent, that Superbolide has just a few too many advantages over it for something that is only ever disadvantaged in fights with extremely specific durations that allow an extra use of LD over SB). The healing requirement doesn't need to be removed; it just needs to be respected.

I think if you moved LD down to a 240s cooldown, moved Holmgang up to a 300s cooldown, then squeezed SB and HG together so that Superbolide was at 330s and Hallowed at 360s, you would pretty much solve the balance equation, without having to resort to any more homogenization than we've already had inflicted on us.

Gonna clarify some things about Living Dead here, since that is being discussed actively currently, as I feel it's relevant to bring up just how much this ability sucks as a whole.


Upon activation, you enter into a state of Living Dead for Up to ten seconds.

If, at any point during those 10 seconds, you are hit by an attack that would have killed you, the following occurs.

Your status of Living Dead is immediately interrupted, and the effect ends.

You drop to 1 Hit Point, and now enter into a state of Walking Dead, for up to 10 seconds. You must be healed to 100% Max Hp Value, or you will die after 10 seconds.

To Elaborate on this: During those 10 seconds of Walking Dead, healers must heal you, for the total maximum HP recorded on your character sheet. You can take damage, that bit doesn't matter. So long as the healer meets your HP Max total, you won't die. So, if you have 250k max hp, so long as the healers throws out a total value of 250k healing in your direction, you won't die.

Now, here's the kicker.

Assuming the max value has been met, Walking Dead is now cleansed from you. Buuuuttttttt....you also lose your invuln.


This in turn, means the following scenario can happen.

You activate Living Dead. (I have a macro set up to blare out alarms with sound effects in party chat to warn healers that I am using it. Kind of messed up, if you ask me, that this is a necessity. But I digress... )

2 Seconds in, boss hits you and you would have died. Living Dead immediately ends, and you drop to 1 hp, and enter into a state of Walking Dead.

The healer throws out enough healing to reach your max hp value.

Walking Dead state now ends.

And so does your invuln

This means, effectively, that your entire invuln span could last literally all of 3 seconds. Sadly, I've had that happen on my own end several times where it lasted that long, since I run extremes with my Friends on Discord and warn them to be prepped for it's use.



Long and short is this. All of the other tanks always get the FULL benefits of their invuln.

Dark Knight is the only one that requires such, in my opinion, ridiculous rules to monitor for it's use, and we can lose it shortly after activation to boot.

While everyone's on the topic of Living Dead, I think you can keep the theme and make it a really good skill.

For starters, you should become invulnerable once you enter walking dead, as in you take no damage. Second, separate walking dead from the room mechanic by simply just placing Doom on your character along with the walking dead status. You become invulnerable for the duration of walking dead, can keep the invulnerable even if the Doom gets cleansed.

Would it be OP? I don't think so. You still have to get full cured or you die. I think it's a pretty good high risk high reward. You could say healing to full is easy, but you don't know how many times I've died to this bad skill because healers couldn't top me off even though they knew it was coming.

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引用元：Dauntess

While everyone's on the topic of Living Dead, I think you can keep the theme and make it a really good skill.

For starters, you should become invulnerable once you enter walking dead, as in you take no damage. Second, separate walking dead from the room mechanic by simply just placing Doom on your character along with the walking dead status. You become invulnerable for the duration of walking dead, can keep the invulnerable even if the Doom gets cleansed.

Would it be OP? I don't think so. You still have to get full cured or you die. I think it's a pretty good high risk high reward. You could say healing to full is easy, but you don't know how many times I've died to this bad skill because healers couldn't top me off even though they knew it was coming.

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Doom mechanic, not room mechanic.

Honestly, I think the community's general opinion of DRK is way too low for what it really is. It can absolutely clear any content at minimum item level, TBN still gives our brains the good chemical, and now we stole GNB's DPS crown which is a neat brag. However "works" and "is good" are two separate concepts. People's main frustration, especially for healers, is the performance in dungeons and I think they could buff it's dungeon performance specifically by rolling back some 5.0 changes and twisting them a bit.

