The completely REASONABLE changes to the Dark Knight job thread

[Falgern]

1) They arnt suppose to, they arnt Paladins. Paladins dont have sick aoe, off gcd attacks, spammable self heals for 2-3K with gear. Paladins have no burst damage potential, terrible aoe and many lacking things. For that, they get incredible mitigation---so no----you don't get a shield, and you arn't suppose to mitigate like a Paladin.

2) So you would like it to provide the impact debuff to free up the monk?

Freeing up the int debuff for monks would let them do more damage, similar how war-nin works.

PLD is focused on mitigation.
War is focused on offensive abilities.

DRK seems to be supposed to be in the middle of these, however has less mitigation than a WAR, doing less damage, less burst, the only thing they have is more AOE, not better simply more.

Hey, at least they seem to do slightly more damage than PLD, that's a positive thing.. right?

[Aurelinaus]

A well written post.

1. I seriously feel like many DRKs are overlooking Reprisal. First block(-30%) and parry(-20%) only reduce and can only proc on physical attacks and are exclusive to one another with block taking priority should both proc at the same time. A DRK can still parry. Now here's where Reprisal, a 20 second -10% flat raidwide dmg debuff comes in, keeping the focus on the DRK since reprisal reduces both magic and physical damage it stacks parry. To put it bluntly when reprisal debuff is up you are effectively blocking whenever you parry a physical attack. Other CDs are pretty much clones of Paladin cds. PLD/DRK are taking the same amount of damage in this aspect. A Wash. I believe the real culprit here is Halone vs Delirium but that arguement falls under the drk/pld vs drk/war vs pld/war vs 2x same tank debate.

2. No comment at this time.

3. Agreed.

[Falgern]

1. I seriously feel like many DRKs are overlooking Reprisal. First block(-30%) and parry(-20%) only reduce and can only proc on physical attacks and are exclusive to one another with block taking priority should both proc at the same time. A DRK can still parry. Now here's where Reprisal, a 20 second -10% flat raidwide dmg debuff comes in, keeping the focus on the DRK since reprisal reduces both magic and physical damage it stacks parry. To put it bluntly when reprisal debuff is up you are effectively blocking whenever you parry a physical attack. Other CDs are pretty much clones of Paladin cds. PLD/DRK are taking the same amount of damage in this aspect. A Wash. I believe the real culprit here is Halone vs Delirium but that arguement falls under the drk/pld vs drk/war vs pld/war vs 2x same tank debate.

2. No comment at this time.

3. Agreed.

The main problem with reprisal is that you cannot really decide when to use it. I would be fine if reprisal was our version of a 30 second dmg reduction ability, although it would be the weakest one by far in terms of surviving tank busters, it's just it requires parry. If it was 30 second cooldown, either oGCD or GCD, without a parry requirement, you could use it for tank busters. But now you almost have to use it when it proccs otherwise you might not have the chance for a long period of time. Sure you can use dark dance to try to trigger it when you want, but that puts it into a weird position that forces you to use one tank CD to try to trigger another tank CD. We don't see Paladins running around and having to use sheltron to be able to use bulwark. Warriors can use their vengeance to trigger Inner Beast, but at that point they are already having a guaranteed 30% damage reduction, and getting another 20%, might as well Holmgang.

[Marxam]

Yes I do agree that Dark Dance needs to be reworked but I don't think removing the evasion isn't going to work. Think about it. As a tank your job is to reduce as much damage as possible and dodging means you take 0 damage therefore its a great tool to have. However in DRK's current state this is terrible because:

1. Blood Price doesn't scale with damage and goes off # of hits so dodging hits means you loose mp regen
2. You need to use the DA + DP to get the blind to get full use of the evasion which is very costly on mp (currently bugged as the blind only affects the targeted enemy instead of all who got hit)
3. Most bosses (especially in end-game) are immune to blind therefore reducing the need to use DA + DD

As a warrior since 2.0 I didn't think it would be possible to have a skill worse than Foresight until I saw Dark Dance. This skill need some love and my suggestion is to keep the evasion but increase the parry rate to 30% or maybe even 40%. The warrior has a 100% parry skill and Paladin has a 60% block rate skill.

and I know this might be op but have DRK's also parry magic since they use magic in their fighting style.

