Can we expect even a SLIGHT rework for DRK in the upcoming live letter/patch?

Basically what the title says.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5830562

Odinel has already asked the question a while ago.

The hard truth is that no, probably not.

DRK, for all its gameplay faults, is both strong and functions mostly properly in high-end content, and jobs in that condition rarely get reworked mid-expac.

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Originally Posted by Undeadfire

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5830562

Odinel has already asked the question a while ago.

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Can't wait for that question to get ignored or get a super hard non answer.

I wouldn't hold your breath, you'll be waiting for 3 years.

Rework? Oh, God, no. Reworks are not done mid expansion.

They will do small revamps mid expansion for severely under performing Jobs. So, minor functionality changes and additions on top of potency buffs.

But, with Dark Knights doing well in raids good luck convincing Yoshi-P that they are under performing.

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Originally Posted by Xiaoki

Rework? Oh, God, no. Reworks are not done mid expansion.

They will do small revamps mid expansion for severely under performing Jobs. So, minor functionality changes and additions on top of potency buffs.

But, with Dark Knights doing well in raids good luck convincing Yoshi-P that they are under performing.

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They've reworked jobs that had severe gameplay issues mid-expac before that weren't necessarily underperforming i.e. SMN, MNK, WAR (pre 4.1 WAR still had the highest tank DPS for the record). I just don't know if DRK is lacking enough to warrant one. It still more or less does everything it needs to and isn't significantly disadvantaged in a number of fights like the prior examples were.

We have seen mid-expansion reworks before but it was for jobs that were seriously broken, 2.1 WAR for example because it literally couldn’t tank a boss.

But DRK isn’t in that position. It’s kit sucks and it has no identity but it is functional and in fact actually shines in raids. That is the problem with DRK, in the majority of content it’s kit isn’t that good or even outright sucks. But in raids? The things that matter everywhere else become irrelevant and the devs balance around raids.

“DRKs can’t solo a boss like WAR and PLD can”. Doesn’t matter in raids, you have a healer and if you get to a point that the tank is healing themselves then it’s probably a wipe anyway.

“DRKs invuln is clunky and kills them if not healed in time”. Doesn’t matter in raids, it’s use is planned and the healers know exactly when and how much they need to heal through it.

“DRKs short recast CD is unusable if they aren’t taking enough damage”. Doesn’t matter in raids, you’re always taking enough damage and TBN is actually the strongest short CD mitigation when it can be broken.

Even though that one question now has over 100 likes it will be ignored or they will say they were not aware that those are issues and will review them.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

“DRKs invuln is clunky and kills them if not healed in time”. Doesn’t matter in raids, it’s use is planned and the healers know exactly when and how much they need to heal through it.

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DRK does not have an invulnerability skill, and Living Dead is not a skill that belongs to DRK.

I'm not sure why you're asking the community if we should "expect" it.
The responses you will get are either "They sure need one," or "No, and it's copium to think otherwise."

You really shouldn't "expect" anything with regards to job changes, just as a general rule of thumb; that's how you build disappointment and resentment.

We'll find out if DRK's getting touched in the Live Letter. They usually announce a couple jobs they're focusing on in Part 1 (which would be the one on the 18th), but don't usually give specifics on job changes until Part 2 (probably middle of next month). If they mention any specifically next week (outside of a leading question), but avoid talking about DRK, then set your expectations very low. If they avoid talking about any at all, then have patience for Part 2.

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Originally Posted by Xiaoki

Rework? Oh, God, no. Reworks are not done mid expansion.

They will do small revamps mid expansion for severely under performing Jobs. So, minor functionality changes and additions on top of potency buffs.

But, with Dark Knights doing well in raids good luck convincing Yoshi-P that they are under performing.

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*cough* monk 5.0-5.4 *cough*

I'm pretty sure they are aware of dark knight issues. There's no way they can't be aware of them after all the threads on dark knights on the forums. I'm betting the JP forums are similar.

JP forum does complain quite a bit about DRK too.

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Originally Posted by Archwizard

You really shouldn't "expect" anything with regards to job changes, just as a general rule of thumb; that's how you build disappointment and resentment.

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What he said.
You can hope for one, but don't take it for granted that you will get one.

As used to be drk main. SHB to EW evolution is crap. the job feels clunky due to salted earth having a combo (this ability should be deleted on this expansion because ground aoe are always bad), having too much ogcd fluff(salted earth combo is the problem but rest is fine), no bloodweapon fix(9.9 secs boy), living dead as no changes when other healers outside of WHM don't have a benediction of its own as cross class skill (that whould be great if they added that to all healers while whm get something in exchange of this skill as cross class), dungeon pulls sucks as drk no sustain compare to other tanks(oblitation could be better lets be real), oblitation could be a evolution for dark mind and some sort of sustain relate with magic skill but nope a skill who take on my hotbar who feels weak compare to TBN. But rest seem fine IMO.