-Give it back the old function of Dark Arts, even if you give it a new name, and make it like Eukrasia
-Burn twice the mana on "Eukrasian" Flood of Shadow and it blinds enemies hit, dropping their accuracy
-Abyssal Drain has no recast to speak of, but an MP cost of maybe 1500 to just do damage or 4500 for the "Eukrasian" version to restore HP
-Where do we get all this MP? Bring back Blood Price, which restores MP based on number of hits received, doing very little for you in single target but keeping you nice and topped up on a wall to wall pull
-Players comfortable with current DRK's kit will ignore burning more MP for HP and take the DPS gain of more Floods, clearing dungeons even faster as a reward, and use the non drain version of abyssal drain to guarantee enmity of entire mobs as they sprint from wall to wall
-Bring back 3.X Delirium, again it can get a new name, but it was an alternate 3rd hit of your combo like Goring Blade or Storm's Eye but it debuffed the boss to do less magic damage. It was literally just Dark Missionary with potentially 100% uptime if you're willing to give up a bit of potency every few combos (and learned 26 levels earlier so syncing back in a roulette would suck less). Giving that back would act as a notional improvement to it's ability to tank with the flavor of also being beneficial to the whole party and satisfy people upset at the fact that it has only the 3 GCD combo buttons. Give it the Power Slash animation as a treat for old fans

Honestly though I would give up any of those changes to just get them to shuffle the level you learn certain abilities. Playing a Heavensward job in Heavensward content shouldn't feel this boring and gutted. Also not getting your party mitigation until Shadowbringers really hurts. Paladin get 1 of theirs in HW, and the other 2 get theirs during Stormblood. Also also, Unmend used to have a 30% chance to give you a free AoE spell, though it cost MP itself. Now that it's free, make it a 15 or 20% chance and there's your "Enhanced Unmend" instead of the Plunge thing

Here are my wishes fix for the new year:

- Rework delirium, im tired of spam bloodspiller the same way WAR spam fell cleave, no more clone mechanics on the job.
- Fix Blood weapon, make it true 10s of duration or just make it 5 stacks to make his execution less problematic, would love if the recast is halved to 30s too.
- Rework the whole Darkside structure, stop making it a buff that keep himself, make his Gauge something usefull we have to pay attention and not something pretty but useless on our screen.
- Sinergy betwen our skills, make our skills feel conected somehow like only MP skills build Blood and blood skills grant extra MP or Allow the use of new weaponskills that grant more MP.
- Re-purpose living shadow, make it grant a 3-5% extra damage to all our weaponskills or upgrade our weapon skills so we execute an special combo or something that make his duration feel more than being damage over time without any interaction with and by result make his representation on the Darkside gauge being usefull.
- Re-estructure the skills learning order so DRK learn early a usefull defensive buff before lvl 70 and make it better at those levels, make it learn stalwart soul way more early so we don't spend 72 levels spaming unleash at the same bring Dark missionary early like the rest of the tanks.
- Do something to Dark mind, the skill is really useless in practically most of the content, make it evolve to obliation or grant it a healing effect, just anything neutrat so we can use it more.
- Do something to the downtime of the job, is the worst gameplay experience of the game and is basiaclly the phase where DRK spend most of the time, doing only souleater combo for 45s is not fun.
- Do something with salted earth, his execution is worse and more limited.
- Rework Livind dead or grant tools to dealt with walking dead by ourself once for all please.
- More weaponskills, make Shadowbringer a weaponskill or bring back older ones, scourge, Power slash, anything that breack the enless souleater spam boredorm.
- Make all oGCD being part or contribute on something, make them being a proc of something or add effects that make them be more that simple skills that offers nothing but low/flat damage (Plunge, Carve and spit, Abyssal drain, salted earth, shadowbringer).
- Delete plunge and Living shadow's traits and make new ones that actually offer something more than just numbers up or extremly niche and useless effects, add true gameplay effects.
- Make TBN 100% grant Dark arts when the shield is consume by time or by breaking it and add a new defensive effect like a regen if the shield is succesfully breaked.
- And the most important one, have some real direction on the job, make it have unique gameplay mechanics, stop leaving it with just a combo and a bunch of fluff oGCD and a buff that keep hilmself, make his gauge mean something, make his skills feel conected make the job evolve with each expansion like BLM, DRG, PLD, RDM, ect, ect, make DRK tecnical and unique again.

I really will apreciate if DRK is rewoked and fixes all this points, happy new year all, for a better DRK for all.

DRK is a joke that has been beaten death, raised from the dead, and beaten again. Rpr exacerbated the joke to new levels of fuck you and if given mitigation, would make DRK utterly pointless. Stop putting the laziest procrastinator in charge of it who gets drunk every night and spits out some last minute bullshit. I don't care about a dps increase, it's a tank, not a dps. The reward for playing everything right should not be the bare minimum of what a tank is supposed to do. The pvp buff DRK got post SHB would make healers not hate us entirely. I want to play DRK and PLD interchangeably and as equals, but DRK is inferior as all hell and I can't bring myself to punish the healer (especially if it's a Sage or Scholar).

