Dark Knight

Dark Knight - GLD30/THM15 - Uses MRD skills as well

Upon equipping your Job Soul, Flash is converted to Darkness.
Darkness
- Increases mana cost by 100%.
- Adds a 230 Potency damage component, divided equally among targets hit.
- Returns 40% of damage dealt as hit points.
- Enmity is adjusted to take into consideration the damage and healing, to keep it even with a Paladin's Flash.
- Blind effect is removed.

30: Dark Soul (Spell Cast Animation, creates a dark aura around you)
- Drains 30% of the DRK's total hp to mitigate all damage by 25%, and increase healing on you by 5% for 30s. Decreases damage output by 10%, increases enmity generated. On GCD, breaks all of your combos
- Cast time of 0s (instant, still considered a spell)

35: Drain (Spell Cast Animation)
- 200 potency spell that returns 150% of damage done as hp. Enmity modifier 4x
- Cast time of 0s (still considered a spell)
- Cost double MP while in Dark Soul
- Off GCD, 15s CD

40: Absorb (Spell Cast Animation)
- 240 potency attack that combo's with Riot Blade to add a 8s buff that returns 3% of incoming damage into MP. 4x Enmity modifier, if not combo'ed: 100 potency with a 4x modifier, returns .5% of damage to MP for 8s
- Weaponskill

45: Soul Leech (Bloodbath Animation)
- Ability off-gcd that puts a 25s DoT for 5% of current HP/tick on YOU that increases your damage mitigation by 5% per tick until it expires @ 24s. 2m refresh. EX: tick 1 = 5% of HP as damage to you, and 5% mitigation | tick 2 = 5% of HP as damage to you, and 10% mitigation | tick 3 = 5% of HP as damage to you, and 15% mitigation, etc.

50: Unholy Ground (Hallowed Ground Animation)
- Consumes all of your mana and reduces your hit points to 1 in exchange for 15s of immunity, the first 10s of which you are pacified and and healing spells have 1% effectiveness on you. Removes ALL status effects, including beneficial ones.

I changed some minor stuff, I don't think a DPS stance is needed, since there are a lot of damage dealing capabilities here in Darkness and the Improved Drain.

Soul Leech doesn't make much sense. The first tic would do about 200 damage to yourself to only block maybe around 20-50 damage depending on the attack. The next tic would be 190 damage for the same amount. As a tank you'll want to be high on HP in case of a big bad beastie bam. This means you'll almost always be taking 200 damage for mitigating much less.

Dark Soul suffers from the same problem. It takes around 1200 HP to mitigate around 200 HP in auto-attacks and maybe around 750 in special abilities. So you lose 1200 for around 1000 HP mitigation. The value is lost even further on blocks and parries (roughly 140HP in auto-attacks and 560 in special abilities for a total of 700 mitigation for 1200 cost if you parry/block them all). This is averaging around 75 HP for auto-attack damage and 1k for special ability damage and blocking/parrying at 25% reduction.

Unholy Ground looks exactly like Hallowed Ground when it comes down to actual functionality. Dropping your HP to 1 would put a TON of strain on the healers to get you back up to full. Since you reduce their effectiveness on you for the first 5s (I realize you did this for enmity issues with the DRK's pacification) that means they have 10s to get your HP up while maintaining low enmity, dodging attacks, and maintaining the HP of the rest of the group. It's not a very group friendly ability and that's what tanking is primarily about: How will this ability benefit your group?

The reason why stoneskin isn't utilized mid fight is because A: 3 second cast time and B: MP requirement. The issue we run into here with Drain is 3s of doing nothing. 3s raises the possibility of getting your cast interrupted by a large margin. All this for restoring some HP that might be already lost in the time it takes to cast. Actually, if it goes on their regular attack stats, using PLD as a guage it would only restore around 150 HP.

I'm not really sure on the purpose for Absorb. Would be nice in speed runs I suppose but otherwise there shouldn't be much issue with MP. The only ability I see here that uses MP is Unholy Ground.