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Originally Posted by Sqwall

*cough* monk 5.0-5.4 *cough*

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Was not a rework, it was a revamp.

6.0 Summoner is a rework.

It'll be rather interesting this go around because JP is also complaining about the same thing now. Quite often they defended Living Dead and TBN but have since done a complete 180. Not to mention, Sage being straight up unable to heal LD in dungeons for the most part is and DRK getting more of a showcase in Savage has, ironically, put a much larger spotlight on its flaws.

Will it be enough for them to finally acknowledge the issues? I suppose will find out. If not... well, I think it's safe to say DRK will never get changed.

And YoshiP wonders why the devs are being criticized.

Remember the difference between criticism and insults too.
The devs deserve the criticism for the design of DRK (or tanking in general, or MCH) and being stern is perfectly reasonnable. Please be firm and straight to the point.
Just remember to not just be waxing insults with or without substance behind it. Calling them lazy or incompetent doesn't address any issue nor is actually constructive.
Anyway, mini-rant is over.

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

Remember the difference between criticism and insults too.
The devs deserve the criticism for the design of DRK (or tanking in general, or MCH) and being stern is perfectly reasonnable. Please be firm and straight to the point.
Just remember to not just be waxing insults with or without substance behind it. Calling them lazy or incompetent doesn't address any issue nor is actually constructive.
Anyway, mini-rant is over.

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This is fair BUT criticism is for the design flaws, insults are self-inflicted for not responding to or addressing the full body of criticism for years. I’ll be honest, it has its place, as long as it’s not a pure personal attack, in hopes sqex never again abandons a job as it seems like they have done with DRK up to this point.

Surely they can understand the frustration manifest differently from customer to costumer and it won’t keep them from doing their jobs.

Insults are never warranted and just give an excuse to ignore the forums. There is other ways to voice frustration without creating conflict.

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

Insults are never warranted and just give an excuse to ignore the forums. There is other ways to voice frustration without creating conflict.

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In the day and age of anything being able to be taken as an insult I’d just rather the dev team polish the product they are paid to work on because it’s their job not because they feel like it or not based on player feedback good, bad or ugly. They have neglected the job and deserve all the feedback they are getting. The idea you will always receive glowing feedback or a critique that simultaneously pats your back and therefore when you receive a harsh criticism you shutdown is a slippery slope for the game.

Again, never said to send glowing feedback or not to criticize. Quite the contrary.
What I say is that insults are useless and just give an excuse to ignore the forums. If you care, don't give ammutions to justify ignoring you. Give feedback, explain the issues, suggest solutions, voice concern. All of that is useful. insulting isn't. That's all I'm saying.

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Originally Posted by Kalaam

Insults are never warranted and just give an excuse to ignore the forums. There is other ways to voice frustration without creating conflict.

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Personal insults, no. Those aren't going to accomplish anything. With that said, calling them lazy based on say, their refusal to make Primal weapons for the new jobs or fix Viera hats after three years is entirely justifiable, in my opinion. There comes a point where people's frustration boils over because their criticism just isn't being acknowledged. Case in point, the healers. Look way back in Stormblood with the original Lily system. People said from the media tour those were terrible but were told "just try it out a see first!" Two years WHMs suffered with a system everyone knew was garbage from onset. DRKs, likewise, have brought up a bevvy of complaints only to be told "It cleared UCoB. It's fine!" Stuff like that inevitably grates on people. And while criticism should never be outright offensive, I'm not exactly going to fault anyone for pulling back on the polite veneer either.

I have to agree. It's really disingenuous to go around proclaiming, " We play our own game! We listen to the community!" when the primary way DRK mains experience combat content in FFXIV has been tumultuous for years, and that's saying it lightly. Polite, well-structured, reasonable feedback has been given about this, and many other job issues for years. And if it were acknowledged, there wouldn't be a problem. It's the fact that it's total silence from a single talking head in Yoshi-P that only happens every few months in a LL or an untranslated interview we have to dig for that is starting to seriously grate on people. I understand TBN is becoming a very controversial and split topic, but is ANYONE asking for Living Dead and Blood Weapon to not be changed? These are easy wins for the development team to show "Yes, we are infact listening" but apparently they can't even be bothered to make even numeric adjustments, not even reworks. I find myself no longer caring about literally anything the developers say unless it pertains to healers or Dark Knights, because those are the two issues that have been frequently asked about, and then shoved aside with non-answers or silence. People have every reason to be upset.

For the developers to complain about harsh feedback from us, that's essentially their own fault, getting mad that the dog they keep kicking stops coming in for cuddles after a few beatings. I'm not advocating insulting them, because obviously, they do good work. But this uneven treatment is prime territory for building resentment.

