4.3 Dark Knight Feedback

4.3 brought great changes to the dark knight defensive kit as well as some quality of life adjustments. These changes improved the defensive capabilities of the class, and maintained the fast paced playstyle that draws me to the class. However, I feel there are still some improvements which could be made to further adjust Dark Knight into feeling amazing in terms of gameplay.

Mana Pool - Currently we hold 9480 MP at max level. For some reason this has been set to be just shy of 4 dark arts. Being able to hold onto 9600 MP (or even 10800 MP for flexibility) would allow dark knights to pool up to 4 dark arts worth of mana for a burst phase.

Sole Survivor - Overall I love the new skill effect, but I would like to see further adjustment to this skill. When the timer expires I would like to see this skill grant 2400+ mana and 50 blood (50 blood is a new effect but is currently on the PVP version of the skill) rather than 1896 MP and 0 blood. I think the HP restore is perfect.

Blood Weapon - In its current form Blood Weapon is primarily a haste and blood effect. I’ve gone into detail on this in other posts, but it works out that the mana gained from blood weapon is approximately the same amount of mana gained from staying in grit and using Syphon Strike over the duration of 40 seconds, and you should expect to gain about 39 blood from each use of blood weapon. If Blood Weapon is meant to be a haste and blood benefit I would like to see these attributes buffed, specifically a 20% haste and buffing the blood gained per hit to 4 would feel far more impactful for the class than its current incarnation. This gives 1 extra GCD in blood weapon (instead of 1 every two uses) and a total of 1 bloodspiller worth of blood.

Blood Price - I would still like to see this skill unlocked from grit.

Delirium - Trait Delirium to buff the duration of blood weapon and blood price naturally without cost.

Souleater - Souleater healing out of grit would just feel right.

This is just my feedback for 4.3 changes, and hope for future directions. What does everyone else think?

Stance Restrictions
I think that stance restrictions should be removed from DRK. The Grit MP reduction to 1200 MP this patch suggests that the devs are fairly cautious about allowing us freedom to change stances. This is fine, but this should also be reflected in our job design. Leave the conditional stance abilities for jobs that have the freedom to change stances on oGCD, with no attached resource cost.

Take PLD, for example. Changing stance is costly. As a result, there are no stance restricted abilities or effects. You don't lose access to passive blocking when you're not in Shield Oath. You don't lose access to Fight or Flight outside of Sword Oath. This is very sensible. It should be applied to DRK's design.

Souleater should heal outside of Grit. It doesn't matter if it's a smaller heal, or if it only occurs as a Dark Arts effect, but it should be there. If you can have healing on Storm's Path irrespective of stance, you can certainly find a way to have it on Souleater.

I understand the caution around Blood Price's resource generation. At this point, though, I'd rather see the ability removed and applied as a trait on Shadow Wall. The longer recast on the effect would allow it to be tuned to have more single target value, and it'd add a bit of personality to Shadow Wall.

Blood Weapon is another ability that shouldn't be really be stance-dependent. You can use FoF, Req, and IR in whatever stance you like.

Burst
I do think that DRK suffers as far as burst is concerned. Most burst windows increase your output over fewer GCDs. This is what you want. It means that you get more powered-up hits out under raid buffs. It also gives you an edge in lower uptime fights, because your buffs are up for a higher proportion of the 'active' fight.

DRK's approach to burst is to push out damage for longer. Blood Weapon allows you to support more DA usage, but doesn't make DA stronger. Delirium extends Blood Weapon without adding any extra impact to each hit.

While the thought of making Blood Weapon faster sounds appealing, I think you'll run into a problem with clipping. The new Plunge animation lock is nice, for example, but there's probably an upper bound on how fast you can make it. If people are running into clipping issues at a 10% speed boost, it's only going to get worse at higher speeds.

I think if you wanted to make DRK thematically faster than it is, you'd need something along the lines of a Duality type effect, where your Dark Arts empowered effect hits for a second time.

I think Blood Weapon itself is fine, but the bigger weakness is Delirium. The issue is a relatively underwhelming effect and a high cost. What I'd like to see is something along the lines of this:

Blood Weapon: Increase recast to 60s, increase duration to 20s.

Delirium: Replaces Blood Weapon at Lv. 62. Whenever Dark Arts is used under the effect of Delirium, the Dark Arts effect is applied for a second time (à la Duality).

