Dark Knight Megathread

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Originally Posted by Takamorisan

Now for defensives they feel really uncomfortable to use, its like several spread defensive cds where I have to bake it into something during fight and they don't feel a efficient compared to the other classes.
Dark mind works really well for this Savage line up given the bosses use magic TBs, but in general I feel like I'm rotating between TBN+ Shadow Wall and then for the next TB TBN+Dark Mind, making oblation really niche unless I plan to clip my OGCDS and add oblation to it. The times that I use it "comfortably" is when someone do a bad move and take a lot of damage before an high damage AoE from the boss, then I apply both Oblation and TBN to the person, but the principle of it usage its a mistake not something you plan for.

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I personally like the approach taken for DRK defensive abilities, where you are layering together different abilities depending on the situation. To me it feels more strategic and I like that. I understand that it may not feel as efficient as some of the abilities on other tank jobs and that some people may not like that, but the flexibility gained by having them broken up like they are is worth it in my opinion.

I think the main issue with Oblation not feeling very good is that it is not quite strong enough as an ability and the 60s recast, even with having 2 charges, isn't frequent enough to really sell the feel of it being that extra bit of defense that you can choose when and where to layer in.
While I would prefer a more complex and game-play focused rework of the ability, like the ones that I have suggested in past posts, I think that at minimum they should reduce the recast to 30s if they want to keep it at 10% mitigation, or have the recast be 45s and the mitigation 15%.

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Originally Posted by WhyAmIHere

Dark Arts, Scourge, and Power Slash.

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Yeah those animations alone were awesome. It's really sad nothing is left of them anymore.

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Originally Posted by Takamorisan

But as said its pretty weird that Blood Weapon and No Mercy didn't receive Delirium and IR treatment?

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Thinking about No Mercy becoming just another "+20% for 3-5 attacks" just made me throw up a little.

https://youtu.be/sVFYaHPcD1w

Watching this video was really eye opening. I don't know if I should be sad that I never got to experience this iteration of drk or be glad that I didn't have to go through losing it twice in a row.

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Originally Posted by RatCopter

Happy 200 pages, mates. I've been thinking about what I actually want from Dark Knight, and wanted to pose a question to you guys first;

What is that skill in DRK's repitoire that, when you use, you feel a kind of visceral satisfaction of "HELL YEAH, I just used ____"?

Because I've been playing WAR lately and they have a lot of those skills. Primal Rend, Bloodwhetting, Inner Chaos/Cyclone, Equilibrium when it crits. But when I sit down and look at DRK's kit and try to make a comparison, I don't have an answer. Hell, the closest I've come to an answer is setting up the infinite mana machine in Stormblood and throwing out DA AD constantly.

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SB mass pulling, pick up all turn off tan stance, TBN+break, use bloodweapon + dark arts/abyssal drain and get the masive returns of quietus with bloodweapon to keep spreading pain and sufering to my enemies while i become inmortal.

such a combination of skills that feel so good to master and use, for single target just HW st rotation was the best thing with scourge, bloodweapon old duration and recast, satisfing combo system and MP management.

Imagine if SB just added stuff, removed nothing just added blood gauge and the adjustements to skills.

Do you guys think we will get some love patch 6.08?

I don't think the job is going to get more than just numerical adjustments and maybe Bloodweapon turned in to stack system and add some self healing somewhere just to pass the expansion without need to touch it more, is what they usually do with DRK, minimun changes to match the performance and leave the increasing list of desing problems for the uncertain future, hey maybe we get even more fluff in 7.0.

Job re-works are entirely possible for .1, .2, .3, .4, .5, but we have Dragonsong ultimate coming in 6.1 so I am gonna assume it will be .2, or .3 it may come.

SE has to be careful making changes on jobs, potency increases, buff tunings, can make wild changes with rotations, etc. A simple change for a job can end up with more problems than solving a solution. The job not being fun it's self is a different subject.

"It will get fixed next patch."

"It will get fixed next expansion."

Me now nearly 10 years older.

