Dark Knight Feedback

[Calib0s]

Paladin has incredibly short cds and is bad against nothing.

Oh magic? I get a 1 minute 30% mitigator for sauce, and 10% damage down debuff.
Oh physical? I get a 20 second parry buff with only a 1 min downtime, and a proc 10% damage debuff.

Paladins on physical: oh this is a laugh
Paladins on magical: help me -.-

The difference is that a paladin -always- is effected by their lowered damage vs other tanks, regardless of if their 'great defenses' apply or not.

If a fight is purely magic damage, you won't be able to use the -10% debuff. Even if it has autoattacks, you can't apply it reliably and certainly not with the precision to guarantee it will be up for meaningful damage.

Against a physical raid boss, Dark Dance is worth roughly 6% damage reduction and is extremely unreliable due to only providing 30% additional parry chance. It is effectively only useful for lowering fluff damage in between big hits, which in this game is largely trivial. Big, reliable cooldowns are intrinsically more valuable in the end game than these kinds of high uptime low effectiveness cooldowns. Over the duration of the fight, it might save your healer a handful of Cure 1s, but it can't be relied upon to help you survive anything crucial. If you use it on cooldown, it's worth a whopping 2% total average DR over the course of the fight.


Paladin tools vs Physical:
Sentinel (40%)
Rampart (20%)
Bulwark (Worth ~18% additional average DR, and significantly more reliable than Dark Dance.)
Sheltron (30% for 1 attack each 30 seconds)
STR down (Uniquely brought by Paladin)
30% Convalescence
Foresight (~5% DR)
Clemency
Stoneskin (Effectively +10% EHP for one hit)
Divine Veil (Effectively +10% EHP for the rest of the party)
Hallowed Ground (10 seconds of invincibility)
Natural block chance (~5-7% average damage reduction)
Natural Parry chance (~2% average damage reduction)


Paladin tools Vs magical:
Sentinel (40%)
Rampart (20%)
30% Convalescence
Clemency
Stoneskin (Effectively +10% EHP for one hit)
Divine Veil (Effectively +10% EHP for the rest of the party)
Hallowed Ground (10 seconds of invincibility)

Dark Knight tools vs Physical:
Shadow Skin (20%)
Shadow Wall (30%)
Dark Dance (~6% average damage reduction, low chance of actually doing anything)
Foresight (~5%)
20% Convalescene
Living Death (Still requires healing)
Natural Parry chance (~2% average damage reduction)
Soul Eater healing (Varies depending on gear/spec/DA/Crits. Not gained when AoE, Power Slash, or Delirium combos need to be used)

Dark Knight vs magic:
Dark Mind (30%)
Shadow Skin (20%)
Shadow Wall (30%)
20% Convalescence
Living Death (Still requires healing)
-10% int (Can also be provided by monk)
Soul Eater healing (Varies depending on gear/spec/DA/Crits. Not gained when AoE, Power Slash, or Delirium combos need to be used)

There is no fight in the game that Paladin isn't more than capable of handling with their toolkit, both magical and physical.

I would say that DRK has a noticeable edge over PLD when it comes to magic heavy fights, but it isn't really a huge gap assuming the Paladin knows how to take advantage of their kit. Paladin has an ENORMOUS advantage over DRK in physical-heavy fights, and a Dark Knight MT's marginally superior DPS doesn't make up for the difference.

In terms of DPS, Paladin in Sword Oath isn't much behind the others. In Shield Oath, yes, their damage is a bit low. I think the rest of their kit more than makes up for the lower DPS - it isn't a hindrance to progression for a competent group. It may make them less desirable for farm parties as people start to overgear content, but I find it doubtful it will ever reach the point that it becomes problematic since their hardiness will directly translate into more healer DPS.

[Freyyy]

snip

Pretty sure that Divine Veil doesn't apply to the PLD. Only to his party members.

[Faytte]

Pretty sure that Divine Veil doesn't apply to the PLD. Only to his party members.

Stone Shield and Clemency also are interrupted easily, and stop you from blocking/parrying. If you know an attack is coming, stone shield is fine (you will just fall MORE behind on aggro, a major issue for paladins atm). Any attack that deals magic damage will interupt clemency, and healers will top you off before it and after it faster than your spells will matter.

70% of clemency casts basically mean nothing.

[Freyyy]

Stone Shield and Clemency also are interrupted easily, and stop you from blocking/parrying. If you know an attack is coming, stone shield is fine (you will just fall MORE behind on aggro, a major issue for paladins atm). Any attack that deals magic damage will interupt clemency, and healers will top you off before it and after it faster than your spells will matter.

70% of clemency casts basically mean nothing.

Clemency is better used on another party member (could be the other tank) to help out the healers during healing-intensive phases than on yourself anyway.

[Erim-Nelhah]

Huh? If they went this route with Reprisal change, I don't see the issues you list. There's plenty of WSs already that require a buff to be executed (Geirskogul?). Would it be OP? If they adjusted the recast to 20 seconds so that 100% uptime is possible - yeah would lean to heavily on DRK/WAR WAR/DRK groups. But to compensate for that all they'd have to do is make it so it doesn't stack with Storm's Path.Of DRK's entire toolkit, Reprisal is near the bottom of my list of concerns - but a change to it isn't unrealistic I think.

The problem isn't that the ability would only be activatable when DA is up, it's that it would be activatable either when DA is up or on a cooldown, regardless of whether it still required a Parry or not. That kind of "cooldown or proc/state" ability is something that I haven't seen on any other ability in the game. The server-side code definitely exists, but I'm not sure that the client could currently handle this effectively.

It's just preference - but I would hate to see more Parry focus for DRK. That's not their intended design. If SE goes that route it's stepping away from MP management & Spell focus tanking. They already share too much in common with PLD, trying to buff Parry use to work like a PLD's Shield for both physical and magical hits.. not very original.. and DOA imo

Hmm...I actually like the idea of DRKs being able to parry magic. While not all that original, it does fit thematically with us being the "anti-magic tank", and it gives us the ability to use Reprisal in fights with no physcal component.

--Erim Nelhah
(Master, Astral Descendants <AD>, Malboro)
(60 DRK Main)