We need to push out potency in a shorter span of time, rather than spreading it out.

Other issues
I think Sole Survivor is fantastic as it is. The resource gain is nice, but the really interesting part is the timed heal. I do think that having it cleanse Walking Dead would be a nice addition. At the very least, I do want to see some sort of a UI change to Living Dead that shows the amount of healing still required.

The other issue that springs to mind is that Dark Passenger is still just shy of being dps neutral in single target because of Slashing, but I personally think the solution to this is to keep it as it is for now, and just get rid of those awful 100% uptime buffs (Slashing/Piercing) in the next expansion.

I think Dark Passenger in its current form is 100% perfect.

We may look at the lost 14/28 potency lost, but it's smart. If buffed it to 150, that would still make it ever-so-slightly inferior to DA, and we'd still be in the question of buffing it further. Buffed further, and it would simply be either neutral, or ever-so-slightly ahead of our 2-second recast DA. Imagine the cries and whining about what a pointless buff it was to DP.

But instead, what we have here is a choice presented by the devs. We can sacrifice the miniscule 14/28 potency once on a 60 second timer for single target fights, and in exchange we gain some sizable amount of aggro, should the need arise. Or we can choose to DA, and no harm no foul. It's perfect! We shouldn't be asking for a DA clone with a prettier animation, we should be asking for choices, and that's exactly what we have. We don't have another skill to worry about keeping on cooldown in order to optimize. We have a tool to use when we NEED it.

And then when you think of the very realistic scenario where you have to pick up adds as DRK, DADP is a solid choice because if you're the first one to jump on an add, it most likely lacks slashing debuff. In such a likely case, DADP offers no hard feelings, and that's good design in my book.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Blood Weapon allows you to support more DA usage, but doesn't make DA stronger. Delirium extends Blood Weapon without adding any extra impact to each hit.

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Blood Weapon allow for more DA usage in a specific window, that's how DRK burst. With 100 Blood and having already used Hard Slash, you could set your window up for 4 DA on 4 consecutive GCD, and up to two DA on oGCDs, which requires more than 12000 MP.

i belive blood weapon and blood price need a change and being unlock it from grit, like keep blood weapon at it is and turn blood price as a parry-bloodbath skill removing the blood-mp generation, of course remove the self healing from soul-eater and add it to blood price, it will solve most fluff mitigation problems from DRK.

we still need a sinergy with living dead in a way to be able to recover ourself from walking dead, sole survivor is perfect for that task.

dark passenger is nice but saddly is not 100% perfect thanks to slashing but i hope next expansion SE get rid from those silly buffs that dont offer nothing.

for the rest DRK need potency increse across the board or changes on they mechanics to be on par on terms of dps with they lower utility, i hope SE dont buff that in this patch bcs they are still working on it.

Meh, Paladin has no ability to bypass the downside of tank stance, while war has unchained and drk has darkside, that should be considered why pld has no skill locked behind a stance.....

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Originally Posted by aqskerorokero

drk has darkside

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Darkside does not bypass anything since you would have it even without Grit so you still lose 20% of your damage.
However, PLD is the only job that build its gauge differently based on its stance.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

Mana Pool

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Agreed. In addition to this, they really need to do some general "clean up" and re-tuning of some of the MP costs for abilities as there are some with MP costs that I don't feel quite make sense with the shift towards 2400 MP being sort of the "measuring stick" for MP on DRK, for example 1320 MP for Abyssal Drain just seems odd now and should really just be changed to 1200 MP or 1/2 a DA.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

Sole Survivor

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I agree about the Blood gain. I also would love it if there was a way to activate the 20% effect early, essentially giving up the chance of getting the 30% if the target dies but gaining more control over when the 20% heal happens.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

Blood Weapon

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I agree that the Blood gain from Blood Weapon really needs a boost, the resource gain (MP/Blood) on Blood Weapon is pretty lackluster and the "haste" effect could definitely use a bit more impact.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

Blood Price

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This one I disagree with. I feel that Blood Price should stay Grit locked and be the "defensive" alternative to the "offensive" Blood Weapon. The problem that I have with Blood Price is that it is lacking, both in resource gain and in something to give it that more defensive bent. I think that they should add a refresh effect that restores a set amount of MP over it's duration in addition to the MP received on being hit. As for the defensive aspect, something like a +20% to parry like Dark Dance had would be nice.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

Delirium

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I also disagree with this one and agree more with Lyth, wherein Delirium is mostly okay as is but definitely needs something more. First I would smooth out the duration increases to +10s for Blood Weapon and +15s for Blood Price. In addition, and something that I believe Lyth was alluding to, I would add the effect where the potency increase from DA is buffed (140-->180 single target / 50-->70 aoe?) for a shortish duration (10s?).