"It will be fixed next patch."

"It will be fixed next expansion."

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Originally Posted by Shin96

Yeah those animations alone were awesome. It's really sad nothing is left of them anymore.

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I loved Delirium too.

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Originally Posted by Crater

If you understand the theory that using TBN more than once per minute is a DPS loss because it drags an Edge outside of raid buffs, then you should realize that removing the Dark Arts charge entirely is automatically a nerf in a DPS-optimized scenario because it means you can't shift an Edge from your 60s window to your 120s window. Realistically though, we should also recognize that "You can only use it once per minute" is a bit of an outdated viewpoint, because the only 60s raid buff is Trick Attack, and Ninja isn't exactly mandatory these days. Realistically, it's more like "You can use TBN all you want on every odd-numbered minute, but you want to use it exactly once on every even-numbered minute."

(There is a problem with the skill there, in that DPS optimization does require that you limit your usages of TBN when you should be encouraged to use it as often as possible in situations where it will break, but the solution to that is to allow the storage of multiple charges, not to remove the interaction entirely.)

However, outside of DPS-optimized scenarios, where we only need consider its defensive properties, TBN's most valuable trait is its shorter, 15-second recast compared to the other tank skills. In a sustained-damage situation, like a dungeon pull, TBN's shield is roughly equivalent to a 1500 potency shield. On a 15s recast, the mitigation throughput there is roughly 100p/sec. What you are asking for is an 800 potency HoT to be added to it, in exchange for increasing the cooldown to 25s. That reduces its mitigation throughput to 92p/sec, including the heal. That is an enormous loss of power in those sustained-damage situations.

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Not necessarily true. See, an often overlooked aspect of self healing abilities is when the healing is applied and the intention behind it. You don't use Blood Whetting at full HP in trash pulls for this reason. Other cooldowns stacked on top of a HoT make it more valuable. So while it would, on paper, be less potent after the heal, the healing itself changes value based on the situation. As an example, right now DRK is parsing higher than GNB in healing, but nobody feels like it actually is. That's because the healing that DRK is doing matters significantly less. I am, however, still against adding a HoT to TNB because there is an issue that would cause portions of the heal to entirely go to waste. If you use TBN at full HP and it breaks, the first tick is overheal. Assuming you had mitigation on, the damage you are taking must bring you below the heal value in order to actually be effective in the first place. (This is what I meant by it changes on the situation.) Even though timed healing can be incredibly valuable, you aren't actually timing this heal most of the time, it does not change the way the skill is used at all, keeping all the same flaws but on a longer cooldown.

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On top of that, you're asking for the heal to come in the least useful form possible: a weak, 200p/tick HoT. If we're talking about a tankbuster situation rather than sustained incoming damage, that 200p HoT is going to do exactly as much to save you from any followup damage as the current version of TBN. The useful version of what you're asking for, which is still a nerf, is an instant 800 potency heal. But that's not even an area where TBN even needs help; healing and shielding are both flat-value mitigation/recovery mechanics, and in terms of flat-value mitigation/recovery, TBN is already very strong, at roughly 1500 equivalent potency to HoC's 900 and Holy Sheltron's 1000, though Bloodwhetting definitely rules that particular roost at 2000.

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Because of the same reasons above, a flat value would be pretty bad except for against tank busters. When it comes to how tanks handle tank busters the only thing that matters is the condition of the tank after it has happened. There's three stages to any buster. Preparing to take the damage, actually getting hit, and recovering from it. The only stage that matters in terms of tank balancing is what the tank looks like after stage 3. Dead? Bad. Low HP? Not as bad, but not great. High HP? Good. If you dropped to 1 hp but lived and a heal kicked in and got you to 50% within 3 seconds, you dealt with it better than the tank that got dropped to 10% hp.