I'm not sure a DRK could be a tank very easily. Using HP as a resource works better if you aren't the one being hit. You'd have to up the damage mitigation a lot to make it viable but then it could have some real balance issues. Like I said in your MYS thread, reusing animations would be pretty boring and again this looks like it will play the same as a PLD (FB>SB>RoH). I'm also one that prefers 2 roles stemming from every class.

Thanks again for the thoughtful response as always. And, as always, here is my defensive rationalization of the made-up job that I created that will never be implemented : D

Absorb - Why is it needed? Darkness, baby! Darkness is going to cost about 424 mana, and its AE enmity, drain, and single target powerful attack. It also helps in the last 10s of Unholy Ground. Obviously Drain would cost MP as well.

Soul Leech - maybe I explained it poorly, the 5% increases each tick, so by the end of 25s, you are mitigating 35% of all damage...i.e. tick 1 mitigates 5% of all incoming, tick 2 does 10%, 3 to 15%, etc.

Dark Soul - Let's assume the DRK has 6k hp. It will take them 1800hp to activate Dark Soul for 30s. Over that 30s, we need to see roughly 6200 damage come in to break even, i.e. 6200*.29 (25% from mitigation, 4% from the increased heals on you) to break even. If we assume 450dps on the tank thats 13,500 total damage, 3,915 of that is mitigated through Dark Soul netting 2,115 hp in your pocket over that 30s. A PLD, if taking 450dps over 30s, will mitigate 2700 of those damage points. So you might need to tweak Dark Soul up a little bit to be competitive, but its exchanging a lot of mitigation for some upfront damage.

Unholy Ground - YUP, its A LOT like Hallowed Ground. On purpose. It gains the advantage of 5 extra seconds of immunity for the cost of losing your shields and protect, and being paci'ed and unhealable for 5s. The paci, no heal duration, and the loss of MP and HP are to make up for that sweet, sweet extra 5s of immunity. And if a healer can't get you pretty close to topped off in 10s of you taking no damage....they are bad. Especially if they know it is coming. Its very group friendly because you can tank anything the group wants to kill for 15s without dying.

Drain - Yeah drain kinda sucks...it needs to be changed somehow...greater potency for the risk or instant cast or something. Hmm, hmm, hmm....

RE: Stoneskin mid-fight. I do that ALL OF THE TIME, lol. In Turn 1 I spam the crap out of stoneskin on a BRD kiting slimes, or on myself at 4 stacks. If you aren't using stoneskin mid-fight...I would love to hear your intelligent argument as to why you are not so that I could possibly make a change to my play style : D

I think this actually works out as a nice risk-reward tank, maybe the mitigation values could be tweaked via math (as stated above). I know it will look similar to the FB>SB>RoH...but those are really just HS>SS>BB for WAR, ya know? I think DRK and MYS are both different enough to be fun. I don't think it would be great if these were the NEXT classes added into the game, but I'm just playing inside of the space that I have knowledge of, currently : D

Well, the amount of HP Stoneskin blocks is less than the amount of HP Cure II provides for the same MP cost iirc. Cure II is a second faster as well. This is why most healers only use it at the start of a battle or during periods where damage won't be dealt. In 1.X it was a great resource but less so now. If you're having enmity troubles on the BRD's targets then SS would be better to use of course but it's less efficient.

I did all my numbers based on 4k HP (even number, close to a PLD's). I wouldn't necessarily count the 4% increase to HP healed in with the Dark Soul math. That number, while helpful, will see varying returns on the healers setup. The higher the healer's base heal is the more benefit you'd get if they waited longer in between heals to prevent over curing to better conserve their MP. Because of this you'll be taking more hits to make up for the bonus to healing done so it kind of evens out. I ignored that 4% in my math.

