Unfortunately I can only go up to 1000 characters for whatever reason, even though I'm using browser and PC...
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Going to leave this here since the thread it was in got super sidetracked.
The balance of tanks is appalling, especially given this is the expansion in which tank balance was to be given a priority. The problem is these promises were not delivered, what actually happened is one tank was buffed tremendously while the others were stripped of their utility while war had some of its utility restored.
Dark Knight is far out of balance with respect to the other two tanks and needs actual attention.
Mitigation: Boils down to two things:
1) TBN as a buff is too short. This needs to shield for at least 6 seconds and needs a mana cut of 600 mana.
2) Shadow Wall is a bad form of sentinel and and vengeance. There is no reason this should be on a 3 minute cooldown. It should either have a 2 minute cooldown or have an additional effect to justify the three minutes. This is not a new complaint, and its time someone actually did something other than ignore this request for 2 years.
DPS: We are behind both paladin and warrior while mitigating less and bring less utility to the team, while other classes got to keep their procs for blocking, ogcds, and dots and even received entirely new buffs and powerful skills, ours were stripped and the new skills do not make up the difference of what was lost.
1) Delirium is disappointing as a buff. On a two minute cool down this should double our damage output while also doubling the effects of blood price or blood weapon.
2) Dark Passenger is in a ridiculous state where most darks are taking it off their hotbars since they cannot justify the mana output for the damage and mitigation returns. Please cut the mana cost of this skill by half while not cutting the potency.
3) Our dps buffs blood weapon and blood price line up for every other party dps window. Please take 10 seconds off their cooldowns to give them better synergy with trick attack and other 1 minute buffs.
4) Bloodspiller potency should always be 140 potency above our average GCD to make TBN worthwhile. This is a no brainer.
Utility: TBN is only situationally useful at best, having one tank have a cost on a defensive utility while the other two can mitigate as much or more for free is a formula for pushing dark knight out of statics and pf. We need a party utility that actually brings something to the table.
1) Make sole survivor a party regen buff turning the parties dps into a HOT and mana refresh. This would pair well with the other tanks shields, while staying true to dark knight lore.
We see patch after patch of being ignored, or the only issues being fixed being bugs. People are already being asked to switch their mains for savage content, and the lack of attention will only make this worse. If this continues the only reasonable change to dark knight will be deleting the class since the people who main it will have switched or unsubbed, but I suppose that when that happens tanks can finally be balanced.
Well one way of looking at it bros... PLD got 4.0'd War got 4.1'd... Maybe drk is 4.2'd. One can only hope they are working on us this time. Pray to whatever god you believe in that we dont have to wait till 5.0 to make DRK great again.
These kinds of buffs need to come in partial patches i.e. 4.15. Waiting for 4.2 pretty much rules out use of DRK in Ultimate, if it truly is as hard as they say, groups will want every last molecule of party mitgation and DPS they can get, and PLD/WAR is the comp that brings it. Too much happens in a patch for that.
Also I'd argue WAR got some pretty significant buffs/fixes (depending on your perspective) prior to 4.1 so perhaps there is hope that 4.2 isn't the waiting period.
Sorry for the double post, but I noticed the trend isn't slowing down:
Here's Syz with the weather! -Update to the FFXIV Tank Usage forecast:
Shinryu - 1 week:
*****
|Class|----------|DPS|-----|Max|----|Parses|
Warrior---------2,837.4---3,342.6----1,104
Paladin---------2,736.2---3,310.5----1,332
Dark Knight----2,630.4---3,213.4----523
Less than half the usage of WAR and just a shade over a 1/3rd the usage of PLD.
I mean, Yoshi did say "wait til raid," and we did. Maybe it wasn't the right one though.
Shinryu is a good fight, and is an opportunity to use Dark Mind. But there are so many better uses for WAR and PLD to shine with their group mitigation tools and overall higher DPS.
Yoshi did say wait until 4.1 for the additional changes but I think he was only talking about WAR since WAR did need some fixes.
But that leaves us back to unbalanced tank jobs.
Maybe we would get a response if we went to all the main cities and cast Salted Earth around the aetherytes.