Build your favorite DRK

Many have made it known the current DRK, and previous iteration, are playable but not fun in their opinion. Share your favorite build idea. Here's mine:

Do away with salted earth. Ground AoEs are a pain to me and the potency is pitiful at this point anyway.

Make scourge oGCD ~15 seconds. Thought about making it a combo finisher but that would be a pain for AoE.

Make AD a GCD with a heal of 50-100 pot (obviously you can play with the numbers). Additional effect will spread scourge dot to surrounding enemies and refresh the dot.

Aoe combo:
Unleash>Stalwart soul (mp gain x amount)>AD (hp gain x amount, gain blood x amount, spread/refresh scourge if on current target (trait)).

Single target:
Hard slash>siphon strike (mp and hp gain here)>soul eater (blood gain).

AoE and single target combo can be used interchangeable (example: if you wanted a slightly higher dose of HP you could do Hard Slash>Siphon Strike>AD).

Dark Mind is gone.

TBN goes back to accumulation of blood gauge.

Add consequential blood gauge spender to prevent over-capping (example: blood shield (shadow skin) ~25k shield to swap those resources back to mp if it bust (whatever the cost of TBN would be), low blow, who knows, I'm just spit balling here).

Automatically, once blood gauge reaches 100% the darkness overtakes you for x seconds ~15 seconds. Your 1-2-3 (single target and AoE) combos are replaced with “darkness” combos (to save space on the Hotbar). Add blood spiller and quietus in their respective combos (somewhere in the 1 2 3) in addition 4 new grandiose attacks (2 for aoe, 2 for single target). Darkness combos would be higher potency in damage but no mp, hp, or blood will be generated. While in your darkness combo phase Mp will drain. If you run out of mp you will automatically be knocked out of your darkness combo burst phase regardless of if you have more time left (example: In this example darkness phase is 15 seconds long. If you run out of mp at 10 seconds into the darkness phase you're automatically locked out of you darkness combos and back to the regular ones).

Delirium will extend the duration of darkness combo duration in addition to grant x amount of mp on par with the duration increase.

BW gives haste for x amount of time and increases blood by ~50 and some mp.

EoS/Fos can remain as is to keep darkside buff in place. EoS/FoS will not get procs from TBN.

CnS could be a scaling ability that will grant ehh ~1500 mp, but damage scales with the amount of mp you have. The less the mp you have the more damage it does. Going into darkness burst phase resets CnS.

Darkside still retains it's 10%(? I think) damage buff. In addition when darkside is active CnS has a ~25% chance to proc on critical hits.

continued...

Shadow clone can stay but needs to feed off MP for DRK to have two burst windows and one they can open up with at the beginning of the fight (Don't give me another WAR hand me down with infuriate to go straight into darkness combo). I would have shadow plunge straight into combat and avoid the 4 seconds of graphic before it starts attacking like now.

Soul survivor will come back as a trait - When "blood shield" or TBN bust hp value of the shield is reimbursed (numbers again can be tweaked). May be OP but DRK needs more passive healing on its abilities due to its normal healing being locked behind combos and not on demand like other tanks.

LD, ugh. If I had it my way I would flip things around. Instead of doing the healing on the back end where no one really knows exactly where they are at on the way to max HP. I would give the DRK an empowered shadow of inner darkness (would be an easy graphic to pick up on for healers) which we already have a taste of with the current shadow. I have in mind a black and reddish/purplish shadow growing out for the players body to x2 their size. The inner darkness would empower the dark knights HP pool to double or triple its normal value (hard for me to say since I don't know what the current numbers are for the heaviest tank busters in current content and no one does for the future). Healers would have the first 10 seconds before the TB to throw up heals/regens/bene to bump that pool up as high as they can get it before the hits. The real fun would be adding TBN on top of that fully extended HP bar for a massive shield. The downside would be if you die then you die - no safety net at 1 hp. It would retain some identity and allow healers to see what they are up against. (might be difficult to get the math right when you throw in all the variables but it could work out and man that would be cool).

The above might be ungodly OP in a dungeon with bene but, its just an idea after all.

If SE wants to keep LD as is then just give bene as a role action. I know some will hate me for saying it but LD is a healer CD clearly meant to go alongside with Bene. LD is designed around that 10 sec invul window so give ALL the healers some control to make that full invul window happen reliably.

The reason for so many passive heals on this build is due to no on demand heals like other tank classes. This in my opinion is the one of the biggest downsides of the shadowbringers build.

I know I probably missed an ability somewhere in there but it's a framework. There is room to tweak CD timers and potencies but I feel like that is a DRK design that pays some homage to versions that came before it and is unique as well.

What do you want to see for the future of DRK?