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

Soul Eater

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Agreed. This is a no-brainer and I am surprised it still has not happened because it needs to.

In addition to that I feel there some other things, many I have mentioned elsewhere in other threads, that still need to be addressed, such as:
- Adding the potency boost for AoE abilities to DA-AD.
- Doing something to Unleash so that it remains a desired and useful ability alongside Abyssal Drain.
- Doing something with Living Dead so that it isn't so cumbersome like improving the non-existent messaging as well as making heal check less punishing. Also just scrapping it and coming up with something else is still a viable solution imo.
- Getting rid of the separate Grit/No Grit potencies for Bloodspiller and just making the Blood Gauge abilities (Bloodspiller and Quietus) just simply ignore the Grit damage penalty.
- Adding additional effects to the DA effects of GCD abilities, such as additional Blood gain from DA Soul Eater, to add some level of differentiation so that you have more of a strategic choice when deciding what ability to DA. The blanket +140 potency is pretty boring and makes DA usage less engaging which has helped foment a feeling of DA usage being "spammy".

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Originally Posted by TouchandFeel

I also disagree with this one and agree more with Lyth, wherein Delirium is mostly okay as is but definitely needs something more. First I would smooth out the duration increases to +10s for Blood Weapon and +15s for Blood Price. In addition, and something that I believe Lyth was alluding to, I would add the effect where the potency increase from DA is buffed (140-->180 single target / 50-->70 aoe?) for a shortish duration (10s?).

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I think at 40 potency this is close to breaking even with current delirium as well as being a potential nerf if not paired with oGCDs like carve and spit. Current delirium is a net of nearly 335 potency per use currently, so at 40 potency you would need to use 9 dark arts in a span of 10 seconds which I don't think is possible.

However, what I could get behind as a buff to delirium is something like this:
Boost dark arts potency on skills by 100%. Additional effect: Dark Arts fades only on use of a GCD action. Duration: 8 seconds. Cooldown 60 seconds.

This would give dark arts the ability to span across multiple actions while also boosting the dark arts potency for a net gain, which would also make things like Dark passenger a situational gain on single targets (you still might want to keep it for adds since it would be worth more on multiple targets), to meet current delirium you would need to use 3 dark arts to break even and any additional oGCD thrown in during those dark arts would be a net positive.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

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I believe you may have misunderstood what I meant in regards to Delirium.

I was saying that it would have everything that it currently has and also place a buff on the player that increases the additional potency from DA.

The immediate MP restore and the additional time to Blood Weapon/Blood Price would still be there, it would just also boost the effectiveness of DA as well, reinforcing the burst damage potential for the ability.

As for the duration and potency increase from said buff, well that is up for debate and I just proposed some safe-bet, low-ball numbers.

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Originally Posted by TouchandFeel

I believe you may have misunderstood what I meant in regards to Delirium.

I was saying that it would have everything that it currently has and also place a buff on the player that increases the additional potency from DA.

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You are correct, I did miss that you were still extending the use of blood weapon. In which case it is not a nerf but I don't think it is a huge buff to burst damage, at least not so high as to be meaningful. Personally, I like the idea of longer duration of blood weapon over adding a small amount of burst. However, I do like Lyth's suggestion about double applying dark arts.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

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My issues with the idea that Lyth presented is that by turning Delirium into just a boosted Blood Weapon a la Berserk/Inner Release, it actually removes an ability from our kit which I would prefer to avoid for the most part as I feel that the DRK kit was already trimmed from too much with SB.

Also it leaves the under-performing Blood Price in an even worse spot than it currently is since Delirium would no longer affect it.

Additionally, the "double DA" aspect is effectively the same as what I proposed with increasing the DA potency boost, just with it being a +100% boost (while abolishing any gains from the current Delirium) as opposed to the numbers I just put out there as examples.
As I stated, the numbers I threw out earlier as examples were low-balled and what I personally would prefer would be a DA potency boost of around 50%, so a normally +140 potency boost would become a +210 potency boost when buffed by Delirium.