They had 6+ years to decide if they wanted to change LD. Despite all the negative feedback around it. I dont expect any changes to it anytime soon. If anything we should be striving for change we know can happen such as Blood weapon, sustain, dark mind and TBN.

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引用元：Derio

They had 6+ years to decide if they wanted to change LD. Despite all the negative feedback around it. I dont expect any changes to it anytime soon. If anything we should be striving for change we know can happen such as Blood weapon, sustain, dark mind and TBN.

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I'm praying usage numbers are below acceptable limits (for once) and DRK finally just gets a rework.

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引用元：WhyAmIHere

I'm praying usage numbers are below acceptable limits (for once) and DRK finally just gets a rework.

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Should be, DRK is the least played by over 40k compared to WAR, 20k compared to GNB. If this doesn't say they're doing something wrong, I don't know what will.

Take this with a grain of salt, as this is just coming from FFLogs.

https://i.imgur.com/ZTXpnMi.png

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引用元：Sazuzaki

Should be, DRK is the least played by over 40k compared to WAR, 20k compared to GNB. If this doesn't say they're doing something wrong, I don't know what will.

Take this with a grain of salt, as this is just coming from FFLogs.

https://i.imgur.com/ZTXpnMi.png

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I'm guessing the general playerbase gap would amount to a significantly lower percentage than it has produced from fflogs parse counts alone. That being said, if a DPS faced even the Extreme/NR content gap above, it wouldn't remotely worry the devs. I doubt this would be nearly enough of a red flag.

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引用元：Shurrikhan

I'm guessing the general playerbase gap would amount to a significantly lower percentage than it has produced from fflogs parse counts alone.

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That's why I said take it with a grain of salt. However, I'm fairly sure the majority of high-end content players do parse, so I would place my bets that SE does pay attention to how much said class is used in high-end content. I think FFLogs, least for NA, is not the worst thing to use when measuring how much a job is played.

That's why the most I'm expecting is some regen on Oblation, but I still have hope.

Dps on DRK is not the problem, the problem is their ability to actually be a tank. They are so painful and frustrating to heal for due to having no self sustain. Your dps when you are dead is 0 and no amount of parsing fixes that.

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引用元：Sacrilegion

Dps on DRK is not the problem, the problem is their ability to actually be a tank. They are so painful and frustrating to heal for due to having no self sustain. Your dps when you are dead is 0 and no amount of parsing fixes that.

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It's more of the playstyle than anything, least for me. Despite the community shoving solutions in their face, they still don't know what direction they want DRK to go. I still wish it was less random weaving, more buffing your GCDs. It's why I think 3.0 DRK was so good offensively. Buffing your GCDs with Dark Arts while also applying Blood Weapon made the job feel fast without OGCD bloat, paired with chaotic MP management. Everything actually synergized with each other, minus its horrible defensive play.

MMMMM I just wish a 3.0 private server would arrive already. Or a private server that has 3.0 DRK's rotation in mind.

Checking in with my fellow ex-DRK mains.
How are y'all doing?
Personally been enjoying the hell out of RPR.

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引用元：Sacrilegion

Dps on DRK is not the problem, the problem is their ability to actually be a tank. They are so painful and frustrating to heal for due to having no self sustain. Your dps when you are dead is 0 and no amount of parsing fixes that.

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This is only a problem in multi-pulling content, AKA Dungeons.

Current non-dungeon content it makes no difference, Healers have a massive amount O-GCDs, any Healer disagreeing should learn using them. Paladin had 0 sustain in Shadowbringers and did just fine in any content, and Healers got upgrades in EW.

I got it to 81 and might level it with trusts slowly, all the while accidentally hitting carve and spit in pulls and losing abyssal drain uses (for whatever that's worth). The best part is if I pull too big I can't even count on my invuln. Walking dead and npc healers, great combo.

DRK isn't my main tank (at least since HW/StB), but it is/was my Sub-tank for when I'm not playing WAR.

Zero sustain in ShB, lol what? XD

PLD clemency got nerfed by taking away requiescat 50% scaling because it was a bit much and would be made worse with the regen and mitigation bonuses

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引用元：Sacrilegion

PLD clemency got nerfed by taking away requiescat 50% scaling because it was a bit much and would be made worse with the regen and mitigation bonuses

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Still shouldn't be using it...

Paladin runs on a synced rotation, any cast of Clemency, hell even trying to cast it will kill it's DPS and start falling to Healer level, or lower.

