DRK major ideas to increase synergy

[Rhaja]

Only change I want to see to Unleash is expand on it's in game trait. I'd like for it to have a chance to proc off any weapon skill or ability, giving it more up time in addition to its current use. The reason would be for a natural TP regain while MTing without sapping MP.

But that would also be ridiculous =P

Edit: I love Acclamation btw

[Ercapote]

am I the only one who loves the class the way it is? seriously I don't know what's up with this winning about "synergy" wtf is that? I feel people are using this word without knowing what it really means. if you have problem playing this class then "git gud" is fairly well balance on DEFENCE and DPS making it perfect for the meta of this game along side WAR and clearly not even close to bad as pld are atm. want to increase the synergy of the class? learn how to play properly.

[Syzygian]

Responses in red.

At the moment, the Dark Knight toolkit feels very chaotic/random and some spells/abilities are very counterproductive to each other. My goal with the major ideas I am suggesting is to ultimately synergize the DRK toolkit without taking away the uniqueness and fun of the job. This is not meant to be a buff/nerf (though it might seem that way).

So I main DRK, and I'm currently progressing on A3S. I did not switch to PLD for A2S, and have several weeks of clears of A1S under my belt. As raiding, like it or not, is the best gauge of how a job plays efficiently, I have no problem saying that I disagree with all of this. All of the perceived counterproductiveness/lack of synergy results from improper usage in the context of the content you are in/the boss you're fighting.

Spells/Abilities:

Unleash
- Removed

Abyssal Drain
- Now acquired at level 8
- Potency decreased to 100
- Mana cost reduced to match the cost of Unleash
- Dark Arts effect remains unchanged
- Abysall Drain no longer breaks your combos

Before I go any further allow me to explain this change. While I do acknowledge that each spell can have their own advantages/disadvantages, the function of both spells are just too similar. Additionally, unleash is basically a copy of PLD flash but with damage and no blind effect. The goal is to make each tank feel like they have their own AOE ability that work differently enough but serve the same purpose. PLD = Flash, WAR = Overpower, DRK = Abyssal Drain.

Respectfully, no. Abyssal Drain and Unleashed have only two similarities: they deal damage in an AoE and generate the same amount of enmity on those targets (the former 120 at 5x and the latter 100 at 6x). Their advantages and disadvantages to eachother are something you gloss over here and have a huge effect on how you use these abilities effectively in content. Its like saying DRG's shouldn't have Ring of Thorns and Doomspike, or shouldn't have Doomspike and Geirskogul. If you look at other jobs many have abilities that are very similar but differ widely in their usage.

In the context of an initial pull, Abyssal Drain works more like an Unmend that you can tag several targets with it provided they're in range. In this same context, Unleashed works all around you and requires no target, so if you pull a lone mob with Unmend and get a proc, you can tag several more as you run past them for no MP cost. The abilities all work together and also in unison with Plunge, which allows you to Unmend/AD a mob/mobs and then Plunge to a lone other one that is farther away as you approach, gaining ground on your DPS and allowing you to get an even greater lead on them, thus empowering them to not have to worry about hate. Having this flexibility and varied toolkit in pulling and initial positioning is one of the perks of this job and I would not remove it.

In the context of the pull having settled into place and positioning have been taken care of, Abyssal Drain is your burst. It is more damage attached to the same hate. In a large pull of 4-8 targets Blood Price will give you MP faster than AD can use it. You spam AD and weave in oGCDs in between. The ability to DA Abyssal Drain enables your healer to continue DPSing as the full force of the trash you pulled begins to whittle you down. Now, Unleashed is altogether different. It costs less MP and doesn't interrupt your combos, meaning after your AD burst, as you're rotating through your non-Power Slash combos (and thus doing good DPS with your non-enmity abilities) you can work in Unleashed to maintenance your enmity for a lower MP cost if necessary, just like PLD does, except unlike PLD with Flash or even a WAR using Flash in the same fashion to avoid having to burn TP for Overpower, you're doing damage. This entire strategic apparatus makes pulling and positioning on DRK more of an art than a science and I don't feel that there is anything redundant or counterproductive about this. On the contrary, it gives you options, and when you have options, you have more ways to succeed, to say nothing of the fact that this fundamentally allows DRK to differ from PLD and WAR in the way it pulls and positions targets in an AoE scenario.