In regards to the duration, while I put the lowball of 10s out there, I feel that somewhere around 10s-15s would be fair, so maybe 12s like Requiescat?

So basically +50% to the potency boost from DA for 10-15s (12s?), +10s to Blood Weapon (2s more than now), +15s to Blood Price (1s less than now) and 2400 MP restored instantly for a cost of 50 Blood every 80s.

Although I still would like to see some adjustment to the DRK recast timers as the 40s/80s recasts for Blood Price/Weapon and Delirium are just a bit odd as to how they line up with the recasts of similar abilities on other jobs as well as party buff windows.

Anyways, I believe you, Lyth and I are in agreement as to wanting a change to Delirium so that it feels more impactful and creates a stronger potential for boost damage by increasing the strength of DA while under its effect, we just disagree on how exactly to go about achieving that.

Personally i still don't see the reason DRK should have a burst phase. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I'd rather see DRK be the smoother, more streamlined and consistent damage dealing tank.
Sure that would then mean in some fights DRK is outclassed DPS'd by WAR's (IR) and PLD's (requieche) burst phases, but I feel like that's already the case with how DRK still has Dark Mind.

Make the interplay between the skills more meaningful, like with WAR's kit. Level out the MP costs and ability timers so we don't have these odd "well, this skill returns a percentage of the MP needed to use another skill," "this still has a duration/recast that makes it hard to align with party buffs/cooldowns," et al. Unrestrict certain actions from being used within certain conditions where it's peers face no such lockout to their own abilities (PLD can FoF any time, WAR is a half argument with skills tied to Defiance, others to Deliverance, yet those skills still mesh with the overall rest of the job's kit).

Stop trying to force double-weaving, for the love of god. I know I'm preaching to the wind since the game's main demo is the japanese playerbase, which has amazing ping/latency on the JP servers, but in this day and age I don't feel like that's a just argument to make anymore for why you don't take into account the ping of regions besides your home when your product is sold far beyond your home.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I think Sole Survivor is fantastic as it is. The resource gain is nice, but the really interesting part is the timed heal.

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The only thing I'd change about new SS is shortening the duration to 10 seconds. I understand the 15 seconds were there to give some leeway when it still required the target KO, but I think it could be reduced now that we always get something out of it. Still, it was a very nice change.

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I do think that having it cleanse Walking Dead would be a nice addition.

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SS being a 120 seconds cd would completely remove the downside of Living Dead, given you choose to save it for it. I believe it essentially reducing the healing requirement to 80% is good enough. That said, LD could maybe use a QoL change of being removed when encounter ends. Not for raiding, just to make it a bit more usable in dungeons and solo.

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At the very least, I do want to see some sort of a UI change to Living Dead that shows the amount of healing still required.

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An easy way to solve this issue would be changing Walking Dead's "can't be killed" effect to an actual damage invulnerability. It would be a slight buff, but you'd still have to get down to 1hp and heal through all of it. Main perk would be that your hp bar would give healers a clear indicator of how much healing is still required and thus help utilizing the skill better without using Benediction.

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The other issue that springs to mind is that Dark Passenger is still just shy of being dps neutral in single target because of Slashing, but I personally think the solution to this is to keep it as it is for now, and just get rid of those awful 100% uptime buffs (Slashing/Piercing) in the next expansion.

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While I agree slashing/piercing debuffs should be removed at some point, we could at least get DP changed to slashing damage for now.

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Originally Posted by WhyAmIHere

Personally i still don't see the reason DRK should have a burst phase. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I'd rather see DRK be the smoother, more streamlined and consistent damage dealing tank.
Sure that would then mean in some fights DRK is outclassed DPS'd by WAR's (IR) and PLD's (requieche) burst phases, but I feel like that's already the case with how DRK still has Dark Mind.