For the healer being able to get you to top in 10s, it's not about being able to do it in 10s it's about the amount of hate generated in such a small period of time and MP cost. I was basing it on 4k HP so that would have been 798MP for 3 Cure II's and 4k HP worth of enmity generated in 6 seconds. If you have 6k HP that's 1064MP for 4 Cure II's and 6k HP worth of enmity in 8 seconds. That's about a quarter of the healers MP and not taking criticals or procs into account. If you have that 5s of pacification in the beginning you'll have to work really hard to maintain hate after it wears off. As a BRD I sit at yellow aggro before I even use any buffs so in that 5s of you not generating enmity I'd likely be in orange, flashing, or red if I had buffs up as would everyone else I'm sure. This would mean that everyone else in the group would have to purposefully gimp their damage during this period to make sure they don't cause a wipe. If they gimp their damage, the fight takes longer and therefor could entirely negate the extra 5 seconds depending on how much of a hit to DPS they need to take. So in depleting MP reserves by 25%, raising others' enmity levels and/or causing a drop in their DPS you're making this ability not group friendly.

You're forgetting a WAR's HS>Maim>SP/SE. That's what makes WAR less monotonous IMO, having a 2nd/3rd combo set to work on when enmity is established and to build up stacks of Wrath.

I have to disagree with a lot of your sentiments here.

If a BRD takes enmity from me by the time I need to use an immunity CD, I probably dropped my control on the floor and it rolled under the couch where I couldn't grab it for a minute. If any DPS class can take enmity from me in 5 seconds mid-fight in a boss fight. I am a horrible...horrible tank at end game. Also, pacification lets you still use Flash/Darkness - you just can't use weapon skills. A WAR's Berserk has the exact same Pacification mechanic, except that its at the backend, and harder to time.

RE: Stoneskin, we miss-understood each other. I am talking about as a PLD I am spamming Stoneskin on myself and the BRDs, and the targets I am referencing have locked aggro, once they spawn nothing anyone does can take aggro from the person that caused them to spawn, so a WHM could spam Medica II for days and never get enmity from those targets. I was taking your comparison of Drain vs Stoneskin as DRK using Drain and PLD using Stoneskin.

RE: 4% increase in dmg mitigation from 5% increase in heals. A X% increase in incoming healing equates to a .8*X% increase in effective HP, so while its not a true 4% mitigation, its pretty darn close. You can make the same crit/variance argument on incoming hits from mobs.

Along the same lines of BRD hate, A healer will come no where near tipping the scales of healing me to full in 5 seconds. Also, if I use Unholy Ground when I have 25% of my hit points left, they are really only having to do 24% more healing in exchange for 15s of invincibility, which is only 19% if I have Dark Soul up.

I WILL agree that this does water down DRK as a job. Meaning, having it be the HP>DMG class is way more iconic and fun, but I do believe this IS a way to create a viable DRK tank.

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Originally Posted by Ehayte

Darkness
- Increases mana cost by 100%.
- Adds a 230 Potency damage component, divided equally among targets hit.
- Returns 40% of damage dealt as hit points.
- Enmity is adjusted to take into consideration the damage and healing, to keep it even with a Paladin's Flash.
- Blind effect is removed.

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Doubling the mana cost is going to make this *way* less useful, especially since you're spreading the damage out across all targets hit, getting rid of the mitigation benefits (not entirely sure why you felt like removing Blind from a spell called *Darkness*).

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30: Dark Soul (Spell Cast Animation, creates a dark aura around you)
- Drains 30% of the DRK's total hp to mitigate all damage by 25%, and increase healing on you by 5% for 30s. Decreases damage output by 10%, increases enmity generated. On GCD, breaks all of your combos
- Cast time of 1s

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I realize that you're trying to do something different here, but forcing a tank, who is going to be hit constantly, to recast their "stance" on a hard cast every 30 seconds will *not* play well. Casting on a tank overall isn't going to play well because you have to be mobile and getting your tank stance interrupted would be crippling. On top of this, you're essentially denying the tank 1/12 of their GCDs with that duration. Honestly, just turn it into a stance and get rid of the cast times on the other abilities. There really is *no* reason for a melee to need to use cast attacks and plenty of reasons for them *not* to.