[Croisciento]

No evasion isn't bad because blood price doesn't scale. I mean blood price should scale but what makes the spell bad it's that it's unreliable. Unlike others many other MMO tanks are not getting hit tremendously over the course of a fight, they sometimes just take a lot of damage so healers can keep up.

Their magic resistance spell is amazing. High resistance and such a low CD, but it's totally useless on physical encounters.

[dragoelete]

No evasion isn't bad because blood price doesn't scale. I mean blood price should scale but what makes the spell bad it's that it's unreliable. Unlike others many other MMO tanks are not getting hit tremendously over the course of a fight, they sometimes just take a lot of damage so healers can keep up.

Their magic resistance spell is amazing. High resistance and such a low CD, but it's totally useless on physical encounters.

actually blood price does scale ... same with blood weapong but they dont scale with lvl but with your total MP so the more MP you have the more it regenerates per hit.

[Kaedan]

actually blood price does scale ... same with blood weapong but they dont scale with lvl but with your total MP so the more MP you have the more it regenerates per hit.

It's still a flat, static ratio, even if it's based off total MP rather than level.

The point is that it is most definitely not dynamically based on damage.

[Vire]

One of the largest issues I have seen with Drk so far is how bad the tp problem is. You run dry in 2 minutes so no matter what kinda damage drk is doing compared to the other two tanks it doesn't mean anything once you are out of tp twice as fast as the other two tanks. That doesn't even get into the fact that their defensive cd's are weaker.

They need to address Tp management for DRK first. You could fix this in many ways such as letting reprisal or dark arts restore small amounts of tp or simply adding a single target melee cheap mp attack to help give you gcd's on bosses where you are not spending tp. unmend's 150 potency doesn't cut it. If they really wanted to get crazy they could actually give them a spell cast with a cast bar damage attack.

Then they need to change Dark Dance to actually be on par with the other tank cooldowns.

Finally they need to either change reprisal to be up 100% of the time or change delirium to be a unique damage reduction debuff so you aren't punished taking a drk instead of a pld/war combo. Right now both of dark's damage reduction debuffs are basically just bonuses that are nice when they happen but not to be relied upon. You cant count of reprisal to be up and if you have a monk in your group delirium is purely for mp regen and 20 more potency than soul eater so you almost literally bring nothing to the table.

Drk's sole strength is Dark Mind and that is completely dependent on the fight design making the class very niche right now. It's a shame because the core gameplay and interactions are fun and they have something good here they just need to take it all the way and bring them up to the other tanks.

[Falgern]

No evasion isn't bad because blood price doesn't scale. I mean blood price should scale but what makes the spell bad it's that it's unreliable. Unlike others many other MMO tanks are not getting hit tremendously over the course of a fight, they sometimes just take a lot of damage so healers can keep up.

Their magic resistance spell is amazing. High resistance and such a low CD, but it's totally useless on physical encounters.

The problem isn't the evasion part itself, if we know that we will evade an attack it can be used for tank busters, currently it's I hope I will parry or evade, not I will parry or evade.


About Blood Price, if you really need a tank cd up during blood price we got many alternatives that would be better than DA Dark Dance, so having an evasion cd isn't that big of an issue really.

[Xenosan]

My issue with the new jobs isn't the how & where they fall in a party configuration -- it's that their play-styles offer nothing new. DRK has no new fresh approach to tanking, AST none to Healing.




Yoshi-P said their first objective in designing new jobs is looking for ways to differentiate gameplay within that job's role, if that was the objective - IMO, they failed. The new jobs don't do that - they don't provide new methodologies to their roles - at least not to the extent that NINJA did for DPS, and SMN/SCH did when they launched. I suppose there's no putting that horse back in the barn, but I think that's my grievance.

In fact Yoshi-P's explanation at PAX East - now in hindsight - seems like a preemptive acknowledgment of the difficulties they had integrating DRK/AST/MCH. They were rushed for 3.0 release. They add no fresh methodologies to their roles, they just borrow from one class and another. Then, they placed this combination of copied abilities behind a restriction that is MP and Card Draw. That's my grief. Magic Tank and Card Deck Healer - the core designs meant to make these jobs unique - work against them.

/rant

Sorry small derail but an itch I've been needing to scratch.