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Because of that high amount of flat-value mitigation, TBN acquits itself quite well against incoming damage that lands in the range of 40-60% of your max HP (which, realistically, is the most relevant tank damage in high-end content, because it tends to come while the healers are busy with their own mechanics or party healing, instead of the fight grinding to a halt for a very slow, telegraphed heavy tankbuster to come in). On a per-use basis, it tends to be marginally more effective than the other skills at the point of impact, then marginally less effective once the other skills' healing has come in. This is already completely fair and in-line with the other tank skills, because that 'marginally less effective in total' drawback is more than made up for by the lower 15-second cooldown.

Where TBN does fall short, in comparison to the other tank skills, is against the kind of extremely-heavy tankbuster - something dealing 90-120% of your max HP after Rampart, Shadow Wall, etc - where flat-value mitigation and healing has relatively little value. In those cases, TBN does fall massively behind the other skills, but the solution is not to give it more flat-value mitigation and healing, but rather to pair it with the percentage-based mitigation that gives the other skills their huge advantage to begin with. This is the purpose of Oblation, except Oblation is too weak. The solution here isn't to change TBN, but the change Oblation to make it better at shoring up this particular weakness of TBN.

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Following the philosophy of a tanks measure being by how they deal with damage (Reduction, Healing, and Shielding are all forms of tanking) most tools in every other tanks kit are actually more effective in anything as little as 70% of the tanks hp. In the case of HoC and Bloodwhetting, you may end up with lower HP immediately after the hit, but healing yourself immediately after more than compensates and leaves you at a greater hp value than TBN would have. In my opinion, TBN is only ever ideal in a scenario where the other tank has stacked their unique cd on you as well.

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Ultimately, there's little value to be gained in adding a HoT to TBN, and the skill is mostly just fine the way it is (aside from needing to allow you to store multiple DA charges), offering unique gameplay from the other tanks' equivalent skills, with a healthy balance of advantages and disadvantages that make it sometimes-better, sometimes-worse than its counterparts. That's what balance in game design is supposed to look like, and it's what we should be encouraging and asking for more of.
In the one area where TBN falls so short that it's unfit for purpose, it has a companion skill meant to help it through: Oblation - except that Oblation is meant to make TBN feel powerful in those scenarios, but is so weak itself that it only manages to make TBN feel slightly-less-weak. Oblation absolutely should get a buff (or more involved rework) that makes it effective enough to serve its purpose when paired with TBN.

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I agree adding a heal to TBN would be pretty bad because the heal would almost never be fully utilized outside of high damage scenarios, in which percentage mitigation is just better in every way. However, consider we as a collective stop treating TBN like it's meant to be HoC/Intervention/Nascent and treat Oblation like this? Fix the clunkiness and bizarre DPS-entwined awkward design choice of TBN by making it never actually be a DPS loss simply by giving a charge on expiration as well. Then it's fixed and can be used to gain Dark Arts stacks (plural assuming multiple charges) to use in a burst window with raid buffs for an actual increase. Then bring Oblation to a point where it can compete with the other skills. A 60 second recharge is not a 60 second cooldown, it's more akin to a 30 second cooldown. To me, this is the skill people should be comparing. If I heal were attached to Oblation, for example, the heal could be used with intent, making it more valuable.

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But, no, it should absolutely not be changed into a risk-free skill with a slightly more potent effect in exchange for a massive nerf to its strongest and most useful point, it's short recast time. If that's what you want out of a tank, three out of four of the tanks in this game are already giving you exactly what you're asking for. You don't need all of them to cater to your specific tastes at the expense of those of us who prefer this skill the way it is.

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I loathe entirely when people argue TBN recasting time is it's strongest point. It's recast time is not only tied to your MP regeneration, but in order to argue this it has to actually want to be used off cooldown, which it is not. Its uptime is nowhere near it's cooldown outside of maybe 2% of this games content. It's cooldown means little to nothing if you don't use it off cooldown, which is a guaranteed DPS loss.

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Yeah, the fact that these bandwagon ideas are catching on so much and seem to just be oblivious to the actual effects of what they're asking for is really alarming.

