The completely REASONABLE changes to the Dark Knight job thread

[Morcavious]

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.

Hence why I used words like "essentially equivalent to."

If not all physical attacks can be blocked or parried, then people are making an even bigger deal than they need to about the difference between DRK, PLD, and WAR.

[Hundred]

Hence why I used words like "essentially equivalent to."

If not all physical attacks can be blocked or parried, then people are making an even bigger deal than they need to about the difference between DRK, PLD, and WAR.

Bolded is part of the qualm. Not all enemies have parriable attacks, thats just the reality, but again its not just about whether it can be parried or not. The inherit parry rate means that raw intuitions 100% parry is never a 20% mitigation gain even if all the attacks could be.

[Delorean]

cut the mp cost of grit, take it off gcd and make it stop canceling combos

[Rbstr]

Bolded is part of the qualm. Not all enemies have parriable attacks, thats just the reality, but again its not just about whether it can be parried or not. The inherit parry rate means that raw intuitions 100% parry is never a 20% mitigation gain even if all the attacks could be.

But that doesn't make it less valuable in a practical boss-related way. The important point is that Raw Intuition will, not maybe will, give you 20% mitigation against an attack when used properly. That's a reliable cooldown for physical tank busters. Similarly Sheltron will give you >20% on a single hit no matter what. (Given most busters have cast bars, eating an autoattack isn't usually a super huge a deal.)

On other stuff:
When you think pre-50 DRK has all the reliable tank buster tools a Paladin had!! Rampart and Sentinel. AND an additional one, if that Buster was magic! Post 60 PLD only gains a physical CD.
After 60 DRK is still the only tank with 3 strong cooldowns that work on magic!
Plus they've got Reprisal. If you're planning well you are very likely to have that for any known physical buster situation! If you use it on CD it's quite a lot of raid wide mitigation of a fight. Stacked with Path that's likely too powerful and why it's only a 2/3rds uptime thing.

Of course, I still don't like Dark Dance's evasion and think it should just give more parry. And I really like the idea of Delirium or Soul Eater or something putting up a shield under Dark Arts.

[Ipkonfig]

@Hundred Come on man.. You know that Raw Intuition will get fixed right? The auto crit heals from side/back are not part of the buff it would specifically say if that was supposed to happen, it's just like if you use Awareness it stops the negative side of RI from even happening which shouldn't work. Or at release when Awareness stopped all crit heals along with crit damage it just took them a bit to fix it.

@Morcavious I find Souleater annoying because the concept of self healing on a tank is flawed, if you are taking damage your healer should be attempting to heal that or even mitigate it with HoTs. Souleater could end up eating a few ticks of a HoT pushing them into overheals wasting the ticks and making that self healing all together superfluous because the healing would have taken place regardless. If it was changed to an hp buffer it would actually be an effective form of mitigation ignoring what healing is currently happening on you.

I'm saying if you want to change the 30%/20% effect of DA+Dark Dance to just 50% parry then it should have a Dark Arts effect of parry absorbing 10% more damage (I said 20% at first, but doing the math that would be a pretty hefty boost.) 10% would make them almost identical in average reduction but drops the avoidance.

[Morcavious]

@Rbstr: Are we sure it stacks with Path? I thought it was concluded that it didn't. Also, thank you for further expanding upon my point about Raw Intuition. You hit the nail on the head.

@Ipkonfig: Self healing is a tricky thing. It can be incredibly powerful if you run with the same healers frequently, as they can adjust as needed to accommodate those heals as a buffer. In a PUG situation they're usually one extreme or the other. Either the healer is awful and your self heals are a life saver, or the healer isn't paying attention to them at all and they're wasted. Either way you're totally correct in the fact that absorbs were be better. Right now you can't really count the self healing as protection against tank busters, but you can certainly count it towards general auto attack stress.

Ah. Nah, I'd personally rather keep Dark Dance as entirely % Parry. 20% seems to be the 'good enough' buffer for most things. Once you hit that threshold it's usually frequency > potency.

[Xenosan]

But that doesn't make it less valuable in a practical boss-related way. The important point is that Raw Intuition will, not maybe will, give you 20% mitigation against an attack when used properly. That's a reliable cooldown for physical tank busters. Similarly Sheltron will give you >20% on a single hit no matter what.

..I find Souleater annoying because the concept of self healing on a tank is flawed, if you are taking damage your healer should be attempting to heal...