Unmend
- Removed Additional Effect(Trait): 30% chance that next Unleash will cost no MP.
- Added Additional Effect: Causes your next Plunge to deal damage in an AOE equal to 50% of the damage done to the intial target. Increased enmity. Duration: 10s

This idea is to make Plunge feel more interesting while additionally preserving the Unleash animation. Basically when the Dark Knight plunges, the moment he/she lands the ground animation for Unleash will show and cause AOE damage around the target. The initial target will receive the original damage of 200 potency while each additional target will receive damage equal to 100 potency.

See the above. Plunge has its own place. Unmend+Plunge is effectively a doubling of your lead on enmity in the first GCD, factoring in the damage and the closing of the gap, making DPS burst rotations less of a threat. Aside from being more off-GCD DPS on boss fights its another pulling tool that you have and another utility. Gap closers on DPS have always been huge benefits and for a tank to be able to enjoy this in addition to a massive and productive AoE toolkit is a terrific benefit and unique design of the job.

New Ability: Acclimation
- Acquired at level 56
- Grants the effect of Acclimation for 12 seconds. While under the effect of Acclimation, potency will be generated equal to a percentage of mana spent through spells and abilities. When the effect ends, erects a magicked barrier which nullifies damage equal to the amount of potency accumulated. Maximum potency: 1200. Cooldown: 90s

As necessary as it is to avoid homogenization, DRK should have their own method of survivability equivalent to Equilibrium and Clemency. While not a heal, Acclimation serves the same purpose in the form of a damage barrier.

I actually wouldn't mind this. However, with DA Souleater being such a frequent and potent self-heal on its own, useable far more often than any of the other tanks' self-heals, and being more potent than an Embrace from Eos (There are dungeon bosses where you can literally solo-heal yourself with this ability and never need anything not even a regen from your healer), I don't think that its necessary at all, at least not right now. But maybe in 4.0, yeah, this would be cool.

Reprisal
- No longer requires a parried attack to activate
- Parried attacks will lower the current cooldown of Reprisal by 3 seconds
- Potency reduced to 170

This allows for the damage reduction provided by Reprisal to be more consistent. There is nothing wrong with RNG based gameplay. It can be fun and rewarding at times. However, when playing as a tank stabilizing the amount of damage you take provides less stress on your party's healers and allows for less surprises. Playing from the perspective of all three roles, I understand the importance of mana management as a healer and it helps when the amount of damage taken by the tank has some predictability.

I think that out of all the arguments to change Reprisal this is the most intelligent, but I still don't agree with it. Reprisal is not meant to be something that your healers anticipate or account for any more than you Parrying. There's a reason it stacks with WAR's Path, because its a fundamentally different ability, and if anything, its used in a fashion much more akin to Inner Beast, except you can apply it (forcing a proc with Dark Dance if necessary) before raid-wide nukes as well as tank busters. The fact that it has a maximum of 66% uptime is fine when you consider that it already has 100% uptime on Delirium, if you gave a tank Storm's Path and Dragon Kick with 100% uptime that would be a little ridiculous. Delirium is DRK's Storm's Path, and Reprisal is DRK's Inner Beast. It just lasts longer and is raidwide at the expense of potency. To say nothing of the fact that its a 210 potency attack that is off the GCD. The fact that it procs on parry is not an issue as it is easy to trigger this with DD, which is not really a CD that you need to save for anything, so popping it for this purpose is not some huge opportunity cost as some others have argued. its 20% duration tied with its 30s cooldown is a balance issue. It would be extremely OP to essentially give DRK Path (off the GCD and not tied to a combo, by the way), AND Dragon Kick. I'm fine with them as they are and I say leave it be. On a side note, stabilizing damage you take and minimizing stress on healers are HARDLY themes of this raid tier's tanking methodology, for better or for worse.

