No discussion on Drk able to use both stance at once ?

So it has now been more or less confirmed, with the famitsu interview translation, that Drk will be able to use both grit and darkness at the same time (grit beind = to shield oath, and darkness a stance increasing damage made by a % while eating away at your mp).


This makes a lot of sense, since you can't maintain it forever due to the mp upkeep. Using both at once will be similar to a warrior using unchained, while using only darkness will allow the Drk to dps efficiently as offtank. Also, Dark arts, a third stance that modify some skills at the cost of a lot of mp, can only be used while under the effect of darkness, yet will allow to boost defensive CD. It wouldn't have made any sense if you could not get access to that under grit.

This also explain, though, why Drk will be so complex: to simplyfy, to access sentinel on Drk, you will need to activate Darkness, activate dark arts, then activate rampart, now boost up to sentinel level, then deactivate darkness to stop bleeding mp. You will want to maximize your dps output by staying in darkness as much as possible while keepign enough mp to use for your defensive capabilities when needed. It will be similar to warrior tapping into stacks both for offensive and defensive purposes, but extended to more elements of the Drk arsenal.

What are people thinking about all that ?

It's pretty simple. Where there were once lolDRGs, there will now be Derp Knights.

But yeah, I was vomiting question marks about seemingly only being able to enhance certain defensive skills by exiting the Tank Stance(which would have been a huge problem if any of them relied on hitting the enemy ala Inner Beast) until this little diddle was revealed. Now Dark Knight sounds like it will be a lot cooler and more meticulous playstyle.

It sounds to me that the actual MT >< OT stance dancing will be fairly simple and be pre-HW warrior like. MT? Darkside + Grit. Switching to OT? turn off grit, darkside still on.

Dark arts however, sounds more and more like cleric stance instead of defiance on/off or sword/shield oath. Course since the actual application is different (harm and heal versus just juggling mana for drk), I still wonder just how much arts pedalling we will be doing.

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Originally Posted by Gardes

It sounds to me that the actual MT >< OT stance dancing will be fairly simple and be pre-HW warrior like. MT? Darkside + Grit. Switching to OT? turn off grit, darkside still on.

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That is definitely not how it is going to work, because darkside eats away your mp each tick and prevents your from benefitting from ballad effects. If you keep it on all the time you will drain away your mp, and will not have any left to empower skills with dark arts. On top of that you will most likely want to use darkness when you can do the most damage to maximize its usefullness.

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Originally Posted by Casper

That is definitely not how it is going to work, because darkside eats away your mp each tick and prevents your from benefitting from ballad effects. If you keep it on all the time you will drain away your mp, and will not have any left to empower skills with dark arts. On top of that you will most likely want to use darkness when you can do the most damage to maximize its usefullness.

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Hm... I'm not sure about that. There was an interview that specifically mentioned that Darkside's MP use was less than the out of combat MP regen so one might as well just keep it on all of the time. I have a feeling that losing Darkside in battle for any period of time might be a failure in player skill.

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Originally Posted by Donjo

Hm... I'm not sure about that. There was an interview that specifically mentioned that Darkside's MP use was less than the out of combat MP regen so one might as well just keep it on all of the time. I have a feeling that losing Darkside in battle for any period of time might be a failure in player skill.

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Yoshida said that maximizing your uptime on Darkness to increase your dps output, while not being dry for important part of the battle, would be an important part of Drk technicity and would require quite a bit of skill. People also said that Darkness consumption was lower than the out of battle regen, but also much higher than the in battle regen -- even with mp regen moves people were running dry all the time. Quite certain Darkside uptime won't be over 50%, especially if you are using any dark arts.

It'll depend on the drk's "working for mp" moves and how strong they are. Considering drk has 3 mp consumption speed (0, 1, 2), I personally doubt that being at speed 1 (DS with no DA) will be very hard to manage, considering we have speed 2 (DS + DA). I mean, I wouldn't balk from complex mana management but this is XIV and yoship we're talking about. The guy mentions new players like ballmer mentions developers. It's good he's finally adding some complexity but it probably wont be too far off from the game's comfort zone. Especially on a popular class.

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Originally Posted by Gardes

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All those that tested Drk said it was way harder to manage than others tank, including War, so, it very well might just be that hard :p

Who are the testers? If it's just 'journalists'..

Honestly I snicker a lot at some of the reporting that gets done on this game. Some of the people clearly have played the game and others might not even play MMOs at all. So it's not hard to see why there was misinformation on darkside + grit to begin with and it's hard to take their opinions seriously when they can't get facts straight.

From what it looks like, you'll keep darkside up a lot, maybe full time when not MTing. The hate generating combos don't provide MP so you'll probably have to juggle that plus the extra cost of dark arts when MTing. It sounds like DRKs have a cooldown that converts incoming damage into MP for them, so that will mostly likely be their equivalent to Unchained for when you want your DRK to be MTing for tank swapping. I doubt that would be something you could use all the time to keep DRKs MTing with darkside up 100% of the time while keeping hate but I'm sure it will make it so that they can be a MT effectively.

It sounds like DRK will probably make a good dancing partner with a WAR and be a permanent OT with a PLD. It looks like DRK, much like WAR, is good at grabbing hate and DPSing. And like WAR it can increase it's DPS while in their mitigation stance MTing for limited durations. The one job that can't do that is PLD. Instead they change their stance and use a cooldown. If your MT is PLD, you'll probably tank swap to let DRK blow it's MP as MT while PLD sword oaths, but then goes back to PLD MT.

I'm sure DRK will be a little bit harder than PLD as far as technical execution, but that's because almost everything is a little bit harder than playing PLD. I'm pretty sure no one is going to be singing the praises of 'OMG DRK SKILL CAP SO HIGH' when you have a good DRK in your party. And just like every other job in the game, there will be people that think the job is hard, but in reality, they are just bad at it.

Maybe Darkside can be held up indefinitely by alternating combos.
But I bet using the Dark Arts skill buff stuff will drain you and you'll want to turn Darkside off to rebuild your MP.

It's pretty reasonable to assume popping Darkside on top of Grit stance will essentially be DRK's equivalent of Paladin activating Fight or Flight, or Warrior Berserking. Darkside's uptime while MTing will probably be comparable to that. ie Every 90 seconds DRK MT will have enough 'extra juice' to throw on Darkside for 30 seconds or so without sacrificing their Tanky mitigation capabilities.

The way I see it is that Darkside is pretty much just Maim. Warriors rotate between agro and Maim combos, DRK rotates between agro and MP combos to keep up Darkside (Maim). Dark Arts can then pretty much be seen like Wrath / Abandon stacks that you can probably use every 30ish seconds by just doing your regular agro / MP rotation and your mana pool overall is your Infuriate.