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I personally agree. I don't want a traditional burst phase on DRK in the fashion of IR and Req, I feel that makes them different. The only thing I'd change in that respect would be to make them outdamage the other two since they don't do anything for the party

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Originally Posted by InfiniDragon

I personally agree. I don't want a traditional burst phase on DRK in the fashion of IR and Req, I feel that makes them different. The only thing I'd change in that respect would be to make them outdamage the other two since they don't do anything for the party

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The main issue with this is that nearly every other class in the game is designed around a burst phase. And with the meta being to perfectly line up all party buffs with Trick Attack, the lack of a burst phase only serves to further exacerbate the DPS gaps we currently have. I am not at all in favor of homogenization, but many of the mechanics in this game greatly reward jobs with burst DPS potential.

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Originally Posted by Tex_Mex

the lack of a burst phase only serves to further exacerbate the DPS gaps we currently have. I am not at all in favor of homogenization, but many of the mechanics in this game greatly reward jobs with burst DPS potential.

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Couldn't have said it better myself. If just about every class in the game has a burst phase and their main DPS output comes from maximizing that burst with raid buffs, then DRK should be no exception. One could argue that Carve and Spit is DRK's "burst" but you're not breaking from the monotony of using your combo repeatedly unlike with PLD and WAR's burst phases. Bursts not only help a job to do more damage when done right, but it's also fun to do something else instead in your rotation.

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Originally Posted by Saeno

Couldn't have said it better myself. If just about every class in the game has a burst phase and their main DPS output comes from maximizing that burst with raid buffs, then DRK should be no exception. One could argue that Carve and Spit is DRK's "burst" but you're not breaking from the monotony of using your combo repeatedly unlike with PLD and WAR's burst phases. Bursts not only help a job to do more damage when done right, but it's also fun to do something else instead in your rotation.

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The difference between DRK and most of the other jobs is that you choose when your burst phase is. You pool mana and blood, as much as possible without overcap, to unleash everything during raid boosts.

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Originally Posted by Saeno

If just about every class in the game has a burst phase and their main DPS output comes from maximizing that burst with raid buffs, then DRK should be no exception.

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Why do you want all jobs to revolve around the same concept ? If other tanks have burst phases, it would in fact help DRK to be different, provided it has a higher DPS output in the long run. Burst phases are useful when you have a small window to skip a specific mechanic, or when you have a tight DPS check, or an add...so even with a smaller overall DPS output, a burst tank is still a valuable asset.

I can't remember who suggested it, but it could be interesting to have a burst DPS tank, a steady DPS tank and a raid-DPS tank.

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Originally Posted by Megguido

The difference between DRK and most of the other jobs is that you choose when your burst phase is. You pool mana and blood, as much as possible without overcap, to unleash everything during raid boosts.

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I'd posit that such is not fully true due to a couple of factors and the interplay between them.

First is the size of the resource pools, they are really quite small in regard to the number of actual usable amounts fit within the whole pool, being 2 uses per full Blood Pool and ~4 DA/TBN uses for a full MP pool.

Second is the speed and cadence in which you gain these resources. DRK gains Blood and MP in two ways, actively in large chunks through the usage of abilities such as Syphon Strike and breaking TBN and then in the more passive slow trickle through things like the Blood gain from Soul Eater and Salted Earth. With both of these working in tandem, the resource gain for DRK is much faster and less controlled than jobs like PLD and WAR which results in the situation where the moment you are hitting a full pool of MP or Blood you are pretty much guaranteed to be losing resource gain and overcapping.

Because of these two factors it leads to it usually being best to not try to pool your resources at all and to try to use them up as much as possible, with the exception of sometimes leaving a TBN-sized cushion for MP, simply because you want to keep your resources low enough that you don't run into the danger of overcapping.

DRK also gets no additional passive bonuses for pooling resources like WAR does with the Beast Gauge, so there is no real incentive to pool resources versus using them up as quickly as you can and so it basically becomes a game of resource limbo where you see how low you can go without toppling over.

Unfortunately this design runs pretty counter to being able to pool up resources to create your own burst phases. You can sort of do it, but the amount of potential overall gain that you currently get from it is likely minimal in comparison to normal usage, especially considering the likelihood of overcapping from trying to fill up your resource pools.

While I too am overall against excessive homogenization of jobs, I realize that there are certain things that have to, or at least should be, present across the board and with the way that combat is designed in this game, burst dps and burst phases are an integral part of that design and therefore one of those things that needs to be factored in to the way the damage-dealing aspect of jobs should be designed.

