Other Dark Knight Ideas

In light of the "We are listening, keep posting feedback" we received from the translated "patch road map" type post, I'd like to throw my ideas into the ring to address some of the core issues with new DRK. Keep in mind that any and all #'s are irrelevant and could always be tuned to put them in line. #'s can be tuned easily, core gameplay kit not so much.

Keep in mind this is all personal opinion too, and spitball ideas. Just wanted to get the thoughts out there.

Remove the Dark Arts bonus from Syphon Strike. Between the excess mp generation from blood weapon and the long oGCD animations of C&S, Plunge, and Salted Earth (relatively), it feels awkward as hell trying to find places to slot in our oGCD's without clipping our GCD from double-weaving such long animation locked abilities and forces double-weaving for Dark Arts Carve and Spit in 90% of uses.

Add Scourge as a combo action off Syphon Strike:
260ish potency, applies Scourge to the enemy. ?? potency, 30s duration.
Dark Arts: Absorb a portion of damage over time dealt as HP.
Gives us something else to do other than 1-2-3 over and over with dark arts sprinkled in and the occasional bloodspiller turning it into a 1-2-3-4.

Unleash: return this to 100 potency. The change was baffling and makes lv 16-50 content unsatisfying. (currently only becomes preferable to single target rotation on 6+ targets after threat has been established. Hello 2.x Paladin.)

Unmend: Remove the chance at a free Unleash. This has never been useful. Maybe let this consume Dark Arts to gain (10-15%?) damage mitigation on the user for (10-15s?). Would be great for fluff damage.

Blood Weapon: Lower the MP restoration back to 3% of our MP per strike (is currently 5%). The damage lost here can be funneled into the Scourge Combo becoming a thing and is largely contributing to the mindless smashing of Dark Arts whenever it's up and we don't need the shield.

Blood Price: Return this to 50% of it's HW value or more. Feels awful to press now.

Dark Passenger: Boost the potency back to 150, remove the blind from Dark Arts Dark Passenger. Possibly allow Dark Arts to purge Walking Dead. At 50% of our MP it's a dire cost for a dire circumstance. Also extremely thematically appropriate given the DRK class quests 1-50.

Swap the levels at which you learn Dark Passenger and Abyssal Drain.

Dark Mind: Bake the 20% dodge from old Dark Dance into Dark Mind's Dark Arts effect. Won't impact bosses at all, and with how little magic damage trash packs do (for the most part) won't be overly strong in AOE situations. The nature of these bonuses practically guarantees that you'll only get the full benefit of one or the other excepting very rare circumstances (the ice sprites in snowcloak? Can't think of any other large caster packs. SE is very sparse on clumping lots of casters together.)

Sole Survivor: Change the effect to grant the user (50-100%?) lifesteal against the target for (10-15?) seconds. If the target dies restore 50 blood and 26% mp.

Carve and Spit: The MP regen has never been that good and cannot even buy us an extra Abyssal. Either bump the MP restore to a full dark arts, or change the non-dark arts effect to grant us Dark Arts as though we pushed the Dark Arts button.

Delirium: While increasing blood weapon uptime is cool, this also feels bad to press. Either lower it's cooldown or change it up. This is completely wishful thinking but it would be sweet if it let us ignore combo requirements and gain the dark arts effects of things we use for a limited duration of time. 7 seconds? Could also halve MP costs of spells (Unleash/Grit/Abyssal being the only 'spell' category items we have) while in this too. With only 7 seconds you have 3 globals to spend this on.

Quietus: Give the Dark Arts for this a Blind. Bumping it's Dark Arts potency to compete with Abyssal would border on ridiculous (2400 mp in "abyssal potency" is worth 218 potency.)

Blood Spiller: Stop goofing around with the Grit/Non Grit/Dark Arts/Grit Dark Arts nonsense and give it "Ignores the damage penalty inflicted by Grit." With a base potency and a dark arts potency only.

I like some of these ideas, bring scourge back as a combo finisher and remove DA from SS are the main ones. I'd like to see more defensive skills that you can use DA on especially after we lost 1 of our 2 CDs that you could use it on. I mean we are tanks after all.

Edit: How did you bypass the 1k character limit?

I like your Quietus. It's current DA seems somewhat tacked on, though really all AOE DAs seem suboptimal with with Blood Price being how it is (assuming Price, not Weapon/No-Grit)

Why no DA on Siphon, though? I too sometimes fall back into 3.x habits of pre-loading a DA before Siphon just to realize 'oh nuu Siphon just ate my DA,' but these moments are coming fewer and further between with more time in 4.x

I'm of the mind they could just remove DA added effects from all single target Weaponskills, and just bake that effect in Dark Arts itself:

Dark Arts:
*Next single target Weaponskill potency increased by 140. Dark Arts consumed.

Would be better than the current DA-Power Slash. And DA-Spinn > DA-PS would be great aggro build, with less overall potency loss.

