If You Were A Class/Job Designer...

[Sousoulsu]

DRK:

Expanding on Dark Arts
Dark Arts is a core mechanic for DRK, but too few abilities are affected by it; and none are really affected by it in interesting ways.

This is less of a new mechanic / redesign, and more of a collection of interconnected ideas to help make the decisions you make with Dark Arts more interesting; as well as to add an iconic DRK ability

-Dark Arts Delirium: Raises potency to 400 (equal to current Dark Arts Souleater)
-Dark Arts Souleater: Increases life-siphon effect to 200%; as well as granting 100% of damage dealt as a shadowy barrier (absorption shield); regardless of whether or not you are in Grit.
-Dark Arts Unleash: Causes affected targets to be unable to crit for 12s.
-Dark Arts Salted Earth: All targets who take damage from Salted Earth are also immobilized for 3s; which does not break upon taking damage (keep targets in position).

Aside from adding/changing Dark Arts effects; I'd like to see a few Dark Arts effects being different, rather strictly better than their non-DA effects:

-Dark Arts Shadowskin: Reduces duration to 10s, but increases damage reduction to 30%.
-Dark Arts Shadow Wall: Increases damage reduction to 40%; but increases cooldown-time to 240s (up from 180s).
-Dark Arts Dark Dance: Removes 30% Parry and 20% Evasion; but grants you 50% Evasion which only functions with Magic.
Dark Dance: 30% Parry, 20% Evasion by default.
-Dark Arts Dark Mind: Instead of reducing Magic Vulnerability; causes all Magic damage you take to recover your MP.

New Ability: Darkness
-Can not have Grit active
-Requires Darkside

-Press this ability to begin a 10s cast; and press the ability again to stop the cast and execute the ability
-Damage done is based on how long you let the cast go through
-You also take 20% of the damage you deal with this ability.
-In addition to taking 20% of the ability's base damage; the abiltiy also drains all but 10% of your MP; and uses this MP drained to increase the damage done by this ability.
-Damage taken is reduced by 60% if you are under the effects of Shadow Barrier (Dark Arts Souleater); regardless of the Barrier's strength.

Alternative method to cleansing Walking Dead:
-If you use Dark Arts Souleater with Walking Dead active, the amount of life siphoned and damage absorbed is increased to 300% and 150% respectively; and cleanses Walking Dead.

Reasoning
DRK is an overall well-designed class, but its Dark Arts mechanic isnt as interesting as it could be. The variability with its cooldowns using Dark Arts to augment their duration, strength, and cooldown would make the choice between using Dark Arts and not using it not as clear-cut.

As it is, you do not want to use Dark Dance or Dark Mind at all unless it's Dark Arts; which is not very interesting.
With the change to Dark Dance, you would essentially be choosing between 30% parry and 20% evasion; to converting the cooldown to a Magic-reduction cooldown.

The use of Darkness would be to deal higher damage during extended periods where you do not need to do damage, and Blood Weapon is down. It is essentially a "Filler" in your DPS rotation once Scourge is up, The enemy is affected by Delirium, and you've expended the effects of Blood Weapon.
You should deal 1.2x more damage by using Darkness than you would do by just spamming a potency combo.
This would relegate Dark Arts Delerium to a potency combo in Grit.

A lot of these are rather sweeping changes. I am not a meowthematician; but just take from these ideas the idea behind them, not the exact implementation. 'w'

[Sousoulsu]

WAR

WAR is the design standard that PLD and DRK should be up to. They have an alternative resource to manage which is non-binary in its usages, it has active mitigation in holding Wrath stacks and Inner Beast, and some of its defensive cooldowns also add to its alternative resource.

Its Defensive and Offensive resources are shared, so since it can fluidly swap between these, it can DPS in Deliverance while still building stacks for defense in Defiance.
If also is one of the rare examples in XIV of one ability having two uses depending on the state you are in (Equilibrium).

There are decisions to make with WAR, and that makes for an interesting and engaging job.
The only thing I would say about WAR's design is that PLD, DRK, and any future tank classes should be designed to have as many moving parts and options as WAR has.

