Dark Knight

[MeganLynn]

I'm just mostly excited that tanks will finally get a small taste of what kind of wait DPS have for dungeon que's since it seems like there will be quite a lot of people leveling it upon release. As for doing away with classes, I don't see them doing away with them, maybe with ROG they've released all the base classes and will start adding more jobs per class. Just my two cents though.

[Najara]

Just logged on to say that nothing screams "DD" louder than a job that historically sacrifices HP to deal more damage.

Thanks Square for destroying that.

Whoever wanted to play DRK right from the start (remember that poll in which DRK was one of the most expected jobs?), wanted to do it as a DD, not as a tank. There are *plenty* of other jobs who could've become one. DRK is also the opposite of PLD, yet the role is the same, too.

I personally have been waiting for DRK long since jobs were implemented in 1.23, and now I feel cheated.

This is, of course, based on a personal point of view, *my* personal point of view.

And, personally, once again, thanks Square.

The only thing Gafgarion ever sacrificed was his MP, and he was a BEAST.
If you didn't unequip his sword before the fight with him you might actually lose. Dark Knight being tank seems more than fitting to me.

[Saigwa]

I don't mind dark knight being a tank. It just crushed a lot of my hopes for Samurai being a tank (since I like playing tank and Samurai seemed like a class I would want to main). Also, maybe im just a scrub, but i believe it takes a certain mindset to be a tank (and a respectable one at that). With the popularity of a bad ass great sword wielding dark knight, I foresee a lot of tank struggles in the future when 75% of the gamers are playing it

[Dyne_Fellpool]

Uhhhh... No?

If you actually look at the various incarnations of Dark Knights over games other than XI, they've actually been a very tanky class:

• The very first Dark Knight is Leon from FF2 who is a one of your most durable characters, with high hp and defense. The only "damage dealer" kind of thing he gets is access to Black Magic, which is no more anti-tank within the confines of the classless FF systems than PLD getting White Magic.
• Cecil, in FF4, is *still* super tanky while a Dark Knight, what with high defense, hp, and heavy armor. The only "damage dealer" aspect he gets is the whole sacrifice-hp-to-increase-damage/deal-damage thing, which still doesn't preclude his tankiness given the fact that he is still your most durable character *and* it's another of the FF games where you don't have anything resembling a trinity construct so even the durable characters are supposed to be throwing out as much damage as possible.
• In FFX-2, Dark Knight is, once again, a highly durable class: high hp and high defense. The same explanation of hp-sacrifice as applied to Cecil applies here.
• In FFT (which the devs seem to be drawing a lot of their inspiration from), Dark Knight is *explicitly* a tank class: heavy armor, shields, knight swords, and an at-will hp regain ability that makes them virtually impossible to kill. Gafgarion is one of your best tanks outright.

The only incarnation of DRK that is an explicit damage dealer rather than following the model for tanks that the devs have been drawing from to turn into tanks for ARR is FFXI, which is nowhere *close* to "all games". At worst, DRK was a tank that used BLM instead of WHM. In general, it was a tank that had the option to sacrifice hp to become a damage dealer for a short period.

It's important to keep in mind that in every single Final Fantasy, with the exception of XI, *there was no trinity*. Everyone was expected to deal damage and take hits. If your only definition of "tank" is "has cover" then the only tank that would be around would be PLD, which is a *terrible* idea for an MMO since having only a single option for a role is boring as hell. When you're pulling classes from games that don't have a trinity and assigning them roles to fit *into* a trinity, you have to look at attributes other than "takes damage for other people" (especially given the fact that oftentimes the characters aren't actually meant to be balanced against one another); you look for high defense, high hp, and a lower than average damage dealing capacity compared to the explicit damage dealers (Cecil as DK compared to Edge or Yang; DK dressphere compared to Gunner or Thief; Dark Knight in FFT compared to monk, lancer, archer, or ninja).

Now, as to what classes actually fit this mold, there are a few of them: Berserker (high hp, high evasion; as a tank, likely based off of PGL), Samurai (self-buffing, parry/evasion; likely based off of new class entirely), Dark Knight (hp draining, high defense, high hp; as a tank, likely based off of new class), Spellblade/Mystic Knight (self buffs, magical sword attacks; likely based off of new class, potentially treed off of the same one as Red Mage), and Templar/Defender (heavy armor, high hp, self buffing; likely based off of LNC).

Considering how many potential jobs there are in the FF series overall and the need to maintain a decent tank/DPS/healer class ratio in *this* game, I find it unlikely that most of those would be implemented as anything other than a tank, since it would be severely cutting into the number of prexisting FF-jobs that could actually make sensible tanks (and, no, Ninja is not a "sensible" tank; FFXI is so anomalous compared to the rest of the FF series that you can safely ignore everything that it did with its jobs because so many of them depart so very heavily from the original implementations). The same holds true for finding new healers, since it's not like there are a lot of them other than White Mage in previous implementations: if it's a job that was designed providing support, it'll likely be brought in as a healer even if that class didn't originally have any real healing capability. DPS is likely going to be a role that gets assigned to a job when it can't feasibly be turned into a tank or healer.

This is an older post, but it sums things up very well

[Duelle]

The original Drk in Final Fantasy was a tank.

Many MMO have drain/endrain tanks, Lineage II's best tank was basically a Dark Knight. I'm fully confident they will make drk work just fine.

I'm not going to lie. I'm disappointed. There's a LOT of thematic sacrifices they'd have to do to make DRK work as a tank, and I'm not too keen on the fact they took what some of us suggested for samurai and gave it to DRK. Nevermind that a guy in heavy metal armor (DRK) should not be able to dodge worth anything while a guy in laquered/wooden armor (samurai) should since the latter is less burdened by equipment weight.

That said, yes, Dark Avenger was Lineage II's best tank and that was basically a dark knight in everything but name (well, they did have their summonable pet panther). They did have defensive cooldowns that were in part shared between them and paladin (Majesty). There's also WoW's death knight to take into account, except that one of the main mechanics from DKs was given to warriors (active mitigation derived from one of their attacks) to help make them viable tanks in endgame content.

With this in mind, you can't copy-paste Death Strike => Blood Shield on to DRK because WAR effectively has that mechanic. The other stuff was damage mitigation buffs (Icebound Fortitude, Bone Shield) but that still leaves a key mechanic. Full on drains have proven to not work (AKA the original reason why WARs could not tank coil when the game launched), so they'd better have something else planned to help DRK ease into the role, or we're gonna see a repeat of that whole mess.

PS: Considering how terrible the armor for DRK in the FFTactics rerelase was, please for the love of the twelve give us an outfit based on Gafgarion's outfit from FFTactics.

PPS: Since they're not giving it a base class (horrible implications there), does that mean I'll be able to make my retainer a DRK come expansion?

[Leira_Raine]

For some reason I feel as if the story for DRK will be related to the PLD. Like as a PLD you end up turning to the power of darkness and become a DRK...

[Delmontyb]

And there goes one iconic class butchered by the XIV team....

Truly disappointed in it being a tank.

It was tank like in FFIV before he turned into a Paladin.

[Adeline]

For some reason I feel as if the story for DRK will be related to the PLD. Like as a PLD you end up turning to the power of darkness and become a DRK...

FFXIV is Reverse FFIV, where all the Paladins will be turning into DRKS/DRGS

Dark Cecil & Kain shall have vengence

[saber_alter]

GREAT SWORD

HELL YES!

[Sapphic]

LOL what if samurai becomes the healer?!

Samcureai ? XD