As to the numbers, your tank stance is insanely strong on mean mitigation (they would require 90% of the healing that a PLD requires and 82% of a WAR) and either ridiculously weak on eHP (if it reduces max hp) or ridiculously overpowered on it (if it doesn't). If it drains hp, you're *also* screwing over the tank if they ever get low on hp: imagine trying to recast that after a Hood Swipe or Mountain Buster. If you don't have the mp, your tank buff lapses *and that's when you need it the most*. The damage would be appropriate, however, because you're consuming animation time constantly.

Also, once again, a GLA job needs a DPS stance to go with it. GLA jobs need a 15% increase to damage when not tanking since that's exactly what PLD provides.

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35: Drain (Spell Cast Animation)
- 200 potency spell that returns 75% of damage done as hp. Enmity modifier 4x
- Cast time: Stoneskin equivalent

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Ignoring the cast time (Stoneskin is a 3 sec base cast, which puts the damage per GCD on this at 167) and assuming that you want these casts to be based off of attack power rather than magic power so that they actually *improve* as gear improves, 75% of damage done as hp is next to nothing. It's an ability that you'd never want to use.

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40: Absorb (Spell Cast Animation)
- 240 potency attack that combo's with Riot Blade to add a 8s buff that returns 3% of incoming damage into MP. 4x Enmity modifier, if not combo'ed: 100 potency with a 4x modifier, returns .5% of damage to MP for 8s
- Cast Time: GCD

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Cast time again. Combo benefits are pretty much always all or nothing. Having the weaker effect on a non-combo hit would be really weird.

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45: Soul Leech (Bloodbath Animation)
- Ability off-gcd that puts a 25s DoT for 5% of current HP/tick on YOU that increases your damage mitigation by 5% per tick until it expires @ 25s. 2m refresh

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This would be insanely strong and weird as hell. You've got 8 ticks that could easily be healed through (Regen would more than take care of it), even since you provided self healing to the class itself, and mitigation which averages out negligible and builds up to Sentinel with an average contribution of Rampart.

Also, just like with Mystic Knight, you're providing a CD for a job that really doesn't need any more. PLD only adds Hallowed Ground to the GLA CD suite and it's *still* the strongest CD suite in the game. Since you're adding something that's supposed to equate to HG for it as well, you're effectively making this tank *even stronger* than PLD with the advent of another tank CD.

P.S. The duration would be 24 seconds, not 25. DoTs always have durations that are divisible by 3 because the server ticks DoTs on a 3 second interval.

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50: Unholy Ground (Hallowed Ground Animation)
- Consumes all of your mana and reduces your hit points to 1 in exchange for 15s of immunity, the first 5s of which you are pacified and and healing spells have 1% effectiveness on you. Removes ALL status effects, including beneficial ones.

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This would be Hallowed Ground on crack. Not getting heals for 5 seconds isn't really as big of an issue as you might think, especially since you're providing 10 seconds of complete and utter immunity afterwards. If your healer(s) can't prop you up from 1% to full in less than 10 seconds, they're doing something wrong, especially if you throw up Convalescence or add your own self heals to it (since it's not like you have to bother with getting interrupted).

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Obviously, DRKs would get some of the THM stuff...Swift/Surecast to be able to use their spells effectively, MRD CDs of Bloodbath and Foresight.

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Swiftcast and Surecast, since they're both on a 1 min CD, would *have* to be saved for Dark Soul every time because you wouldn't want to run the risk of not getting the recast, so you're not really guaranteeing anything which means that all of your *other* casts would be cast without. Having one ability that's supposed to be used regularly contingent upon you having a completely separate buff up is just bad design. You could remove the cast times and it would mean just as much while being a *lot* more playable.