^qft

There's an increasing amount of false equivalencies and paper-stat discussions,

I think those theory crafting need to queue T5, T9, Titan, Odin, and other non-dungeon, non-24man-raid 50 content. (God forbid try PUGing it instead of with friends)

From my experience DRK just isn't matching up to PLD&WAR in any party composition in either OT/MT role. Ramuh felt good but that's about mechanics, 15% magic resistance is QoL, not essential. If tanks didn't need it before, still don't need it now. Dark Arts blown on Dark Mind for additional resistance is a DPS loss.

Post 50, PLD gets extra mitigation and utility, WAR gets extra mitigation and dps

Post 50, DRK get QoL. (Dat gap closer tho!)

If anyone has videos or experience of DRK in any of this content doing well, I'd love to hear or see a Vid to learn from (in case the fault is on me and not the job).

[MuzakFan]

@Rbstr: Are we sure it stacks with Path? I thought it was concluded that it didn't.

Yes, Reprisal definitely stacks with Path. I made sure to watch out for this when I did a Ravana HM fight with me as MT and a WAR OT.

[Rbstr]

There's an increasing amount of false equivalencies and paper-stat discussions,
I think those theory crafting need to queue T5, T9, Titan, Odin, and other non-dungeon, non-24man-raid 50 content. (God forbid try PUGing it instead of with friends)
From my experience DRK just isn't matching up to PLD&WAR in any party composition in either OT/MT role....

If a PLD did it, a DRK could. They could only count on rampart and sentinel for reliable mitigation on any of those tank busters. Dark Dance then provides some decent general non-buster mitigation like bulwark. Think about how powerful Dark Mind is on Akh Morns or Revalations. Plus that extra 10% often up from reprisal. (It's a very big deal, though a bit less than Path, raid wide mitigation can really save the squishies back there).

My main point is that people are hung up on survivability when the difference is primarily one reliable cooldown being magic instead of physical.

Dark Arts blown on Dark Mind for resistance is a DPS loss.

That logic doesn't really hold up. It's not a very big loss. If DPS was truly that important as tank, no one would ever be in a tank as that's about the worst thing can can do for DPS.

[Ditto]

I agree with the suggestions, however I'd add 3 things personally. (Others have probably already mentioned Shadow Wall)

1. Reduce the cooldown of Shadow Wall to 120 seconds, or give it reason to be a 180 second cooldown. As it is, the cd is just obnoxious for what it does, and how long it lasts.

2. Give us an out of combat ability, something called "Dark Syphon" or whatever really, that allows us to basically channel our MP back. High DPS and AOE groups hurt Drk's ability to tank pull by pull. You go in, the DPS goes balls deep, you blow all of your MP trying to keep the mobs under control while they're continuously jumping back and forth between you and the DPS, and then they die. No time for you to recover that MP, and Blood Price doesn't exactly always leave you in a good spot depending on the type of mobs they are. Just to combat this lately, I find myself having to literally do a 1 - 2 spam combo with syphon strike as soon as I get a couple of Abyssal Drains out, just to make sure I have enough MP to go into the next fight without mobs going everywhere.

Sole Survivor is nice for this, but the amount returned in MP isn't that much, and a 120 second recast is a pain.

3. Do something with Blood Price so that it is a more useful way to recover MP while in Grit, against a single target. Even if it slowly recovers your MP for you alongside the MP you regain from taking damage, it just needs something.

If a PLD did it, a DRK could. They could only count on rampart and sentinel for reliable mitigation on any of those tank busters. Dark Dance then provides some decent general non-buster mitigation like bulwark.

The fact that people are STILL trying to compare Dark Dance to Bulwark just blows my mind.

I'd take Bulwark any day over this current Dark Dance. And Bulwark is VERY reliable for tank busters when you're using anything but a tower shield.

That logic doesn't really hold up. It's not a very big loss. If DPS was truly that important as tank, no one would ever be in a tank as that's about the worst thing can can do for DPS.

And no, it adds up perfectly. Having to Dark Arts a Dark Mind IS a big DPS loss, because just to get that MP back you spent on DM instead of what would've been a 1.5k+ possible crit with Souleater, you'd have to Syphon 2 - 3 times. BLood Price isn't reliable on single target, and blood weapon only if you can drop Grit.

However, a tanks job is to survive, so I see no point in making a big deal about the loss of DPS. This will be a problem however later in when tanks are once again expected to be pushing high numbers in raid content.