Ignoring playstyle issues in favour of talking about efficacy - and my position has always been that post-5.0 DRK has had playstyle issues, but not efficacy ones - Dark Knight's current position is probably best described as 'in a decent spot, but its position there is precarious'. It's definitely been shortchanged in a handful of key places, and it has some legitimate QoL issues, but it also has some pretty strong advantages that make it uniquely well-suited to tanking certain parts of the current raid tier, and many of these common suggestions are people basically explicitly asking for those advantages to be nerfed and taken away in exchange for miniscule improvements to convenience and basically fixing Xeno's personal pet peeves.

What a lot of people actually seem to want is a glamour prism that lets you play Warrior with a Dark Knight skin on top and all your skills nerfed by 5%.

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No, what we actually have right now is already a Warrior with Dark Knight Glamour. We only want cohesion and consistency... and a tank invuln that doesn't kill you.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I get the nostalgia value, but do we really want to use up a button to have a 2-minute cooldown... that gives less than a TBN's worth of healing (not shielding, healing), and requires the enemy's death for full effect?

We've so many other ways to build in healing on demand. We don't need to make it badly constrained by both cooldown and conditions.

/agreed on most other notes in that list

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Put Sole Survivor on Oblation, perhaps? Heals the DRK + the target the DRK used Oblation on? Idk just a thought.

EDIT: I kind of recall there was a translation error in the early stages of Heavensward release and the English speaking world thought that Sole Survivor only healed the DRK if an ally died, an interesting thought that could be riffed off of maybe... If Target of Oblation dies DRK gets both heals.

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Originally Posted by Undeadfire

Job re-works are entirely possible for .1, .2, .3, .4, .5, but we have Dragonsong ultimate coming in 6.1 so I am gonna assume it will be .2, or .3 it may come.

SE has to be careful making changes on jobs, potency increases, buff tunings, can make wild changes with rotations, etc. A simple change for a job can end up with more problems than solving a solution. The job not being fun it's self is a different subject.

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Ninja got reworked in 5.1 and Alexander ult was soon after

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Originally Posted by Takamorisan

Like overall dps rotation and mechanics, DRK plays like shb DRK in my particular case I enjoy it. But as said its pretty weird that Blood Weapon and No Mercy didn't receive Delirium and IR treatment?
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No mercy and similar abilities should never get the stack treatments
because you would lose out on extra damage with ogcd like bow shock,blasting Zone and Continuation
which is something WAR lost was crit dh onslaught and upheval during IR

it should only be for abilities to make it ping friendly or more comfortable in the rotation
Inner release,Delirium,Blood weapon,heat blast

I've been keeping with these DRK threads off account for a bit now and I think I finally want to come in and put down my two cents.

Putting aside numbers, putting aside cohesion and balance, putting all that to the side; One of my biggest problems with DRK is it's currently unimpressive and unsatisfying on aesthetic level.
I cannot stress how much things like animations, effects, and impact help the job maintain a sense of 'yeah, I'm doing this thing and it feels good even if its just 2 damage!'

DRK's animations and skill effects are boring as all sin, slow and clunky and lack any *oomph* you might get from the other tanks. I don't feel the hard hits of the sword that weighs as much as it looks, especially when referring to their basic 1 2 3 combo. Take reaper for example; even their most basic of attacks are aesthetically pleasing and very active through the entire GCD, keeping you satisfied during its slow moments and building anticipation for its burst. You can tell lots of love and care went into the impact and aesthetic of every skill, and the culmination of the graphic teams decade of experience went to its design.

DRK has instead regressed from its old skills, clearly many people love what DRK had just on a *visual* level back when it released. You give DRK a nice animation and sound overhaul and I guarantee it will do some measure of good for how the class feels, without even touching the actual skills themselves.

Now as for cohesion and balance it's been talked to death at this point and not everyone agrees with a direction. I have my own thoughts but my overall hope is the dev team stop treating the class as an oGCD dump and give it a meaningful system where their skills have a time place and synergy with the rest of their kit to get rid of all the ugly disjointedness.