This tank would be onerous to play (thanks to *having* to use cast times as a tank and having to constantly refresh your tank buff; PLD gets away with Stoneskin largely because that's purely optional), sub-par in solo/OT circumstances, and stronger than PLD *or* WAR as an MT.

Get rid of Soul Leech and replace it with a DPS stance (have it reduce max hp to increase damage by 15%, call it Consuming Darkness, which is a classic DRK ability), remove the cast times on Drain and Absorb, make Dark Soul an actual stance (have it reduce healing received and max hp as the "cost"; you'd need to fix the mitigation though), and fix Unholy Ground so that it's not Hallowed Ground on steroids (have it consume 75% of max hp and prevent healing for the entire duration; don't make it last 5 seconds long but reduce the CD by 1 minute to justify the cost; conversely, have it eat 75% of your hp when it falls off or reduce all healing received by 50-75% for 10 seconds after it fades).

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Originally Posted by Kitru

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Thank you for the constructive feed back : D

- Dark Soul: Refer to math above, its actually weaker than Shield Oath on a net-HP basis, and I give DRK Soul Leech to compensate for that. If I took away the cast time completely I feel like it would make it better? And yes, being low on HP would screw the F out of DRK, better use this when you have high HP to make sure its up when you don't : D It's more about timing your HP pool when things are good so that you can strong when sh*t hits the fan than long term averages. What if you remove the cast time, and make it 30% reduction to CURRENT HP, so being low on hp doesn't hurt as badly.

- Drain: Yup, its horrible. Probably use this slot to make something like...

35 - Rancor/Consuming Darkness
- Reduces hit points by 30%
- Lasts for 30s
- Increases attack potency by 80% (or whatever is appropriate)

Use that as the dps stance?

- Darkness : I think blind makes it OP, but good point lol. Also, they get absorb for MP regen. Darkness is OK to become more powerful, but it needs to require more player attention to allow it.

- Absorb: Take of the cast time, make it a weapon skill. Fair point, no reason to have a cast time.

- Soul Leech: OK on the 24s, fair, I was only accounting for 24s of ticks, but giving it an extra second of lee-time to catch the server ticks. I gave DRK this because I feel like the disadvantages from Dark Soul required giving it some more active "CD" type abilities. I thought this was a nice balance between giving the DRK some more toys, and making them think hard about what they are doing in advance.

- Yup, its supposed to be HG on crack. You are saying you think the disadvantages don't balance with the extra 5s? The 10s of healing wasn't meant to cause a healer scramble, just another drawback.

Alternatively, your last paragraph has some really really cool suggestions. I think between the 3 of us and the different ideas thrown it, we could combine to make a really really cool DRK tank : D

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Originally Posted by Ehayte

- Dark Soul: Refer to math above, its actually weaker than Shield Oath on a net-HP basis, and I give DRK Soul Leech to compensate for that.

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From an eHP standpoint, Dark Soul is weak as hell: decreasing damage taken by 25% increases eHP by 33%, which amounts to 93.33% of your previous eHP, though as soon as you get healed up, you're at 133% (which, given the propensity and probability to overheal, is entirely likely *very* quickly, especially since you're increasing healing as well). From a mean mitigation standpoint, it's broken as *hell*: 25% less damage taken and 5% increased healing received gives you 140% (1.05 / .75) of normal healing efficiency; PLD has 125%.

For incoming damage, I assume it equals constant Cure I/Physick casting with nothing else (no Regen, no Selene/Eos, etc.) for anything approaching end game content that you don't overgear. For a tank packing 6k hp, equivalent gear on the healer is going to get that heal up to 1k. You'll get 12 of those off over the course of Dark Soul's duration. PLD gets a 25% increase to effective healing from Shield Oath, which gives them 15000 effective healing (1.25 * 12 * 1000) in 4 man content; DRK gets a 140% increase, as previously indicated, and, after factoring in the 1800 loss, you're at 19200 (1.4 * 12 * 1000 - 1800). If you go up to 8 man content where you're dealing with 2 healers, those numbers go up to 30000 and 40200.

