All tanks have lost about 30% of their damage in PvP post 3.2 (estimate)

[Cynric]

snip

It is really terrible. The healing is bad , though the heavy can be good for catching someone in frontlines right after an attunement, or after a stun to finish them off, or to force a purify before full swing. But anything DRK can do the other tanks kind of do better, aside from harass casters to prevent spells.

[Nalien]

I like your idea for Tar Pit ...

Yeah, a ground DoT would work best, though I find the idea of a sort of drain aura very appealing... Not sure there is any precedent for it in game though, would likely be troublesome to implement...

I'd actually be incline to swap the effects on the two PvP skills, too... Heavy on Carnal Chill, reduced damage on Tar Pit. Not sure how balanced that would actually be, but a heal and reduced damage stacks up nicely, where as Heavy is much more useful as a ranged skill, more so with the Sprint changes (if someone is running, and I'm next to them, I'll just Sprint as well...). Possibly turn Carnal Chill into a DoT as well, just to reinforce the Scary Terry approach Dark Knight has in PvP; "You can run but you can't hide, b*tch!". Anyone running does have the chance of getting away, I tend to like DoTs in such situations on the off chance the DoT kills them. The total DoT damage would have to be greater than its current potency, though, else you could just kill them outright with it now... If they see Heavy and a DoT? Perhaps they'll waste Purify and I can Sprint + Plunge + Low Blow.

I think the only other skill I can take issue with is Abyssal Drain. It's not bad in Seize, but Seize has plenty of enemies usually stacking nicely... Feast (especially 4v4) will not, and Abyssal Drain will never be worthwhile over a Grit Souleater. At least not from a numbers perspective. Might have some utility if retreating back to spawn can be a sensible move... MP management might be an issue, but that depends on the length of the matches and the size of the map. The recent Darkside adjustment was great (I don't think I've noticed my MP being drained from Darkside alone since, perhaps I'm crazy but the in combat ranged might have been reduced too?) so I'm not too worried about that, though.

It is really terrible. The healing is bad , though the heavy can be good for catching someone in frontlines right after an attunement, or after a stun to finish them off, or to force a purify before full swing. But anything DRK can do the other tanks kind of do better, aside from harass casters to prevent spells.

I had another look at it last night, and granted this is the base potency/% drain, but ~60HP per person... It's incredibly dumb... Abyssal Drain managed to surprise me with a few 400s, though 200s seem far more common. Well no, 0s are far more common because of Stoneskin/Adlo/etc. Still, they both drop a lot of their utility in Feast, they're only somewhat redeemed in Seize because of the nature of that game. I have more targets and the aim is to push nodes... We can perhaps slow someone picking up medals, but that's about it... Warrior and Paladin can out right knock someone away for the same effect, with an added Stun/buff removal; Much more impressive than the (at best) 480~960 HP Tar Pit can give me.

Mythril Tempest (and Holmgang) has some absolutely amazing medal denial, depending on how long they're up. Glory Slash isn't bad either. Tar Pit just sucks. A Warrior of Paladin can see an ally going down, knock the melee away from them, and hopefully deny those medals. Dark Knight has nothing.

Tar Pit would really function better as a "Welcome to Hell" placement for the Dark Knight to either scare medal grabbers away, or to just kill them for grabbing the medals. Perhaps an additional Full Swing effect on it would even make sense. There is plenty they could do with it, either way though, right now I rank it just above Malmsight in terms of "What even is this?".

[Februs]

Snip

Actually, the idea I had for Carnal Chill was to draina bit of the targets Tp/Mp. Kinda like when you leave a battery in the cold and it loses power. Same concept. If Carnal Chill affected the Target's Tp and Mp, then Drk's would have a means of effectively throwing an attacking force into chaos by screwing with their Mp and Tp draws and forcing them to use recovery items. Drk's would gain tremendous utility against casters, in particular, which makes sense given that they are already kitted towards magic defense (Delirium Blade/Dark Mind). Having a nice method for chasing is good too, but I think that the utility would be a little too stacked in favour of Seize, given that chases don't typically happen all that much in a smaller arena (not too many places to run to, as it were). Further, if Tar Pit was a ground based AoE, there would be nothing to stop Drk's from popping it behind an enemy in anticipation of their retreat, even in a bigger format like Frontlines.

You're right about Abyssal Drain. It's a can of worms. Sadly, I don't think that there's much that they can do to make it more useful in PvP. It's too situational, and the base dmg would have to be jacked immensely to make it viable in small format fights like Feast ... I just don't see that happening.

[Nalien]

You're right about Abyssal Drain. It's a can of worms. Sadly, I don't think that there's much that they can do to make it more useful in PvP. It's too situational, and the base dmg would have to be jacked immensely to make it viable in small format fights like Feast ... I just don't see that happening.

Could they not work it similar to Holy/Gravity/Flare? Reduced potency for each additional target. Then we can technically have a stronger 2~3 person drain, with it leveling out to the same numbers overall on larger groups. Always figured that's just how it should have been for PvE even.