My overall sentiment is no matter how good it is in raid, no matter how good its defensives actually are, no matter how viable it is, it still feels like ASS to play and its moment to moment is uninteresting as is.

A good question to ask about the feel of a job is: "if I completely disable all UI elements, including damage number, does it feel satisfying to play from pure mechanics and visuals"
Of course, damage numbers are part of the feedback, that's one thing satisfying with Inner Release. You see big numbers and exclamation marks (the actual value of those numbers is irrelevant). The game shows and tell you "you just hit very hard" and it feels good.

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

A good question to ask about the feel of a job is: "if I completely disable all UI elements, including damage number, does it feel satisfying to play from pure mechanics and visuals"
Of course, damage numbers are part of the feedback, that's one thing satisfying with Inner Release. You see big numbers and exclamation marks (the actual value of those numbers is irrelevant). The game shows and tell you "you just hit very hard" and it feels good.

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I think the opposite is equally important, though. If you can turn off most visuals (outside of simplified UI) and the job still feels satisfying, now that's a real success, and probably one that XIV would struggle with far more than the "visuals only" test.

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Originally Posted by MagiusNecros

Dark Arts Dark Dance + Dark Arts Dark Passenger dodge tanking in dungeons was where I got that visceral hell yeah let's fucking go feeling. But that was back in Heavensward.

Other then that the Stormblood Abyssal Drain god mode was the only other time things felt great.

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I don't know why they're so set on getting rid of things like AD god mode. Stuff like that seems like a natural opportunity to flesh out some job identity without worrying too much about balance concerns.

AD god mode felt good, it felt "dark knighty," and no one really cared that other tanks couldn't do it because it was only relevant in Expert roulette.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I think the opposite is equally important, though. If you can turn off most visuals (outside of simplified UI) and the job still feels satisfying, now that's a real success, and probably one that XIV would struggle with far more than the "visuals only" test.

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Mechanically, yes I aggree. But still, without seeing actual numbers. (or just placeholder ones)

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Originally Posted by Jandor

I don't know why they're so set on getting rid of things like AD god mode. Stuff like that seems like a natural opportunity to flesh out some job identity without worrying too much about balance concerns.

AD god mode felt good, it felt "dark knighty," and no one really cared that other tanks couldn't do it because it was only relevant in Expert roulette.

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The odd thing is, they haven't (Bloodwhetting [Nascent + shield] still exists, and Expert Roulette damage is never so high that Warrior can't survive for the 17 seconds until the next 8s of self-Benes). It's just painfully straightforward and limited to a single job now.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

The odd thing is, they haven't (Bloodwhetting [Nascent + shield] still exists, and Expert Roulette damage is never so high that Warrior can't survive for the 17 seconds until the next 8s of self-Benes). It's just painfully straightforward and limited to a single job now.

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I honestly wonder if they could implement what they have done with the damage of many AoE abilities, where there is fall-off after the first target, but with the healing aspect to Bloodwhetting. Perhaps that would still keep the general spirit of the ability but give them a venue to rein it in a bit. From there they could adjust the fall-off percentage as they see fit to better balance out the ability.

It's dawning on me that the thing that feels most disappointing about the concept of a tank based on the classical FF Dark Knight is that missing "risk-reward" element.

Like, you would think a tank based on a job that regularly expends its own HP for power would be counterproductive, but if you remove the element of the Dark Knight using its HP as a cost, there's still an argument for, say, someone who actively gets stronger the lower their health gets during combat.

A concept that already exists in the game through abilities like Essential Dignity, for instance, just not in the hands of DRK in particular.

It would almost make sense to have LD and a barrier in place of life leech, if an active element of the job was to survive on the borderline of death for as long as possible. But for all the risk offered by the combination of tools at DRK's disposal, there's no reward to indicate such a design was intentional, nor any interconnectivity or loop to facilitate such gameplay. No traits or abilities that are affected in the slightest by how little HP you had when they activated.

Just thinking aloud, I guess.

