The completely REASONABLE changes to the Dark Knight job thread

[Morcavious]

Raw Intuition is 20% Physical DR for 20s every 90 seconds. That sounds a whole lot closer to Rampart and Shadowskin if you ask me.

And a well timed Sheltron does the exact same thing as a well timed Inner Beast. It reduces the damage of an incoming Tank Buster. It's much harder to do, but it's still there to serve the same purpose if it needs to.

My point was that in ARR Paladins had a longer duration, longer cooldown ability (Rampart), and Warriors had a shorter duration, shorter frequency cooldown (Inner Beast). In HWthey gave Paladins a SHORT cooldown (Sheltron) and gave Warriors a LONG cooldown (Raw Intuition). Both are weaker versions of their respective counterparts (Rampart > Raw Intuition and Inner Beast > Sheltron), but they still fill in those niches.

DRKs are missing a single SHORT cooldown. Something to use on frequent tank busters. Beyond that and reprisal issues, we're really quite balanced.

[ZodiacSoldier]

snipe

Where do you see Raw intuition being 20% Physical DR?

"Raw Intuition - Parries all attacks taken from the front for 20s. All attacks taken from the flank or rear will result in critical damage."

Because of that crit debuff, its only usable on boss fights, not worth it in some trash pulls based on mob size and pretty much impossible to use in big trash pulls.

[Morcavious]

And Dark Dance cannot be relied upon to help mitigate tank busters. It's there to serve the same purpose as something like Bulwark. Since it's available more often, however, the combination of Dark Dance and Souleater are there to act as our 'random bits of mitigation' much like a Paladin's shield, or the Warrior's various weak bursts of healing or minor defensive cooldowns.

[Morcavious]

Nobody is arguing about the ability to tank trash. Everyone is worried about boss fights.

Parry reduces damage taken by 20%. If you've got a 100% chance to parry the boss your tanking for for 20s, then how is that not essentially equivalent to 20s of 20% Physical DR?

[Ipkonfig]

If you look at both PLD and DRK:

Rampart - Shadowskin
Sentinel - Shadow Wall (10% difference but serves its purpose of breaking a tank buster)
Bulwark (Physical) - Dark Mind (Magic)
PLD Shield - Dark Dance
Hallowed Ground - Living Dead
RoH STR Down - PS INT Down

Some of my Paladin friends aren't to excited about Sheltron so I left it out, I guess it's very hard to time and ends up eating an auto attack instead of what you really want to block, like if you are solo tanking Rav Ex and want to block the split-able tank buster solo and you time it wrong so it takes an auto and then you eat the full buster.

Taking into consideration Dark Dance's effect with Dark Arts and the 33% up-time on the buff, assuming you keep it on CD for an entire fight, and assuming an average Paladin block rate/strength, a shield and DA/Dark Arts actually equate to roughly the same overall damage reduction, as long as we are assuming auto attacks, which regardless of what you're doing can be dodged/blocked. Now there are certain mechanics, typically Tank Busters that can't be dodged but can be blocked, but more often than not you don't want to leave stopping a tank buster up to the chance of if or if you won't block. The proposed change to Dark Dance would severely handicap this concept dropping its overall effectiveness by around 15%. Now if you want to boost the parry to 50% and increase the amount of damage parried by 20% if you use Dark Arts, that would make it equally effective and eliminate the dodge.

I think since these classes are all designed in a vacuum they all have paper balancing factors and while on paper DA/Dark Dance is roughly the same DR over the course of a fight as having a shield, it just doesn't seem like it because RNG mitigation is never good mitigation.

From the list above it looks like PLD is more niche for physical and DRK is more niche for magic, yet they can both do either it's just one will be better than the other in certain situations. Since DRK was designed along with the new content it's a very safe assumption we'll see a need for magic damage reduction meaning DRK will shine.

The only real change I want is more group utility. Delirium Blade is great for the -10% INT which was amazing in T13 with a Monk, and since no one in my FC is leveling Monk for HW DRK can bring that debuff. Looking at PLD though they get -STR% on Rage, they can Stoneskin, Clemency, and Divine Veil which are all awesome utility. I guess Clemency is really only good for downtimes in combat because while casting you can't block or parry so a chunk of your mitigation disappears to cast a heal.