It's worth remembering that change is driven by profit. If you're unhappy with something in the game but it's not a deal breaker, then it's not really worth their while to do anything about it. Moreso if you just make a few posts in a community sub-forum to vent out your frustrations and keep playing anyways.

They've made a concerted effort to sell this image through influencer interviews that the dev team are a team of 'passionate players' just like you and are receptive to your feedback. And that is the message that gets broadcast in the end. Prospective consumers aren't actually going to see dissatisfied players on neglected jobs putting in years of feedback that gets deliberately ignored.

What worries me is that, much like in Stormblood when there was a player backlash over DRK issues, they'll promise to address the issue, offer up a token rework in the name of PR, and completely ignore Living Dead yet again. Even if they did nothing else, I'd feel like we were making progress if they just deleted the ability and made a new invuln from scratch. My expectations are below the floor.

I don't understand, drk functions super well. Guessing by its post count, its the single most played job in the game.

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Originally Posted by deadman1204

I don't understand, drk functions super well. Guessing by its post count, its the single most played job in the game.

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While I'm personally satisfied with DRK's incredibly bursty gameplay loop outside of Blood Weapon & Living Dead, most of the complaints people have against DRK isn't about its functionality, considering that it not only has the highest dps output, but also performs immensely well in raid scenarios mitigation wise due to the flexibility of its defensive kit, to the point DRK can solo double busters with relative ease and still have cooldowns to spare without needing to tap into its invuln ever.

Most of the complaints are more towards the feel of the job, something that is very subjective and not tied to how well it's performing on a functional level. Due to similarity in its gameplay systems to WAR, many people simply see it as a lesser copy-paste of WAR gameplay. Others find the 'Burst your entire kit in 10s then Soul Eater spam with occasional Edge/Bloodspiller until the next 60s window' gameplay loop to be bland. Others want more complexity in its kit through more in-detail resource management/buff management, closer to the HW/SB iterations of the job.

Others still are tired of the devs overlooking certain flaws in DRK's kit that have been prevelant for literal years (Blood Weapon) and some that have been an issue for literally half a decade now (Living Dead), which is made all the worse when the devs state they play their own game and read feedback, when somehow these extremely talked about points are somehow ignored again and again.

The feel of the job is the same idea behind why you had/have many people disliking jobs like old SMN, SCH, pre 5.4 / 6.0 MNK, etc. The jobs were fine functionally, and many were even meta - but they didn't feel good to play compared to other jobs in their role.

There's also plenty of people that are fine with DRK as it is, but voice their concerns over certain weaknesses in their toolkit, like it's inherent lack of self sustain contrasted to PLD / GNB (Discarding WAR since they're just OP compared to everyone on sustain front).

And on post count, people who are dissatisfied with something will be the most likely to voice their concerns, so it will naturally create a bias if you base a job's popularity purely off of how much its talked about.

In resume while DRK works and fullfill his duty in terms of numbers is the job most criticated mechanically/identity/gameplay wise and for a good reason, DRK is just a functional mess with despite of the feedback deliver from the past years to this day the Dev team refuse to put more than 5 min of development time on the job to fix or just apease the concerns above.

Working extremely well in raids and working extremely well in everything else are two very different things. Is DRK good for raids? Of course. The numbers show us very clearly that it is a top performing job, both in terms of damage and in mitigation. But uh.. y'know what? There are other forms of content, and playing DRK outside of a very structured environment is a lot like getting a root canal without anesthetic. You'll die more to glare mages than anything else by a wide margin. That aside, it just feels terrible to play. It's like a Walmart brand WAR with some extra peripherals you bought at K-Mart tacked on for good measure.

Oh, and LD is still a suicide button outside of pre-planned use.

I got a late start to this expansion so I haven’t leveled any jobs to 90 yet but I switched to GNB and even in the leveling process you can feel the care that the Devs put into it. It’s hard to argue the devs put the same level of care and attention into DRK as was given to GNB and, based on the tool tips, war and pld. We’ll see about updates. Either way, as frustrating as the last 4 years have been, I can’t bring myself to care anymore and I’m happy to be rid of DRK. I look forward to all the cool and unique CDs which will be passed out from DRK’s kit in the future and thank the devs for keeping GNBs kit one of a kind.

I post this only to say that, I’m not entirely sure DRKs abnormally high DPS numbers were on purpose considering the buff to pld. And without the DPS on DRK what really shines? Still TBN? The shadow dot? Nothing seems a standout in a good way. Those of you that like it, for more than just the DPS, wherever you are, I’m happy for you.

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Originally Posted by deadman1204

I don't understand, drk functions super well. Guessing by its post count, its the single most played job in the game.