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Originally Posted by TouchandFeel

I honestly wonder if they could implement what they have done with the damage of many AoE abilities, where there is fall-off after the first target, but with the healing aspect to Bloodwhetting. Perhaps that would still keep the general spirit of the ability but give them a venue to reign it in a bit. From there they could adjust the fall-off percentage as they see fit to better balance out the ability.

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That would be preferable (that or... give the other jobs something as OPishly fun, though preferably with a bit more gameplay actually included), but I similarly have to wonder if it's possible for them.

Originally, I just wanted them to revert it back to scaling with damage, rather than solely number of enemies hit (with skill-inherent crits --Primal Rend and Inner Chaos / Chaotic Cyclone-- likewise guaranteeing heal crits), since that has a larger gap between floor and ceiling as would reward better play, but with the shield thrown into the mix, there's already a fair portion (~20% in single-target, decreasing with target count) of non-target-scaled power involved in the skill. At that point the more reasonable change may literally just be to decrease its heal potency from 400 to 300 and up Storm's Path's self-heal.

I do feel that tanks at present are a bit overpowered in terms of their total, simultaneous capacities, but so long as they are ultimately required for Expert, the only real consideration we need make is whether they tend to push healers out of the most efficient (and, largely, convenient) compositions for dungeon running. A purely "we mow down large mob groups, so long as there's DPS enough not to need more time than we have CDs for" is totally fine in that regard. Hell, I'd rather have more elaborate offensive means of survival like Stormblood's BW-DA-Quietus-AD-DA surplant some of the simple measured play of "sequence oGCDs... do AoE combo... til they're all dead." I just don't like that capacity being turned into what, unless someone stops doing what was optimal anyways in AoE, amounts to just hitting Hallowed Ground every 25 seconds, let alone its being limited to a single tank.

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Originally Posted by Archwizard

A concept that already exists in the game through abilities like Essential Dignity, for instance, just not in the hands of DRK in particular.

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I've been asking for a Blood for Blood trait for Dark Knight since its release, at least in the form of increased self-healing based on missing %HP. And now that Dragoon's given up any claim to the name with the rebranded Lance Charge...

Of course, I'd also been wanting Living Dead to have a far shorter CD and just straight up let DRK dip into negative HP, rather than applying Doom or nullifying damage that'd take it below 1, for exactly that reason. Since XIV has always refused to give the actual percentiles for anything but damage buffs, let alone formulae, in its tooltips anyways, we could even make Blood for Blood's rewards quadratic...

-200% HP -> 300% missing HP's worth of reward -> ??? -> Profit?

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I've been asking for a Blood for Blood trait for Dark Knight since its release, at least in the form of increased self-healing based on missing %HP. And now that Dragoon's given up any claim to the name with the rebranded Lance Charge...

Of course, I'd also been wanting Living Dead to have a far shorter CD and just straight up let DRK dip into negative HP, rather than applying Doom or nullifying damage that'd take it below 1, for exactly that reason. Since XIV has always refused to give the actual percentiles for anything but damage buffs, let alone formulae, in its tooltips anyways, we could even make Blood for Blood's rewards quadratic...

-200% HP -> 300% missing HP's worth of reward -> ??? -> Profit?

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There's probably an even simpler solution by means of just giving DRK an effect that snapshots the percentage of HP they had when it was activated and gave a linear "%-increased healing from all effects" bonus equal to the missing percentage. Having LD dip into negative HP would be overkill after that point, since you'd already get double to all sources of healing.

Including but not limited to The Blackest Night itself.

I suppose that would theoretically make them harder to heal as their max HP goes up (since you would get less %-return from missing any flat amount of HP), but presently Living Dead already assures that with no benefit, and theoretically their base mitigation would go up anyway and the need for healing would already go down to flatten that out.

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Originally Posted by Archwizard

There's probably an even simpler solution by means of just giving DRK an effect that snapshots the percentage of HP they had when it was activated and gave a linear "%-increased healing" bonus equal to the missing percentage. Having LD dip into negative HP would be overkill after that point, since you'd already get double to all sources of healing.