I like a lot of your thoughts. Regarding this:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Danelo

Do away with salted earth. Ground AoEs are a pain to me and the potency is pitiful at this point anyway.

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I moved Salted Earth to a macro that automatically places at the feet of my target. After doing that, it has been zero pain to activate.

My only addition: Abbyssal Drain - Keep the AOE effect, don't let its healing scale with more enemies, give it a flat healing buff, and reduce its cooldown to 30 seconds.

I have always been very unimpressed with Abyssal Drain. The cooldown is too long meaning it can't be used multiple times in your average large trash pull engagement, and every time (at least that I've seen) the health gain isn't fantastic at all. DRK already has gimped self-healing (locked behind a single-target combo). Giving Abyssal Drain a buff, alongside your suggestion for making the AOE combo have self-healing, is something that would go a long way to match the abilities that the other tanks have.

It may make DRK too godlike though, I'm just not sure. Maybe implement only one or the other. Maybe take the cooldown off Abyssal Drain completely and just make it cost MP (a cheaper/less potent version of Clemency).

DRK's self heals are the biggest pain point for me. If that were solved, I think everything else about the class is tolerable for me.

My dislike for Salted Earth is more about how ground AoEs work in general. I've had it macro'd since the end of HW. It's mechanic was more tolerable when it had a higher potency but now that it's nuttered it feels like just another button press and not impactful. I was always hopeful SE would do something while you stand in it but since they haven't that's why I say get rid of it.

Your addition is well within the realm of reasonable. I don't know why they didn't do that for this expansion. Pretty much anything would be better than how it is now considering it's high CD. Your could also keep the attack pot the same but cure pot per target fall off. Both of the two alternatives give it utility in single target. I wish this would be addressed in 5.2.

I absolutely HATE the Living Dead skill. The majority of the time it's a suicide button. I wouldn't mind if they completely removed the healing requirement and instead let the DRK press the button again to end the walking dead status effect before it expires or die. Completely remove the burden from the healer(s) and place it entirely on the DRK. Would let the skill retain it's identity as well.

I wouldn’t mind the idea you put forward for LD but I would much rather SE start over fresh. At this point do you honestly think they will remove the death if you haven’t been healed for your max hp mechanic? Doubt it. It’s not like the current version is the only one that could possibly work. The death mechanic is ridiculous. I do believe SE has run out of good will regarding the current LD after they’ve refused to touch it and buffed other invuls without anyone asking.

MP zerker

Delirium - Reverses your total pool of MP (if you're sitting on 3k MP, you now have 7k MP, or if you're sitting on 9k MP you're now down to 1k MP)

Darkside - While 50% or below your total MP, the dark knight draws on their bloodlust and anger to grant them 15% more damage and alters skill abilities.

Dark Missionary - regular effect: 10% magic mitigation, darkside effect: deals a large range aoe dealing 50 damage per target and pulling them directly to the user on use, stunning for 1 second.

Inner Shadow - regular effect: becomes the new target of any mobs aggro'd onto you for 10 seconds with 25% of your max hp, darkside effect: what it is now with your shadow fighting with you.

Quietus - MP per hit, give it back >o>

Abyssal drain - regular effect: heals with a cure potency of bla bla bla per mob hit, darkside effect: doubles in potency but 50% less for remaining targets etc etc etc....



Something along those lines. Where you have to manage your MP gauge still but you're in control of why you want to and what situations call for you to need more damage output or more mitigation.

Take SWTOR Sith assassin tank (w/o sneak) model and call it Dark Knight.

https://vulkk.com/2019/12/05/swtor-6...-guide-by-ahz/

Just replace force with magic.

Edit:

Fix Living Dead, bring back Scourge. Change delirium to not be diet IR.

My fav DRK would be HW one with TBN instead of dark dance and bloodspiller living shadow with living dead fixed.

Or

SB DRK with more efective combos, scourge and living shadow

If making something that would make a Dark Knight feel like you're playing a Dark Knight, more focus on HP drain effects, debuffs that lower enemies damage dealt, and HP shields make Dark Knight feel more like a magic tank on top of existing mitigation, and more focus on offensive GCDs with either unique recast timers or high cost to use and damage over time effects with Dark Arts having stacks for you to use ignore high cost but generating it can be done with a high cost GCD(no cost if outside of combat), reduce Darkside's duration to 30 seconds while making it's re-cast timer 25 seconds(bring the button that activates with having to do damage first) and buff Blood Weapon to 30 seconds and have it affect all damage dealt and be attack speed increase but make it's re-cast 25 seconds(it would be more of maintenance buff like Darkside).

That's the general way I would go about it building Dark Knight as a class...