I will say though that they could make the concept of pooling your resources to be able to create your own burst phases possible on DRK and could do it relatively easily by increasing the size of the resource pools so that there is room to let the pools fill up more to be saved for the right time and not be caught in the current cycle of trying to empty them out as fast as possible that we have now.
That is something that I would be perfectly happy with seeing as a solution to provide DRK with some way to have burst potential, but if they went that route I would still like to see something done with Delirium to make it feel more impactful to use.
In fact that may be the best way to implement burst potential for the job without creating a hard-line burst phase in the basic rotation like WAR and PLD. You can pool and burst when needed while just spreading your resource use and damage otherwise.

I'm happy at least that DRK is in its best place since Stormblood came out. Obviously there are still improvements than can - and hopefully will - be put in over the course of the coming months.

As for me at this point, I really only have a single, simple request. That being if your Dark Arts buff expires before you can use it, the MP spent be refunded, even partially. It sucks in raids, since there's plenty of examples of bosses becoming untargetable. If you were about to do a DA action right before the jump but didn't hit it in time you've just wasted 2400 MP, which kinda sucks.

I love the changes so far. Saving mp for DA+power slash, DA+Dark passenger, and DA+plunge for gritless aggro gain feels nice when catching adds as OT in sigma v7 savage.

Also as MT you can use DA+Dark Passenger early in your opener before NIN, SAM, or WAR applies the slashing debuff so that it won't be a dps loss in raids.
Against bosses that smash you with magic attacks like Phantom train and Chadarnook, dark mind really shines.

Defensively, the changes are just really really good. Yes, we're still a tad weaker on the physical mitigation side, but seing how strong we are on the magical mitigation side, it's not that big of a deal. Aggro generation is also fare mor easier and less punishing. Now, I don't feel that I must do more work to mitigate less than a WAR and PAL, and that's what matters the most. ^^

Offensively, it's just a tiny up, pretty close to nothing. For a non-rework improvements, it's better than I thought it would be. Yes, I would like to have a total rework of Dark Arts, going back to a closer feeling of HW, when using Dark Arts was satisfying, but I can wait for now. So, yes, all issues are not solved, but it's a solid step in the right direction. \o/

Burst vs. Sustained DPS
There are several reasons why burst is important. It concentrates a greater proportion of your dps into relatively fewer GCDs. This means that:
1) A greater proportion of your dps falls under raid buffs.
2) You can time your burst such that a greater proportion of your dps occurs during high uptime sections of the fight. This means that you are generally punished less for time off of the boss.
3) Your dps relative to non-burst jobs increases in fights with a lot of downtime (i.e. no targetable mobs present, boss using their special move animation). While you're all sitting around waiting, the time to your next burst phase is ticking down. You spend a greater amount of your active time in burst.
4) A number of mechanics require you to burst down an add in a fixed amount of time.

Common sense would dictate that, if you have two jobs in the same role with different amounts of burst, the job with the higher burst ought to do lower dps under target dummy conditions. This way, the burst dps job pulls ahead under lower uptime conditions, and the sustained dps job pulls ahead under higher uptime conditions. It's a bit like being forced to trade off acceleration/handling for a higher top speed in a racing game.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case. So while you can have two jobs on paper which could do similar dps on a target dummy, the one pulls ahead under practical conditions including unfamiliar mechanics and human error. You end up needing to play perfectly and needing to work much harder to narrow, but not entirely close the gap.

DRK and Burst
On first glance, you might think that DRK can burst whenever they want to. In a very limited sense, this is true. You can pool up your resources and then use them all at once.

But Dark Arts is not multiplicative. It's additive. You gain 140 potency for using it irrespective of how powerful the GCD is. Use it on Syphon, and it's a potency increase of about 1.63x. Use it on Souleater, and it works out to be about 1.46x. Use it on Bloodspiller and it works out to be about 1.35x. It doesn't make your big hits proportionally stronger (out of necessity, of course, because then you would be using it preferentially on Souleater/Bloodspiller). You're better off thinking of it as a 140 potency oGCD than a damage boost.

DRK does not "burst" by pushing out more potency into a smaller set of GCDs. It "bursts" by pushing out a fixed potency boost for longer. Blood Weapon and Delirium just give you resources to sustain this.