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The idea there was that Living Dead in that context would neither inflict Doom nor prevent HP loss (by nullifying damage that'd take it below 1 HP), so it'd just be built wholly around letting DRK (or, Blood for Blood) do its thing. The negative HP would likewise contribute to the "missing %HP" (technically, %HP away from 100% HP).

I hadn't planned to include The Blackest Night or external healing received under that, just DRK's damage->healing or on-damage cure potency.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

That would be preferable (that or... give the other jobs something as OPishly fun, though preferably with a bit more gameplay actually included), but I similarly have to wonder if it's possible for them.

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I agree with that sentiment and I think that both approaches should be attempted, bringing the upper outlier in a bit and finding a way to bring the rest of the tanks up a bit in that regard so that they can generally meet somewhere in the middle.
The difficult part of course it to implement them in ways on each tank so that they feel and play differently instead of just giving everyone a copy of the exact same capabilities and game-play loops.

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Originally Posted by Archwizard

It's dawning on me that the thing that feels most disappointing about the concept of a tank based on the classical FF Dark Knight is that missing "risk-reward" element.

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This used to be a thing with MP management. DRK had an ability that let them regenerate MP faster the more they got hit, so players would dance around danger by using that and spamming abyssal drain, which had a high MP cost but wasn't on a cooldown. Good times.

But it led to issues related to healers which does make sense. I guess TBN kind of is a modern take on that, you take a risk and the damage is taken in your TempHP (so your healer won't have a heart attack) and get a refund...but it's just a refund so...

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Originally Posted by Duskane

No mercy and similar abilities should never get the stack treatments
because you would lose out on extra damage with ogcd like bow shock,blasting Zone and Continuation
which is something WAR lost was crit dh onslaught and upheval during IR

it should only be for abilities to make it ping friendly or more comfortable in the rotation
Inner release,Delirium,Blood weapon,heat blast

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I see, apologies for my ignorance then. So guess I will just retain to Blood weapon haha

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

But it led to issues related to healers which does make sense. I guess TBN kind of is a modern take on that, you take a risk and the damage is taken in your TempHP (so your healer won't have a heart attack) and get a refund...but it's just a refund so...

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As others have said, make it free, but I'm starting to think Dark Arts also needs some work in regards to procs. It really doesn't feel like a smart design even if we've been using TBN to soak damage up and try to get an extra Flood, so maybe it should take on a different form.

I think that Dark Arts should be something that is granted from MP Usage, such as using three Edges/Floods. After say, 6000 MP is consumed using Edge/Flood, you're granted Dark Arts. This new Dark Arts would change the ender of both Single Target and AoE combos into stronger versions of themselves; with the AoE having a HP Recovery on Hit(around 50% of DRK's current Max HP on say, 6 targets). The Single Target would provide a self-shield equal to the damage dealt, helping deal with the lack of mitigation options in early content. Dark Arts ends on execution of either one of those skills and refunds 1000 MP on expiration.

P.S. I don't know what to name them - but it'd help deal with DRK's ABYSMAL HP sustain compared to the rest and make gameplay flow feel a little better I'd feel.

Yeah I'd like Dark Arts to be remade into a second job gauge for DRK. One you could spend on things like TBN or Abyssal Drain. Maybe it ticks up with a reworked Blood Price that that gauge goes up with the amount of hits/damage you take.

I don't trust who's making decisions to get the job done though. If anything, they'll find ways to make it worse.

I don't understand why people want to slap a third resource on DRK, while the two it already has haven't had any meaningful mechanics or management to them since 5.0. Be it Dark Arts as a proc or spendable Darkside, as long as they're only spend on a single thing most of the time, they're going to be just as empty as what we got now and will just add more useless crap to the job gauge.

It would be much better imo to just add more different things to spend MP on, so that you actually have to think about it. It would also automatically give some meaning to Darkside upkeep, since suddenly you aren't extending it every time you touch your MP in any way.