As far as the potency goes, they could always just jack up the % returned. Rather than 100% of damage dealt back as HP, we could have 150% back, for example. Actually, a combination of the two, perhaps? On a single target, you get a larger % back as HP. More targets you add, the less % you get back as HP. It's still a 120 potency on-target AoE, just rather than getting 120 potency heal out of it on a single target, perhaps you're getting 240 out of it, throw in another target and it's a total of 240 potency damage with 360 potency healed. Get to three people hit, and it's 360 potency damage with 360 potency healed, as it is now. IIRC three targets is about where it becomes stronger than Grit Souleater (assuming you're not in Grit for Abyssal, at least).

That said, it doesn't need to be useful in PvP. Plenty of skills aren't, granted most of them are tank/enmity related...

[Februs]

Snip

Could they? Probably, yes. Will they? Not likely.

I'm not getting into any technical numbers, but Abyssal Drain's Hp regeneration actually scales quite well in PvE. It functions beautifully for larger mob pulls, because it's utility is actually in dmg mitigation, not flat out self-healing. SE probably does not want to mess around with this, so any adjustments that they made to it would have to be PvP exclusive. The problem with that is that SE has already proven, time and again, that they are reluctant to make changes that would require separate system storage, citing space requirements and system limitations as their number one excuse (this is also, supposedly, the reason we don't have the ability to store our Action Points separately across multiple jobs). They would likely take the same approach here, exactly because of what you said:

It doesn't need to be useful in PvP. Plenty of skills aren't, granted most of them are tank/enmity related...

This is exactly right. Abyssal Drain is a PvE move designed for enmity and mitigation against a large number of foes. It's specifically used for situations when the tank is standing still and holding the line against multiple targets who are all focused on him/her. Consider when this happens in PvP. Almost never. PvP doesn't work on enmity. Targets move around, there's no organized pulls, and Dps tend to go for the squishy guys before they go for the Tank. The odds of you seeing an entire party of people standing still in the exact same spot so that they can all get hit by AB are astronomical, to say the least. AB just wasn't made for PvP, and SE doesn't really have any particular reason to adjust it so that it functions better in PvP. It would probably be easier for them to adjust Drk's lack luster PvP skills than it would be to adjust PvE skills that don't really have to be used in the first place.

[Vaeria]

Man..really feel for you pvp-career tanks. Pld was crap to begin with (ya..drk too *shrugs*) but to see even teh mighty solo-man 1 army war get dragged down too? That kinda hurts and I dont even touch tankie jobs. Makes me think of the blms and the once mighty flare-bOOm! Sad sad. So I guess this now means: Old war= God/ new war = King, old drk = Yeaah./new drk = ZzZz, old pld = garbage can/new pld = dirt under the garbage can?

Wars were exceedingly fun to fight solo, especially with that rushenroulette FC crit possibility when youre under 50% hp. But now...poo ; ; Hope this doesn't happen to smn too or all the dangerous things will go up in smoke.

But really SE..gimping pld too? iz like...now..not only will they NOT do anything useful over a stun but insteada just not doing damage, their attacks will actually give you hp back! Iz just wrong SE...so wrong ; ;

[xxczx]

pld is crap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0qLLHXikSQ

pld was crap

[Houston009]

Man..really feel for you pvp-career tanks. Pld was crap to begin with

Lol, what? PLD crap? Are we playing the same game?

[Atreus]

because [U]Pld's cannot contribute to dps while stunlocking a target.

They're called oGCDs. Spirits, Circle, even Glory Slash contribute to this.

Once a Pld's stuns are resisted, they are resisted forever. They can not stun that target again unless they die.

Uh no. Resistance lasts 60 seconds from the last successful use for every single CC.

I usually ignore the nonsense you spew, but what..? I gotta hand it to you for your essays, but you need to fact check some more.

[Februs]

Snip

You might try reading the entire thing before you arbitrarily decide you have a clue what we were talking about. Firstly, the first quote that you're taking out of context was referring directly to War's ability to upkeep their primary Dps (Butcher's Block, Fell Cleaves, etc) while having a target stun locked. Yes, Pld's have a couple oGCD's, but they in no way compare to what a War can do in the same situation. Now, before you get all antsy over that, you should also keep in mind that I never said that Pld was somehow bad or worse off than War in PvP. We were actually talking about comparative utility, which a lot of people seem to think that War's fall way behind on ... which they don't.

As for your second out of context quote, congratulations! You just pitched in on something we cleared up several posts ago, and contributed absolutely nothing to the conversation. If you had cared to follow the discussion, you might have noticed that someone already mentioned the 60 second timer, which both I and Cynric already admitted that we could not remember the exact time for. So, what's your point? Pld's still get resisted for a large chunk of time, and see diminished returns for consecutive stuns, even after resist falls off (if the target happens to live that long). I'm pretty sure we cleared that up a while back, along with a pretty solid comparison of how war's stuns compare.