This is one of the places where DRK fell behind between Heavensward and Stormblood. Req and IR both represent an additional layer of burst to their respective jobs. Delirium is relatively underwhelming because it has an expensive resource cost attached, and extends Blood Weapon rather than making the window more powerful. You can contrast this with IR after the rework, where a shorter, more powerful window widened the gap between tank dps.

I think that Delirium, as it stands, needs to be reviewed so that it offers something of proportionate value.

DRK and Raid Buffs
This should come as no surprise, but in a game where burst is so important, DRK is required to play around the timing of raid buffs. You need to push out as many DA usages and Bloodspiller usages as possible under infusions and raid buffs. The only difference is that you're doing it without the aid of your own damage multiplying buff.

It also doesn't help that the 40/80s timing of our resource buffs is somewhat out-of-phase with the traditional 60/120s timing of many other raid buffs.

I don't think that "burst" has to always equate to a simple damage up buff. Wildfire is another example of how a buff can concentrate a lot of damage into a relatively short span of time. We've already talked about how, under the present system, players want to fit in as much DA usage as possible. Ideally, Delirium should reflect this, either by making individual uses of DA more powerful, or by delivering a burst of damage at the end of the window based on how much DA you use.

With the way raid buffs are designed, I think it's too much to expect DRK to keep pace without a greater degree of burst. The solution to this lies in making Delirium into a more impactful burst cooldown, and possibly making Bloodspiller come up more often.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

DRK and Burst
On first glance, you might think that DRK can burst whenever they want to. In a very limited sense, this is true. You can pool up your resources and then use them all at once.

But Dark Arts is not multiplicative. It's additive. You gain 140 potency for using it irrespective of how powerful the GCD is. Use it on Syphon, and it's a potency increase of about 1.63x. Use it on Souleater, and it works out to be about 1.46x. Use it on Bloodspiller and it works out to be about 1.35x. It doesn't make your big hits proportionally stronger (out of necessity, of course, because then you would be using it preferentially on Souleater/Bloodspiller). You're better off thinking of it as a 140 potency oGCD than a damage boost.

DRK does not "burst" by pushing out more potency into a smaller set of GCDs. It "bursts" by pushing out a fixed potency boost for longer. Blood Weapon and Delirium just give you resources to sustain this.
This is one of the places where DRK fell behind between Heavensward and Stormblood. Req and IR both represent an additional layer of burst to their respective jobs. Delirium is relatively underwhelming because it has an expensive resource cost attached, and extends Blood Weapon rather than making the window more powerful. You can contrast this with IR after the rework, where a shorter, more powerful window widened the gap between tank dps.

I think that Delirium, as it stands, needs to be reviewed so that it offers something of proportionate value.

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Instead of giving DRK another version of IR, I'd rather have DA developed as burst mechanic. If we got any kind of "increased dmg for X sec" skill, we'd just become pre-4.2 WAR, aligning resources and cooldowns to burn them in short window. Not fun.
Personally, I really like system we have right now when it comes to burst: you can choose how much mana to save and when to dump it without losing DPS. DA is pretty much a 140 potency oGCD that doesn't have to be used on cd.
My suggestion would be to simply boost DA damage at the cost of GCDs potency. This way we'd keep our freedom to burst whenever we want, without feeling bad when mechanics force us to delay it.

I don't want another class based around single ability timer.

WAR does not have a monopoly on burst damage (although, bafflingly, some people seem to think that it ought to have a monopoly on high tank dps altogether). Every job has some degree of capability in this area. Every job also burns their high dps actions under relatively short raid buff windows. It's just some jobs are able to extract a much, much greater benefit from this than others.

In a game where burst has a clear-cut advantage over sustained dps, this either needs to be acknowledged in the design philosophy (i.e. jobs with higher burst should do proportionately less average dps under target dummy conditions), or jobs with less burst should be brought up to speed. Either way, a change is needed.

Likewise, "Increase damage dealt by X%" is not the only way to do burst. Increasing the potency of Dark Arts under the influence of Delirium is one way of doing a DRK themed burst. You could even design a stacking buff that dealt damage based on the number of Dark Arts uses that you fit into the window, ala Wildfire. The implementation is of secondary importance. What matters is that you're capable of providing a competitive amount of burst.