I would like Delirium to have an extra effect, like Magic Vuln increase to help your casters, possibly add an effect to Dark Side that changes your damage to magic so you can benefit from your own debuff. It fits with the ability thematically. Make Sole Survivor cast-able on a party member, if they would drop below 1 HP, instead stop them at 1 HP make them "zombie" that is immune to damage for 5s and heals you for 20% of your HP and MP, it would still work on a MOB as well, but obviously not the immune to damage part, just the 20% HP/HP if they die with it. I guess I do hate self healing effects on a tank so if Souleatter would instead of a health buffer based on damage, that would be much better.

[ZodiacSoldier]

Nobody is arguing about the ability to tank trash. Everyone is worried about boss fights.

Parry reduces damage taken by 20%. If you've got a 100% chance to parry the boss your tanking for for 20s, then how is that not essentially equivalent to 20s of 20% Physical DR?

Ok I see your point about it being a 20% physical DR for 20s, but Rampart and Shadowskin are still better CD since they give 20% reduction to all damage sources and on top of that they still have the chance to Parry normally.

I guess they can consider giving DRK a 30 sec cooldown that parry the next attack as a possible mitigation.

But you also have to consider the whole balancing issues. Currently WAR does the most DPS as a tank, PLD has the most mitigation and DRK is in between. If you want DRK to have as much mitigation as a PLD, they will have to nerf their DPS to be the same as PLD.

[SpookyGhost]

Ok I see your point about it being a 20% physical DR for 20s, but Rampart and Shadowskin are still better CD since they give 20% reduction to all damage sources and on top of that they still have the chance to Parry normally.

I guess they can consider giving DRK a 30 sec cooldown that parry the next attack as a possible mitigation.

Raw Intuition (Physical only) = Rampart (Physical/Magical) = Shadowskin (Physical/Magical)
IB (Physical/Magical) = Sheltron (Physical only) = N/A

[Morcavious]

Ok I see your point about it being a 20% physical DR for 20s, but Rampart and Shadowskin are still better CD since they give 20% reduction to all damage sources and on top of that they still have the chance to Parry normally.

I guess they can consider giving DRK a 30 sec cooldown that parry the next attack as a possible mitigation.

Yeah, that was my point. Shadowskin and Rampart are better, which is why Sheltron (and ideally whatever they gave the DRK would be weaker than Inner Beast), but still usable in a pinch for when you need to break a tank buster every ~30 seconds.

[Morcavious]

snip

Souleater may seem annoying, but it's frequent enough that I bet it comes pretty close to the effect that a PLD's shield has AAs. We're looking at ~13K HP right now, so it's not unreasonable to see a DA Souleater healing back ~5-8% of your health pool. With a little bit of practice that's nothing to scoff at.

I do agree that we'll likely see more magic damage going forward. I bet that's why they were careful to make the new WAR/PLD abilities physical only. If that's the case, then DRK are sitting rather pretty.

Are you talking about the proposed change to Dark Dance of making it 50% parry instead of 30%/20%? If so, I'm very firmly in the boat of 50% parry. I'd gladly give up the full avoid for the increased chance to parry a tank buster. Either way I think people are vastly underestimating it.

I would be shocked if they made Delirium give a magic taken debuff.

[Hundred]

Nobody is arguing about the ability to tank trash. Everyone is worried about boss fights.

Parry reduces damage taken by 20%. If you've got a 100% chance to parry the boss your tanking for for 20s, then how is that not essentially equivalent to 20s of 20% Physical DR?

1) Not all attacks can be parried
2) You acknowledge that 100% of 20% = 20% mitigation, you do realize that base Parry chance is not 0% right? Because Base Parry chance is not 0% your not actually gaining 20% mitigation, you are gaining notably less.

Eg. If you have a 20% chance to Parry innately, you're already at 4% average mitigation. With raw intuition you'd actually be gaining 16% mitigation from your base under the presumption of 20% base Parry rate.
tl;dr Raw intuition isnt actual 20% more mitigation, however since it gives crit heals, its amazing.