Switching Bloodspiller to 'ignore tank penalty' would keep it as a DA priority in Grit, if they changed DA to act this way.

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Originally Posted by Dauntess

Edit: How did you bypass the 1k character limit?

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Cut your post down to 1000 characters so it will post, then edit your post and paste the rest of text back in.

nice, looking forward for the next expansion.

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Originally Posted by Xenosan

Dark Arts:
*Next single target Weaponskill potency increased by 140. Dark Arts consumed

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I'm gonna respectfully disagree with that. DA needs to go back to having more interaction with abilities and get away from being just a glorified viagra button. We already have enough DPS tools, we don't really need anymore.

1. Increase Shadow Wall's duration to 20s. This differentiates it from Vengeance and Sentinel. This ability is woefully undertuned and is aging quickly and poorly with 4.0.

2. Change Dark Mind's DA effect to 30% of all damage. With TBN being the gold standard of mana-to-mitigation ratio, TBN-DM is 100% better than DA-DM in almost all scenarios, so DA-DM needs a pretty significant buff in order to ever be worth the mana.

3. Add a -10% damage taken effect to Blood Price. This makes it a more effective and beneficial counterpart to Blood Weapon.

4. Increase TBN's recast to 25s, to balance it with our other cooldowns.

5. Remove the DA interaction with Carve and Spit and fix it at 450 potency at the cost of 2400 mana. To compensate for its unboosted form no longer being usable to supplement MP in AoE scenarios, lower the MP cost of Abyssal Drain from 1320 to 1200.

6. Revert Dark Passenger to its original form.

7. During the Walking Dead portion of LD, have all skills that return mana return a small percentage of HP instead.

8. Increase Souleater's self heal to 150% of the damage dealt.

9. Add Scourge back as a second combo finisher. Because managing a DoT would be inefficient with Bloodspiller varying our number of GCDs between combos, instead of having a DoT, I recommend having an additional buff effect. This buff would cause your next Salted Earth to tick for double its normal potency.

Quietus IS bad right now. What is obviously meant to be an epic, gage spending attack is "meh" at best.

Compared to AD it is 160 potency vs 120, without enmity modifier, and is also on the GCD and no mp cost. Can you get any more "meh" than that? Needs to be more like 200/320 and oGCD.

Bloodspiller needs to be oGCD. This way there are no negatives associated with it (delaying use of SS/SE). I like the way Ninja's spenders are set up, which is kind of what we have: One AoE, one ST, both stronger than other options and oGCD.

I agree that this would leave CnS with a bit of an identity issue (as well as require yet another double weave) so I also agree with the poster above. Remove the DA interaction with Carve and Spit and make it like the tool tip implies, a similar ability to DwD and give it 3 x 150 pot hits. Give it a Grit effect of a large life return.

Dark Passenger--Revert. It is just so bad now.

Unleash---Revert. This makes level sync content AWFUL.

Blood Price---make the MP returns 50% of the HW value compared to the 25% it currently is.

Dark Mind does need a buff when compared to the MP cost of TBN. I am in agreement again with Syzzlespark on this.

Shadow Wall needs something, somethign that makes it unique and not a "less good" Sentinel.

Dark Dance needs to come back. However, this time make its effect a doubling of the parry value (40% instead of 20% damage blocked since anticipation affects rate) and make the Dark Arts effect a 25% evade and magic evade.


These things would make me feel good playing the class, though I would still very much miss those visuals/sounds of Scourge, Reprisal, Delirium, Low Blow. Reprisal had to have been one of the most satisfying skills to click in the game.....and I loved those times where it seemed low blow just proc'd non stop............sigh

I just really hope some of these ideas get traction. DRK is in as bad if not worse a place than WAR and yet it seems like we're on track for a big WAR buff, the entire front page of the tank OF is almost 50% WAR posts. If DRK goes relatively untouched will just cement us as the worst tank, without any advantage whatsoever regardless of content.

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

I just really hope some of these ideas get traction. DRK is in as bad if not worse a place than WAR and yet it seems like we're on track for a big WAR buff, the entire front page of the tank OF is almost 50% WAR posts. If DRK goes relatively untouched will just cement us as the worst tank, without any advantage whatsoever regardless of content.

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Well I think if us DRKs really want to make our voices heard it might be worth leaving SE questions about it in the Ask Questions for Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XXXVII! (Exploring Patch 4.0) thread.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...g-Patch-4.0%29

Since at least that way we're a lot more likely to directly draw SE's attention to the issue. Given it's often questionable at times as to whether they really even are looking at the other sub-forums on the English forum here.

I should also point out that for anyone else making a question post in the linked thread above that if you have multiple questions you should make separate posts for each question you wish to ask. The SE Community RP even outright requested that players do so when posting questions.

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Originally Posted by Fazraye

[*]Please post only one question per reply (of course you are allowed to post several replies!)

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That and aside from it being a rule anyways this also helps to bring more attention to each individual issue instead of it being lost in a massive wall of text and multiple questions.