The only time that it seems balanced is when DPS is *really low*. As soon as you get to content that actually pressures the tank, Dark Soul becomes *insanely* powerful because the cost isn't scaling while the mitigation *is*. Basically, it's the inverse of the WAR's problem with self-healing being inferior. At the current numbers, it's marginally more pressure on the healer in easy content *where the healer isn't pressured anyway* and a crapload *less* pressure on hard content where the healer actually has to work.

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35 - Rancor/Consuming Darkness
- Reduces hit points by 30%
- Lasts for 30s
- Increases attack potency by 80% (or whatever is appropriate)

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If it deals damage to you when you use it, it should be comparatively low since it's supposed to be used while soloing and provide some kind of constant Bloodbath to have you recover over the duration. You also don't want it to provide too much increased damage, else it will end up with them doing *way* more damage than they should be able to.

It would work better to have it deal 2.5% of your max hp in damage every 3 seconds (so 30% overall), 50% damage into healing, and increase damage by 15%. The hp cost should roughly balance out with the hp regain so that it's actually useful while soloing and doesn't arbitrarily punish your healer for you being offtank when you're in group.

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- Soul Leech: OK on the 24s, fair, I was only accounting for 24s of ticks, but giving it an extra second of lee-time to catch the server ticks.

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The game already catches all server ticks. If you throw up a DoT after the server has ticked, you get one tick *instantly* and then it resumes the DoTs at the 3s server tick. You will *always* get at least time/3 ticks no matter when you apply it and, occasionally, one extra. For example, if the server ticks every 3 seconds and you apply a DoT at 1.5 seconds, you'd get the first tick immediately and the second tick at 3.0.

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- Yup, its supposed to be HG on crack. You are saying you think the disadvantages don't balance with the extra 5s? The 10s of healing wasn't meant to cause a healer scramble, just another drawback.

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The drawbacks *don't* balance with the extra 5 seconds. Remember, you're providing them with 15 seconds of taking *no damage whatsoever* and you're not going to be using it when there's a lot of AoE damage, mainly because tanks don't take much damage during those times. You use HG when the *only* person that at least 1 healer cares about is you and any healer can *easily* heal you for 100% of your max hp in under 10 seconds so the drop to 1% means nothing because they've got 10 seconds to top you off.

If you want to have an hp cost, you have one of two options to make the cost not be a joke: upfront damage comes reduction of all healing to 0% for the duration and backloaded damage that hits you as the debuff falls off. Using up 99% of your hp seems like a nice idea, but it doesn't work in practice since, unless you *expect* the tank to die when it fades (at which point you might as well just have it say "you die when it fades"), you have to provide some ability to recover from the cost; losing 99% of your hp forces you to provide a window that's too large to actually act as a legitimate cost.

Also, increasing the duration by 50% is a crapload, especially when you're talking about complete and utter immunity, which is why I suggested reducing the CD by 1 minute instead.

Honestly, I'd think you'd want to get rid of Hallowed Ground completely. The whole "immunity" schtick is a PLD thing. With this, you're not so much creating a DRK as a class that exists in and of itself, discretely separated from the other jobs, as much as you are creating an inverted PLD. The DRK job ability list should just look like a thematically swapped PLD job ability list. It can look like a *tank* ability list (stance at 30, other stance at 40, etc.) but just mimicking another job's doesn't really play well, especially since it's a job going off of the exact same class.

1 - You are getting more eHP for that time because you are giving up 30% to start. Tweak whatever #s you want, I still think the concept is solid.
2 - Sounds good - I really like the life-drain to off-set the dmg.
3 - OK
4 - What if you keep the paci @ 5s, move the healing debuff to 10s. I don't necessarily want it to "cost" HP, I just want it to have extreme drawbacks from HG. i.e., if healers have 5s only to get you back up they probably wouldn't be done healing you when your immunity wore off.