Dark Knight : Just another mitigation tank

[kuikui]

Uh, blood tank? What is this wow? I stoped reading after the second Sentence.

[okitaluc]

To a "blood tank" work in this game instead damage mitigation or evasion or self sustaining heal only , the tank should get skills that transform instant damage to damage overtime , balance this and it will work i don't think it's that hard.

and it's a good idea to keep the classes more unique

[SaitoHajime]

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

Imagine RoH with a GS. I need this...

[NovaLevossida]

So you want to do more for sake of creativity (others will call it complexity) to do the same effect?

Yeah, that's going to go over well.

As BLM and DRG got changes in Heavensward that add complexity for the sake of having complexity, it honestly wouldn't have surprised me if they had taken that route with DRK.

[Einheri]

The problem with blood/lifesteal/leech tanking is scaling. As it has been said leech tanks like evasion tanks come in two flavors under and over powered. WAR 2.0 suffered from raid bosses damage scaling higher at a much faster rate than the players damage.

WoW spent years balancing this. Now where blood dks heal scaled off damage received and evasion is spread between two attacks. Little more than flavor differences in mitigation.

All mitigation is increasing your effective health pool. Armor, health, dodge, heal, and shields all complete this task with very little difference. Armor is consistent. Shield are just a different visual of increased hp and heals are just the delayed form. Evasion is spikey due to probability. At the end of the day you can balance these if they all scale off either the player OR npcs. They are just different flavors that represent the same number of a spread sheet.

Now if you want to talk about making a class different you can talk about how the flavor of mitigation is obtained. Passive armor and health stacking? Reactive skill? Proactive skill? Maintained via a set of actions?

Arbiter in rift is one of my favorite tanks. Its gimmick is maintaining shields via depleteing and building its focus resource.

The dark templar from age of Conan was a bad ass life drain tank but wasn't great against slow but heavy hitting boss.

Black Orcs in war hammer used skills and damage taken to increase their healthpool.

You can also niche your tanks via the content they are strong against. Lots of little attacks? Big spread out hits? Magic vs physical? Single target v aoe?

[Daksun]

Why not brainstorm a class as an example, come up with skills, stats and such like an actual class/ job in game and post it as an idea?
Weapon style, attributes, cool downs, all of it.

Then post it and negotiate with the community.

Who knows, maybe SE might go with it?

[Duelle]

It was an absolute mess when it launched, then was only viable as a pvp build, then was super op, then sucked again for a while, and then I quit so I'm not sure.

Well, 3.0's DK had the issue of the talent trees being a mess and bliz's attempt to make it a tank regardless of spec. When talent trees were changed going into cataclysm, they made Blood the tank spec and made its main mechanic Blood Shield, which was a barrier that absorbed damage equal to damage healed at first but was changed to damage taken in the last 10(?) seconds. This was on top of Icebound Fortitude, Vampiric Blood, Bone Shield and their superior parries.

[Sylve]

-

Awww yeah, Sounds like a fantastic idea. A Tank that requires you hit a healing skill every single time you get hit because you're going to die to that second hit if you dont. Well, assuming you survived the first one.

Lifesteal tanks sound like a grand concept on paper, until you realize that it doesn't matter how much HP you can restore to yourself if you can't survive being hit at all.
And if you try to give it the same damage reduction as a WAR/PLD while ALSO giving it lifesteal, You become a WoW Blood Knight, which was broken so badly they had to revisit the entire concept of the class.

As Kiteless mentioned, they tried with Warrior, but it didn't work because even though the WAR had high HP and could heal for a big chunk fairly regularly, It didn't stop them from being burst down by a tank buster or several hits in a row without Inner Beast ready.
Not to mention that 99% of the time Inner Beast WOULD have healed you, it doesn't because the Healer is doing his/her job and actually healing you.

[Omskahn]

Why not brainstorm a class as an example, come up with skills, stats and such like an actual class/ job in game and post it as an idea?
Weapon style, attributes, cool downs, all of it.

Then post it and negotiate with the community.

Who knows, maybe SE might go with it?

It seems most of the detractors are more interested in telling the OP how wrong they are about their specific suggestions, instead of maybe looking beyond at the reason why this topic was even made.

There\\'s no real reason to play a DRK over any other tank right now, except unless you just feel like it. And the funny thing is a lot of the arguments against the OP mention how his idea doesn\\'t fulfill the utilitarian function of a tank, but then seem to offer no other alternatives. No one wants to talk other ideas. It seems to me that these people concerned with function over flair are ok with a tank that is both less unique, and less useful.

Undoubtedly, minor things about my post will be picked apart instead of addressing the fundamental issues.

-Why should I pick DRK?
-What can it do that the others can\\'t?
-What was the point of this additional tank of it seems so similar to the other 2?
-What can be changed about it so it can have its own identity?

Right now I feel there aren\\'t very good answers for any of these. I think this has to do with SE knowing what a good thing they having going with the game right now, after being utterly abysmal a few years ago. They don\\'t want to rock the boat too much, so to speak, and in doing so are hesitant to try and innovative even a little.

The only significant thing that DRK has that sets it apart imo, is Dark Arts and how this ability synergizes with other abilities, giving them additional effects. I don\\'t think that\\'s enough

[Asierid]

Stuff

That's because the core argument of this thread was, and I quote:

Where are the blood tanking skills?

Otherwise known as life stealing/draining. The whole post was about how DRK is not a drain tank and why it is bad because it is not a drain tank. There was nothing about the functioning of a DRK or suggestions to make it better, only the notion that the class sucks because it is not Blood DK from WoW. The whole point of this thread isn't to brainstorm or offer ideas on alternatives, it is to point out how much DRK isn't a Blood DK, and why it sucks monkey balls to balance drain tanks and why we're (more than likely) not getting one.

Reading. More at 11.

Plus, you can ask those questions about PLD/WAR right now, they offer no new insight into DRK or lead into anything gamechanging. The defining difference is that the class has is the MP/DA system, just how WAR has a Wrath/Abandon system. No different from how BRD is based off of DoT procs and MCH is ammo/RNG procs, or how SCH is shields and WHM is power heals. Aside from that, the rest are merely number tweaks that will happen...once they get around to it.