Just slap an MP cost on Shadowbringer, separate a Darkside upkeep ability from Edge/Flood, so it's no longer tied to your main mana dump and then tweak Blood Weapon's uptime(cd and duration) to double DRK's total MP rates - there, you have actual MP management where you need to save it for burst, nuke cooldowns and buff upkeep, while also having to watch not to overcap, with a better distribution of weaves through the rotation and things to track outside your burst.

Would extending BW uptime add too many Bloodspillers? No problem, just delete Delirium - virtually everybody hates the skill and we needed that hotbar space for new Darkside ability. While at it, the new BW duration can actually be something sensible that you can fit enough gcds in this time, instead of literally being lower than what the tooltip says for some reason.

[edit] Btw, this would also let you use TBN more often without it being sub-optimal and thus actually make some use of that low cooldown, as you'd be forced to spend MP outside of raid buffs anyhow.

man, if SE ever fixes DRK, this section of the forums are gonna die.

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Originally Posted by WhyAmIHere

man, if SE ever fixes DRK, this section of the forums are gonna die.

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The devs, breathing a sigh of success: "We've done it. We've slain the beast."

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Originally Posted by WhyAmIHere

man, if SE ever fixes DRK, this section of the forums are gonna die.

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And every poster will breathe a sigh of relief, saying to themselves, "At last we can rest."

New generation will come to the forums in 7.0 after Dark Knight fix.

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Originally Posted by WhyAmIHere

man, if SE ever fixes DRK, this section of the forums are gonna die.

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When it comes, I shall welcome it with open arms... But next patch will not be the day, and Square will not be the judge!

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Originally Posted by crystalcat

And every poster will breathe a sigh of relief, saying to themselves, "At last we can rest."

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As we all fade into the Underworld, smiling that the new DRK players will never have to suffer like we did.

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Originally Posted by WhyAmIHere

man, if SE ever fixes DRK, this section of the forums are gonna die.

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we pass the torch to Machinist mains

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Originally Posted by Satarn

I don't understand why people want to slap a third resource on DRK, while the two it already has haven't had any meaningful mechanics or management to them since 5.0. Be it Dark Arts as a proc or spendable Darkside, as long as they're only spend on a single thing most of the time, they're going to be just as empty as what we got now and will just add more useless crap to the job gauge.

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Agreed.

Though, having more things to spend the same resource on relies on a fine balances; give no shifting priorities and it just feels like you have n-1 skills of bloat, with that 1 useful skill being based on very basic categories like "are there more than n enemies?" while if the priority shifts themselves are too regular, it just feels like another 1-2-3 ad nauseum combo system. There likely needs to be some measure both of gambit and of response to external stimulai (beyond just 'n>2').

Any spitball examples in mind?

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Just slap an MP cost on Shadowbringer, separate a Darkside upkeep ability from Edge/Flood, so it's no longer tied to your main mana dump and then tweak Blood Weapon's uptime(cd and duration) to double DRK's total MP rates - there, you have actual MP management where you need to save it for burst, nuke cooldowns and buff upkeep, while also having to watch not to overcap, with a better distribution of weaves through the rotation and things to track outside your burst.

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I'm not sure this would change anything except in that your banked oGCD potency margin would be far less, such that you have left that can be saved for burst even prior to wanting not to overcap Darkside? Wouldn't this effectively just turn Edge/Flood into an only faintly variable CD (used slightly more often during raid buffs, then used slightly less thereafter)? You'd just be waiting on a timer to tick down from max-gains_per_use rather than being free to slap an add with what little MP would fall outside of (use in, or sourcing use via DA) raid buffs anyways...

Forcing players to bar-watch, unless the rewards for doing so is fun, isn't going to be any better than what we have now, I'd imagine?

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Btw, this would also let you use TBN more often without it being sub-optimal and thus actually make some use of that low cooldown, as you'd be forced to spend MP outside of raid buffs anyhow.

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It's impossible for us to know whether that would be the case without knowing what ability you've separated Darkside upkeep to and whether it has any interaction with TBN.

Some more detail, please?