Dear Square-Enix: You Forgot About Buffs to Dark Knight's Off-Tank Utility.

[Brian_]

We go one raid tier and everyone forgets that Dragon Kick was basically mandatory in 2.X progression.

Dude, I understand you have a dog in this fight but saying that RoH is equivalent in value to Delirium is unfiltered stupidity. No sane raider actually thinks that and any educated player knows that Delirium is significantly better.

DV will never, ever mitigate as much damage as Delirium throughout a fight. Even with the reduction in recast, you cannot have it available for every cascade let alone active through every splash, protean, sluice, or whatever. DV mitigates more damage than delirium for a single moment. While they might both fall under raid mitigation, they are used in very different ways. This is why PLD comps will still have a MNK.

The raid leader from Elysium's old team 1 explained it best. In 2.X, people designed progression comps around raid consistency and the ability to deal with any situation. The race was a sprint and having a comp that didn't cover all your bases left you vulnerable. That's the real reason PLD was great and MNK was mandatory. In 3.X, that mentality went out the window because it was all about DPS.

At this point, who knows what 3.2 will bring. Like I said in my original post, 3.X so far has actually forced both tanks to "MT" a great deal. If there is a moment like A4S's 4th leg mortal revolution again that teams cannot survive even with heavily stacked raid mitigation, we might be in a world where teams bring PLD and DRK for Reprisal, Delirium, and DV for maximum raid mitigation. If there is a mechanic like Ravana's Final Liberation dives which you can just straight cheese with two immunities then that might be a thing.

And MT or OT does not matter as long as we're dealing with issues of overall raid balance. You can't pretend MNK doesn't exist because they do. You can't pretend we only have 1 melee DPS comp because we don't. Any discussion about DRK's OT utility has to be done without impacting their overall utility.

[Cynric]

snip

It really depends on what you'd rather have. Delirium is very much replaceable by Dragon Kick, and Reprisal is very much replaceable by Path.

The bigger question goes into the melee comps themselves. Will the Monk buffs be enough to replace a Ninja with one? If you can reliably replace Ninja with Monk then there's no need for Dark Knight at all. Dark Knight doesn't really bring anything special or unique. Especially while being an OT.

And neither Paladin nor DRK can replace a Warrior even if the DPS was brought very close Warrior still wins out in utility.

If you replace Warrior with DRK/PLD you most definitely don't have bases covered and you will probably do far less raidwide damage(your ninja would definitely lose out)

[Syzygian]

snip

You're still failing to make me understand how Delirium alone is considered adequate OT utility. Its a fact that the jobs OT utility is crap compared to the other tanks. It needs a buff. How anyone could argue the contrary, I'm not following.

I heard from patch 3.0-3.15 nothing about DRK OTs other than how bad they were and how they offer no utility. So now that PLD has been buffed, people suddenly don't believe that anymore? Suddenly its utility when OTing is better all better now? How?

And PLD OTs... their DPS was never notably far behind DRK OTs (unlike the MT gap between them, of course)... and due to Clemency getting interrupted while MTing and Cover being more beneficial when directed at another MT, it was not uncommon these past few patches to argue that PLD's utility was better overall while OTing. It brings more to the table, more options, no matter how situational, and none of them are replaceable by a melee DPS.

Sure you can do crap like voking the boss or an add to stick Reprisal up on something, I understand that and I do it all the time, but that's such a cumbersome way to operate. No other tank has to fuck with another tank's aggro or voke something just to have a chance to operate off their max utility.

[Cynric]

You're still failing to make me understand how Delirium alone is considered adequate OT utility. Its a fact that the jobs OT utility is crap compared to the other tanks. It needs a buff. How anyone could argue the contrary, I'm not following.

I heard from patch 3.0-3.15 nothing about DRK OTs other than how bad they were and how they offer no utility. So now that PLD has been buffed, people suddenly don't believe that anymore?

The problem is people aren't considering a couple of factors.

Tanks will do less DPS period. A5+ will be more physical oriented(according to the devs anyway), Monk was just buffed, Mch also received a hefty bonus for any comp not using 2 casters.

DRK/PLD is a definite no no. DRG is still very much amazing, there's also the chances of PLD/WAR/NIN/MNK/DRG/MCH, PLD/WAR/MNK/DRG/MCH/BLMor SMN just outright destroying any comp running DRK just for an Int debuff.

If Warrior wasn't the guaranteed OT this wouldn't be an issue, however that is the case and so, you'd have to decide what is worth more when the content releases. Mitigation or DPS.(DRK/PLD comps will bring neither of these in spades aside from not needing a monk for Int down)

[Brian_]

You're still failing to make me understand how Delirium alone is considered adequate OT utility. Its a fact that the jobs OT utility is crap compared to the other tanks. It needs a buff. How anyone could argue the contrary, I'm not following.

Dragon Kick alone was enough to make MNK mandatory for all of 2.X. That was despite NIN and DRG being higher DPS.

Again, one raid tier was enough to make everyone forget a year+ of raiding meta.

And, one patch is also apparently enough to make everyone forget reality. PLD utility? What utility? DV is their only high impact utility. Stoneskin is good but nobody has ever considered bringing PLD because of Stoneskin. RoH is mediocre because strength down is just not that useful. Clemency is not suddenly good now that it is 1 second faster to cast. Cover has always been very very rarely useful.

On the flip-side, Delirium was the entire reason NIN DRG melee comps became a thing. Delirium caused a job to go from mandatory in progression to being the red-headed stepchild of melee DPS jobs. I would call that pretty damn impactful. Ask all the unemployed or converted MNKs if they think Delirium isn't a big deal.

The reality is again, MT and OT does not matter. The two roles swap constantly in content. What matters is overall raid comp balance. You cannot throw off overall raid balance just to give DRKs more OT utility. If you want to make this argument, then provide an easily implemented and balanced way to increase DRK's OT utility while not impacting overall raid balance. I doubt you can.