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Depends on the content, and the problem most DRKs have is that its strong performance in high-end trials and raids belies its weaker performance in most other content.

DRK's only self-healing tool (outside of Souleater) is Abyssal Drain, which shares a CD with Carve & Spit; it's a damage loss at less than 4 targets, and doesn't compare to Equilibrium or Aurora's healing (before their boosts to double their effects) until 6 targets. This is in contrast to the other three tanks who got big boosts in self-healing this expansion at both 82 and 84 -- the latter of which instead gave DRK an active CD reduction on its gap-closer instead of any survival boon during its rotation.
Dark Mind is only usable in certain types of content where targeted magic damage is expected, which is relatively rare in dungeons outside of raidwides or effects you're meant to dodge.
Oblation is the single weakest mitigation effect available to tanks, only of notable value when stacked with other CDs. Its cooldown also means it won't always line up neatly with TBN.
DRK's on-demand mitigation skill requires MP, competing with its damage skills. While the bubble is great for taking the brunt of a tankbuster, it gets shredded within about 2-4 seconds against a crowd of enemies; unlike the post-82 on-demand skills, it also provides zero survival benefit after that first four seconds.
Those all contribute to a recurring issue for healers where they find DRK tanks burn through their mitigation effects extremely quickly during wall-to-walls, and are harder to heal in dungeons than most other tanks.
And of course, Living Dead can only be safely used when coordinated with your healer, which no other tank immune has as a limitation (especially because any other tank could self-heal through the worst of theirs). Unless your healer has Benediction or most of their resources saved up, there is a strong chance they will struggle to heal you to full within the period given by Walking Dead, making it the one "immune" that amplifies healer anxiety rather than providing momentary relief, on top of giving no indication of how close it is to being healed -- and even if they do miraculously succeed, you lose time on the actual immune period, because you would die instantly if the clock actually hit 10, so you're not even guaranteed the full benefit. It is without question the worst tank immune, especially now that even Holmgang lasts a full 10 sec.

Bonus round: It doesn't get its extra gauge until 62, its on-demand until 70, its AoE combo until 72, or its raidwide until 76. In all cases, the highest of any tank. Kinda just feels like a really simple melee DPS with the wrong role actions before 70.

And that's before we get to the rotation feeling like a clone of WAR's with less "oomph" from all the Direct Crits... but that's something that I doubt would even be addressed in a .X series.

It's picked the most often for trials and raids because it's the highest parsing damage among tanks, owing to most of its EW boosts being to direct damage (two to a glorified DoT). Even that's marginal, and if that went away the job would drop to the least use of all tanks.

I honestly hope that Dark Knight receives any sort of slight rework or changes this expansion but i do not expect it to happen considering the fact that it has gotten less changes in two and a half years than Paladin got in the current patch.

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Originally Posted by Absimiliard

Working extremely well in raids and working extremely well in everything else are two very different things. Is DRK good for raids? Of course. The numbers show us very clearly that it is a top performing job, both in terms of damage and in mitigation. But uh.. y'know what? There are other forms of content, and playing DRK outside of a very structured environment is a lot like getting a root canal without anesthetic. You'll die more to glare mages than anything else by a wide margin. That aside, it just feels terrible to play. It's like a Walmart brand WAR with some extra peripherals you bought at K-Mart tacked on for good measure.

Oh, and LD is still a suicide button outside of pre-planned use.

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Ironically, this may be our saving grace. The dev team will respond far quicker to casual player complaints; irksome as that may be. The fact Sage basically can't heal LD in a dungeon setting is particularly egregious. Maybe DRK getting showcased in raids and how many groups even at the highest level go out of their way to avoid using LD whereas groups without a DRK run invuln strats will finally smack the devs awake on how garbage this ability is.

We know devs do listen to casuals so the fact that DRK isnt doing good in dungeons will push devs to make changes.

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Originally Posted by Derio

We know devs do listen to casuals so the fact that DRK isnt doing good in dungeons will push devs to make changes.

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I'll gladly take this copium. I really miss the days when all I had to worry about was MP management, not whether I'd get carpal tunnel from my opener.

i want to believe

There were a ton of upvotes for questions about Living Dead near the end of Shadowbringers, but they still deliberately ignored the issue in favor of less upvoted questions. I really don't know what level of player frustration is going to be the tipping point for them to actually acknowledge it.

The player base will have to move onto different job. As long as it’s played by a somewhat equal share as the others I don’t imagine they care. The saving grace for se is that there has been an influx of new players while the game has been growing. Im just guessing that if they did a detailed analysis of who is still playing DRK they'd find the vase majority are new players instead of vets. I wonder what will happen when everyone gets settled in and the growth curve has flattened out?