DRK, an idea

While thinking about the other 2 melee DPS and one of the issues that plague melee in general of just being on the front lines and risk getting hit by aoe, it got me to have an idea on a little bit of a different way to go about DPSing with a melee.

DRG and MNK both do positional attacks from the side and behind, but never the front. My idea would be to have DRK be a job that will occasionally jump in the front of the fight to do attacks, going as far as absorbing some to increase their own damage.

The idea behind it stems on the idea of making DRK the DPS job for GLA. They would use shield and swords and be in line with more classical FF dark knights (think Cecil from FFIV). They would utilize heavy armor and a decent health pool to help keep them alive up close to mobs. GLA already has good defensive cool downs too which would aide them in surviving, especially if they need to be in front of a mob and be at risk of eating frontal attacks. So between Sentinel, Bulwark, Convalescence, and Rampart you got a sturdy melee.

I'm not terribly creative with abilities, so someone better than I could fill in the gaps here but a few ideas I had for what they could do is say have an ability where they would have a cover-esque ability which they could pop on the tank to help absorb a little damage off them, which coupled with a cooldown would mean they effectively reduce damage taken, and then they could then have either the damage taken (maybe have it calculated before damage reduction?) is sent back at the enemy in some form (dark wave?).

The general idea behind this is merely having a DPS class with the mentality of "Fight the enemy head on!", rather than always cowering behind and stabbing them in the backs.

I also think it'll be a nice change of pace from the XI DRK everyone seems to want to just copy and paste. Bring something new and fresh to the game I say.

Pike + Shield should be awesome !!

TBH, I'd really like to see a Gafgarion/FFT DRK take on the class; utilizing swords/2h? rather than the FFXI vers. where they used scythes.

Would love to see it play out as more of a third tank rather than a dps but more dependent on drainskills than defence. Unfortunatly they already did this with war very poorly imho.

First of all, none of what is written below is meant in a bad/offensive way.

Honestly I don't think this works out because as a MDPS standing in front of the boss/mob you're fighting in some cases is just plain stupid. Take Hydra for example the reason why you take 2 Tanks (I know about the one tank strat not talking about it now though) is to share the damage between the two tanks. If, like you say, you can have a MDPS who can take the damage cause of their defensive cooldowns why not just take those 2 MDPS then and leave the tanks out of it, sure they will take a little more damage than a regular tank since they don't have the job specific defensive cooldowns but if they have good defensive abilities from their base class, abilities that can reflect damage taken back onto the boss/mob (the dark wave thing you were talking about) + the armor and decent health pool (because I think you were talking about more HP than a MNK has) you were talking about and then on top of all that they do the amount of damage a MDPS is supposed to do then they would get priority over a tank any day since you would just take two of them in your party to manage aggro between them in the off chance that they take a bit too much damage.

If I understood your post right than your current suggestion on this kind of MDPS will actually really destroy the balance between classes since everyone would just go play DRK since they can tank/take heavy hits and DPS, however the main thing you actually wanted to point out was the 'backstabbing' that's going on with the MDPS we have right now (I think). The only reason we're actually at the 'back' of the frontline is because we HAVE to since our damage increases based on our position which is on the back and the flank pretty much all of the time, it's not like we want to be 'cowards' :P. I would suggest to make the next MDPS have abilities that don't require them to be at a certain position however they should have an insane rotation (kind of like what MNK has with the forms but then even harder >:D) to make it a challenge to play properly because you have to admit that being at any random position and pressing random buttons to do a good amount of damage is just boring...

Personally I don't know how I feel about heavy armor and all that but I haven't played XI so I know pretty much nothing about DRK.. so yeah blame me if I'm ignorant, just voiced my opinion based on what I read

Not sure it really works given how "dangerous" the front of the boss is. You give the DRK enough survivability to deal with front of boss shenanigans and all of the sudden you have a tank that can deal DPS level DPS.

Also I feel like the class really really suits itself as the DPS job crystal for marauders.

I mean "marauder" even sounds dark knightish.