Living Dead
- Living Dead component remains unchanged
- Walking Dead component reworked: While under the effect of Walking Dead, you will be brought to 5% of your maximum hp and all damage is reduced by 99%. Walking Dead Duration: 5s

This is another change that is meant to be more party/healer friendly as well as make the ability feel more reliable. In high intensity fights, Living Dead is extremely stressful on healers as they have to make sure to heal you for an amount equal to your max hp. This could force your healers to use their more mana intensive abilities just to keep you alive, and until they have reached the healing threshold they pretty much have to focus on healing you and nobody else.

Living Dead is something I use so infrequently that any change people want to make to it really makes no nevermind to me so I really don't have an opinion here. Any time I do use it, the healers know that its coming, or are already focus healing me, so its not something that ever comes out of left field.

New DRK exclusive debuff: Crazed

Crazed
- Targets affected by Crazed have their auto-attack speed increased by 100% while decreasing their auto-attack damage by 50%.
- Does not work on bosses and certain mobs.

Crazed increases the amount of incoming auto-attacks but decreases the amount of damage those attacks do. Potency of spells/abilities are not affected. Damage taken by the Dark Knight will mostly remain the same but allows for more opportunities to parry foes, which is one of the Dark Knight's most important form of mitigation, providing quicker reprisals and low blows.

My fundamental issue with this is that it excuses DRK from learning the fight in the context of intelligent usage of their abilities, in the same vein that a DRG has to learn a fight to figure out how many Geirskoguls they can drop and when, for example. If a boss isn't hitting you enough in a certain phase, don't pop BP, or better yet, just drop Grit and use BW to get the MP back instead, after all, if the boss isn't hitting you enough, why even have Grit up? Or, if you know that a boss autoattacks infrequently, adjust your MP and combo usage accordingly. Note that in terms of DPS, a WAR suffers in a similar fashion as Vengeance will not trigger as often for extra damage/self-heals. Will this make your DPS ceiling lower in some fights than in others? Sure. But lots of jobs have to deal with things like that. How do you think BLMs and BRDs feel right now about movement heavy fights? Obviously you always keep BP on cooldown but its your job to know just how ham this allows you to go, and there's a cap to how ham you can go regardless if you're being responsible and keeping Delirium/Scourge up in between all your DA SE spam. This entire mechanic that you're suggesting of controlling boss autoattacks through a "debuff" feels even more chaotic, as this also gives things like E4E more chances to trigger, but also more chances for you to be critically hit, etc. It could also be a bit more OP because although people like to downplay boss autos, they can crit from 4.5-11.5K in savage at the moment, and this allows you to nerf spike damage like that considerably and make it much more manageable as it is happening over a longer period of time. This would give DRK huge favor with healers as they would essentially never incur any meaningful spike damage outside of a TB.

Spells/Abilities/Traits that utilize Crazed:

Dark Passenger
- Removed Dark Arts Effect: Blind
- Replaced with Dark Arts Effect: Crazed. Duration: 10s

Dark Dance
- Removed Dark Arts Effect: Evasion
- Replaced with Dark Arts Effect: Any damage parried while under the effect of Dark Dance will apply Crazed to the parried target. Duration: 10s


Enhanced Unmend
- No longer reduces the mana cost of unleash (since unleash has been removed)
- Now causes unmend to apply the crazed debuff to the target. Duration: 10s

Evasion and Blind while useful, are completely counterproductive to DRK. Parry is your most useful defensive. As such, it is important for Dark to get as many opportunities to parry as possible.