But that's what I don't want: another buff that we align with raid buffs and burn everything in it. WAR IR change "fixed" it by mostly separating gauge management from bursts, but with DRK's mana/DA/blood system, it'd be a huge pain to set up. Burst windows are ok, but not when you plan all rotation just for them.
It's true burst dmg has advantage, but I think we should go away from it (by buffing sustained dps jobs in no downtime fights) instead of adapting every class to fit.

It would be nice to have a new combo to use, but short of a flat damage buff (too much like WAR to my liking), I can't think of an easy addition.

I can think of plenty of creative additions, but they'd need some very precise tuning and fine-balancing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ekimmak

It would be nice to have a new combo to use, but short of a flat damage buff (too much like WAR to my liking), I can't think of an easy addition.

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This could be a leech put on the target, where any member who hits the target get a fraction of damage converted to HP. The WS itself should have a higher potency than SoulEater out of Dark Arts so you would use this when you need to save some MP. So instead of having raidwide mitigation like PLD or WAR, DRK would help keeping HP bars a little higher at all times.

I'm fairly new to the class, but my takeaway after unlocking all the blood gauge abilities and tanking experts and alliance raids is that I felt the blood gauge abilities should be on a separate gcd than the main 2 combos. I'm unsure if this has ever been brought up before, and more than likely it has, but what are people's thoughts on this?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kaalia_Stormborn

I'm fairly new to the class, but my takeaway after unlocking all the blood gauge abilities and tanking experts and alliance raids is that I felt the blood gauge abilities should be on a separate gcd than the main 2 combos. I'm unsure if this has ever been brought up before, and more than likely it has, but what are people's thoughts on this?

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Off-GCDs are extremely strong, so if there's any reason they aren't oGCDs then that's probably why. I do agree that Bloodspiller and Quietus would feel a lot better as oGCDs but it's not likely to happen unless their potency is nerfed a bit or a longer CD is attached.

May or may not be right but I'll take a stab:

Souleater combo with DABS and DASE

Bloodspiller on GCD / 2.42 GCD:
150 + 250 + 440 + 540 = 1380 potency / 9.68 sec
140.81 pot/sec

Bloodspiller off GCD / 2.42 GCD:
150 + 250 + 440 +540 = 1380 potency / 7.26 sec
190.08 pot/sec

So it's a significant increase in DPS by making it off-global. Of course we can argue about DRK needing a bit more DPS still, but just wanted to point out how making it off-global it would need to be carefully adjusted.

Though.. BS and Q are mostly needed on the GCD. Q isn't just MP sustain because it regenerates MP on hit, it's also a free GCD in respect. (the fact that it cost Blood isn't an issue; the only thing Blood goes into anyway is more Qs when DEL is spent). DRKs still got to be mindful of the risking single target GCDs on 3+ mobs, despite their deep kit dedication to AOE (a peeve I've got).

And there's Bloodprice, which in 4.x only serves as a Blood regen (needed in Grit because of MP demand of trash), the fact they put DEL's 16sec duration boost on it opposed to BW's 8 sec, and then doubled Siphon's MP restore in Grit also so DRK single target Grit'd can compete also -- shows how convoluted the situation is.. And SE KNOWS about it because they deliberately bandaid'd their way around it in 4.0 (double Siphon, double dura BW)..

I digress.. my complaint about bloodgauge otherwise is the superglued +10 Blood from Souleater. I'd rather have consuming Dark Arts and executing Dark Passenger generate Blood instead. Salted Earth at 100% uptime potentially for a constant Blood regen. Something-something of that nature. Not a performance issue, but feel like that would tie the kit together better.. Blood reward nested atop MP management (DA/DP/TBN), and bubble.

Appreciative of the buffs from 4.3, Dark Knight feels a bit better to play. Still hoping for a rework of Dark Knight for the next expansion though as the whole feel of how it plays is a bit on the simple side when compared to itself during Heavensward. The interaction of Dark Arts Dark Dance + Reprisal and Low Blow (when it had damage) resets, Scourge, and the more theme-appropriate version of Rampart we had had in Shadowskin (still feel like the visual effect could be worked back in during this expansion), and a Delirium damage combo for when DA+Souleater wasn't in the MP or you wanted to debuff the enemy. It made you feel like you were this grizzled, dark magic brawler opposite the Paladin yet mirroring them in a few ways, almost mockingly. Probably in the minority, but this player would just like to see it's Heavensward version returned for 5.0, however unlikely. Not every job has to use a gauge if it already played so well without it.