Dark Knight : Just another mitigation tank

[Musashidon]

You simply have to press an extra skill (Dark Arts) before you do your standard PLD rotation.

when did they give drk fast blade, savage blade and rage of halone?

[Nektulos-Tuor]

The third kind of tank is called a Lifetap Tank.

Tanking through Sustain rather then mitigation. It is a rather awesome playstyle.

Example:

Shadowknights in EQ2.

Lifetaps,
Sacrifices for effects,
Draining,
DOTs

It was a damage over time mage tank with lifetaps, sword and shield.

[Malevicton]

But I want stuff that's different! Give it a gun and the ability to eat random med kits while riding on the back of a bald eagle.

Huh. I'd try that job tbh.

You could toggle your eagle off and lose evasion, but when you toggle it back on it'd come back with more medkits. Could totally work.

[Lorielle]

SNIP

You could ask what I mean instead of trying to shoot back and missing the target. The problem is here that people are convinced that it isn't going to work out because it's going to be weak or overpowered based on previous MMOs. There's no thought process into making it work save TC's attempts.

> Will it work with other tanks? No.

These assumptions based on nothing. That's what brainstorming is about and experimentation. Nothing gets done if people don't actually take the dive. We can assume and theory craft all day, but until results happen, they're just words at the end of the day.

[Sapphic]

Everyone that wants a lifesteal tank seems to forget that they are a pain in the ass to balance. If you give them enough lifesteal to really make a difference, they end up overpowered as hell long before the end of an expansion. If it's strong enough to be viable early expansion, it [B]will[B]be overpowered later.

EQ did it with Shadowknight which had life taps and diseases. The life taps werent meant for self sustaining, it was mean to balance out the weaker mitigation the other heavy tanks had. Its main purpose was enmity generation. Using disease spells to damage and debuff, was a pretty fun tank job. But other tanks where preferred due to their higher mitigation. Swapping between them on raid content, you easily felt the difference. Thus Deathknight was never taken (unless heavily outgeared) for end game main tanking.

[Asierid]

stuff

Why would you take the other tanks? This guy can sustain himself. Hell, who needs healers? Heals and bubbles to keep himself alive? Pfft. Healers.

Or the sustained heals are so low that 8ts nothing more than a solo/low party tank. IE: shadow knight.

It's been done numerous times in numerous games. Each time failed. There's the proof. It's been done with burst heals, leeches, draines, HP sinks, bubbles, debuffs. What else is left at this point? How many times are you gonna sink a game into the ground over it before we get it.

Might as well make the lizard man from Soul Calibur a tank that eats people for HP. Least it's something new...

[Gardes]

If the issue is popping cooldowns before the hit...why not make it after. Make grit let drk take all hits and transfer them to a side pool that can go bust and insta kill the drk. In exchange the drk has to use his skills to prevent fron ever going bust within certain time limit. His hp wont ever go down from max but healers can see his debt debuff stacks and heal him accordingly...which will just empower his skills to help him pay his debts to the void..

[Deusteele]

As someone that mains a Blood Death Knight in WoW, which is a perfect example of what's the OP is asking for.

It's just a mitigation tank that absorbs a flat amount of damage.
-Death Knights work via an ability called Death Strike. When this ability is used, and can be used twice in a 10s window depending, the Death Knight is healed on damage done and receive a bubble based on amount healed.

While it does work at all levels of play decently, it's not really anything special. It took Blizzard the better part of two years to figure out balance on the design and it still starts weak at the beginning of an expansion and ends with being horrendously overpowered. It has the simplest form of Active Mitigation, and requires extensive personal and external cooldown usage.

The OP is really just wanting a different tank for "reasons". No real need for one and on the development side might require more effort to make work within this games structure.

[Assirra]

As someone that mains a Blood Death Knight in WoW, which is a perfect example of what's the OP is asking for.
It's just a mitigation tank that absorbs a flat amount of damage.
-Death Knights work via an ability called Death Strike. When this ability is used, and can be used twice in a 10s window depending, the Death Knight is healed on damage done and receive a bubble based on amount healed.

While it does work at all levels of play decently, it's not really anything special. It took Blizzard the better part of two years to figure out balance on the design and it still starts weak at the beginning of an expansion and ends with being horrendously overpowered. It has the simplest form of Active Mitigation, and requires extensive personal and external cooldown usage.

The OP is really just wanting a different tank for "reasons". No real need for one and on the development side might require more effort to make work within this games structure.

If you did play blood DK you know how insane they could scale and that they could be utterly broken in a small party game such as this.

I remember our warrior tank dying sometimes in the start of WoD and the blood DK could handle a 2 man tank fight for a looong time on his own, was freaking ridiculous.
Or How about Mionelol that could solo raid bosses, yes current end expansion raid bosses.

Something like lifesteal will always be super iffy to balance around since it will be either UP and useless or OP and you can solo whole raids.

[Lorielle]

Even more stuff~

You're making the self-healing thing go WAY out of proportion and such, overpowered to the point healers are not needed. Taking Soul Eater right now, the self heal potency is weak and laughable because of the three factors: Damage received, 3 GCD and MP(Dark Arts). But even with that, we need healers. So let's try boosting the potency of that heal up more to a reasonable point where we need cures still, but can actually use Soul Eater for more than just it's Combo Potency. And yes, you can make it so that the drain is tied only to Dark Arts.

This is just a simple tweak to their toolkit already. But this is what I mean as far as brainstorming instead of dismissing the ideas completely because "everyone else failed, it's going to fail here too". Now we have come back to square one.

"It has yet to be done. It's impossible to do."

But hey, whatever floats the boat. DRK needs tweaks in general. It doesn't need to go blood tank, if it does, it'd be unique. I'd just be on board with them actually making them viable to take into progression. The most I saw the use of DRK was probably DRK using DA Dark Mind for Discord because it drops the numbers to the same levels as Shadow Wall. But you normally only see Discord twice in that fight where you only really need two CDs for it. What good is the third~? Stay tuned for Dark Knight relevance in Savage!