Sigh... No... Understand that blind and evasion are useless anyway in boss fights, so it should be an issue there, but in dungeons, you're meant to use the DA effects of these abilities after BP wears off. Again, intelligent usage and timing of abilities. The evasion and blind in those scenarios provides insane mitigation. I've had to say this to a lot of people but I'll say it again: Just because abilities like BP and DA DD/DP can be counterproductive together when you use them incorrectly does not mean that the job does not have ability synergy. It means people are not playing the job properly. And yes, parry is very useful for DRK. But you parry often enough especially with DD, as it is, regardless of how much mitigation people think they are or are not getting from those parries, to have Reprisal almost any time you could want it. And frankly, 10% is icing on the cake, not the difference between life and death, 99% of the time, as you should be popping actual cooldowns to mitigate damage as well.

Feedback

Please think about concepts and not numbers. Numbers can always be adjusted.
What did you think?
What did you like?
What did you not like?

I think your heart's in the right place, and some of these all-new mechanics might work in the future, but not now. DRK is just a tank that requires a lot more active thought into your abilities' interactions with eachother and resource management as opposed to the other two tanks which, for the most part, just worry about DPS and burst mitigation. All the new expac jobs are meant to have much higher skill ceilings than the others, and this is all part of that. I would not change anything about DRK. If they got buffs, that'd be cool, but I'm not craving them, and I'm certainly not craving new abilities or complete reworking of the abilities they have, especially not so soon after the expac. I dunno. I feel like I could talk to the person who designed this job and say to them, "I get it." it saddens me that so much of the playerbase can't say the same.

[AeraCross]

Responses in red.

Thank you for taking the time to write out such a well thought out reply. I'd say you've definitely opened my eyes to a few things I hadn't seen before. It's gotten me to really rethink some if my ideas, which I dont see as bad thing at all; it helps me to learn and understand more. Much appreciated.

[Disc]

am I the only one who loves the class the way it is?

I'm with you for the most part. The only thing I have to complain about is how random Reprisal procs can be.

[Ercapote]

I'm with you for the most part. The only thing I have to complain about is how random Reprisal procs can be.

can't remember the name of the ability but as random as it's you can control this by popping the ability that I can't remember the name that increase your parry, giving you a fairly well chance to make it proc and use it on the right moment, and you have to be really out of luck to not get a proc with this on... anyways like I said it's all about how to use the class... which at it's current state it's as optimal as it gets...

[Ercapote]

Responses in red.

AMEN! you are the man more clear people can't get it, I wish the rest read this and realize that DRK is an amazing tank.

[Disc]

can't remember the name of the ability but as random as it's you can control this by popping the ability that I can't remember the name that increase your parry, giving you a fairly well chance to make it proc and use it on the right moment, and you have to be really out of luck to not get a proc with this on... anyways like I said it's all about how to use the class... which at it's current state it's as optimal as it gets...

Dark Dance. I still lose out on it every 1 out of 10 hand cleaves in A3S because it just doesn't proc. But yeah, other than bad luck it's in a pretty good place.

[Freyyy]

The only current issue about DRK IMO lies in Reprisal and the fact that it forces DRK into the MT spot, thus rendering PLD/DRK comps pretty bad except if you plan on letting the DRK MT and PLD OT (and even like that it's not optimal). I think at least one of these two tanks should get the slashing debuff (Why not PLD ?), and Reprisal should have a way to be applied while OTing even if it's still only 66% uptime like it is now. This would make PLD/DRK comps much more viable. Currently, Storm's Eye and Storm's Path almost forces to have a WAR in your party, and Reprisal forces the DRK to be the MT, thus rendering DRK/WAR super-optimal compared to any other tank comp.

[Starkbeaumont]

Responses in red.

In dungeons DA Passenger/Dance still don't work very well with blood price. while your example how to make effective use of those abilities is good, it still shows the flaw in it. If you use DA passenger/dance after blood price wears off, the fight is likely close to be done soon anyway, while you are left with little mp for the next pull... those missed hits don't really benefit the group at this point. having account all hits during BP no matter hit or miss, would be a nice change.

Also a general note about Reprisal: it's not meant to be another storm's path. it is basically a DRK's shield though. in comparison to PLD it only works on single target mobs, but is probably stronger than the shield in this case. PLD's shield doesn't work OT, same for Reprisal.