It's only getting used when there's nothing to attack. If people call that a sustain, that is insulting.

True, if all goes right, never need it. Rather do the healing myself if the healer dies.

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引用元：Sacrilegion

PLD clemency got nerfed by taking away requiescat 50% scaling because it was a bit much and would be made worse with the regen and mitigation bonuses

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It already had significant costs, though, which EW already increased by giving its alternatives 40% the healing of Clemency (if cast on self). There was no need to remove its bonus from Req, especially if they're going to have it still consume Req stacks.

If it were a sustain tool that rotationally got that bonus for free, I'd understand, but it wasn't. It was a tool useful only in emergencies, because it was far from free.

happy new year im already drunk as fuck! cause EU, hopefully they fix dark knight soon! o/

Better to have the option, over not having at all

Was lookin around the XIV reddit n such and found this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7XrGmA4SOs this DRK died with a DoT on him while Walking Dead was up, meaning he can't go below 1 hp unless it's a specific mechanic that you can't invuln. Now this has happened to me as well during the 1st EX when he casted Phobos later down the fight when it was just me and 2 DPS alive (was just going to show my friend the rest of the fight etc) and I fell over when I had Walking Dead on but just the bleed from Phobos.

Reason i'm posting this is did anyone else experience this bug? I haven't been hearing many people talking about it but I just thought I was lagging because the servers were laggy today on my server.

Edit: BTW Don't click on this link if you HAVEN"T finished EW as it's a spoiler from the last dungeon.

I been in so many situations where my healer dies and I'm stuck slowly dying as DRK

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引用元：Sazuzaki

Should be, DRK is the least played by over 40k compared to WAR, 20k compared to GNB. If this doesn't say they're doing something wrong, I don't know what will.

Take this with a grain of salt, as this is just coming from FFLogs.

https://i.imgur.com/ZTXpnMi.png

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numbers that bad aren't, sadly.
NIN's parse numbers for instance are, however. Expect a significant response on tuesday for NIN.

Now, what I will say is this is a limited scope. I'm sure SE also has metrics for total # of players leveling jobs, usage in high end duties, usage in dungeons for expert roulettes, and overall gleaming of PFs and paying attention to what tanks are in parties, as well as how many DRK's appear in duty finder.

EDIT::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXMTLM19JZw
'member berries tastin' real good right about now.

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引用元：WhyAmIHere

numbers that bad aren't, sadly.
NIN's parse numbers for instance are, however. Expect a significant response on tuesday for NIN.

Now, what I will say is this is a limited scope. I'm sure SE also has metrics for total # of players leveling jobs, usage in high end duties, usage in dungeons for expert roulettes, and overall gleaming of PFs and paying attention to what tanks are in parties, as well as how many DRK's appear in duty finder.

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Shhhhhhh I'm high on hopium rn...

PLEAAAAAAAAAAAAAASE YOSHI PLEASE LET AT LEAST THIS BE LOW ENOUGH

https://i.imgur.com/LLtp1NX.png

What monk got in EW was what I thought was going to happen to drk after the rework.

I liked the rework and believed it was for the better even if it’s bare bones. The gameplay is much more smooth (not you blood weapon) compared to SB and laid the perfect foundation to build back up with the new darkside, blood, and mp.

But the devs did nothing. There is nothing to compensate for the loss of dark arts beside just having ogcds to press and it’s repeating the same issue that caused the rework in the first place. A complete lack of direction for the job besides just adding more. People liked dark arts? Let’s add dark arts to everything and increase mp generation! Drk got lots of ogcds? Here have three more and an extra button for you shitty defense when everyone else gets an upgrade!

I get that it’s a tank and can’t have complicated job mechanics, but you can at least be a little creative instead of copy and pasting things straight from another job in the same category. And not to mention giving our old mechanics to newer jobs but done right.

Some parts in me want to believe that this is all done on purpose just so they can rework it again but that is yet to be seen. If ast can get reworked two expansion in a row I don’t see why drk can’t.

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引用元：Jakulo

I get that it’s a tank and can’t have complicated job mechanics, but you can at least be a little creative instead of copy and pasting things straight from another job in the same category. And not to mention giving our old mechanics to newer jobs but done right.

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Or at least attempt to create the illusion people are receiving something better on the other end.

Tanks can have "complicated" mechanics. Not when your average player fails on CT or WoD. I guess it really is convenient for these developers since they don't play tanks. Incredibly selfish of them not to hire developers that know how to make tanks and healers unique.