Bring PLD and DRK up; do not bring WAR down.

[JackFross]

DRK:
A lot of these are rather sweeping changes. I am not a meowthematician; but just take from these ideas the idea behind them, not the exact implementation. 'w'

A lot of this is interesting, but you're kind of glossing over every major issue with the Job in favor of trying to strengthen the strongest part of the Job as it currently exists.

Dark Arts working the way it does is very good - implementing it to augment essentially all of your skills would just add way too much glut to a class that's already incredibly complex.

The Darkness attack has several glaring issues:
1. It would be impossible to balance. The mana expenditure directly leading to damage dealt will lead to a skill that will either be insanely overpowered or completely worthless, and nothing in-between. If it's just "good" - no one will use it, since you get far more benefit out of using your mana for other utility things and your main damage combos.
2. In the case of where it's "good" and deals "1.2x" the amount you'd do with a combo in that time, you could run into some pretty serious health issues when acting as the Main Tank if you use the skill. It also would cause severe mana issues in that position, the likes of which you'll more than likely end up wasting a Carve and Spit on to dig yourself out.
3. The mana loss will just flat out -never- be worth it, especially with the changes/modifications to Dark Arts you suggest in this post.
4. And most importantly - it would need to replace an existing skill, and there is not a single current skill that I would want to lose.


So, I'll expand on what I mean by the "issues" with Dark Knight that you seem to be missing:
Several skills in the Dark Knight kit do not mesh -at all- with one another.

Dark Dance is best utilized in mass pulls. Boosting the parry chance is most noticeable when you have a shitload of damage flowing in. Dark Arts + Dark Dance completely flies opposite to this idea, in that it no longer meshes with what Dark Knight should be using first in a mass pull - Blood Price. You could wait for BP to drop before doing DA+DD, however at this time, you really shouldn't be SPENDING mana, but rather refilling it to fuel your next run of BP-AD spam.

Dark Passenger is the best AoE skill that Dark Knight has, especially when you Dark Arts it. However, Dark Arts + Dark Passenger is an INSANE Mana expense, best used while under the effect of Blood Price --- oh wait, but it blinds the enemies. :|

And then having two skills which like parries while having no significant parry skills.

Dark Dance is 30%. DA+DD makes that lower because you dodge before you parry and the parry rate isn't increased.


The Dev team has specifically stated that the reason Darkside and Dark Arts work off Mana rather than Health is because Dark Knight is a tank. You can't have a tank who is freely shifting health up and down. It trivializes healers - all you'd need to do is stop spending Health and just use the plethora of Health regen you would undoubtedly have and suddenly you would become literally invincible.

We don't need to spend health to deal damage to be Dark Knights. I know I'm in the minority in saying that.

Like, yeah. Dark Knight needs more ways to spend Dark Arts for interesting tanky reasons, rather than them all being all offense all the time as it is in the current meta. I suggested things like this in the post I made about changes to the Tanks:

1. Dark Dance - Dark Arts+Dark Dance should increase the Parry rate from 30% to something more like 60-70%, instead of increasing dodge chance.

2. Dark Passenger - Dark Arts+Dark Passenger should deal 250 potency and inflict damage reduction - effect identical to and cannot stack with Storm's Path.

Some of the other ones are silly, now having played 3.2 DRK pretty extensively. TP issues don't exist anymore sooo... yeah.
I would also suggest that DA+DD should actually just be 100% parry because, seriously, why not? Low Blow procs? Why are we not allowed to use Dark Arts for mitigation while also getting some offensive benefit out of it? I dunno, seems silly to me, but maybe I'm just weird. With this sort of change, I wouldn't even be mad if DD was suddenly a 90s cd, so long as that base 30% went up to like 40-50%.

I also think Grit (or Greatswords) needs to have a built in Parry chance buff. Could just make it built into the Parry stat - while in Grit, your Parry increases by 50% or something. Give DRK a reason to stack Parry - make it scale better on us. :\




tl;dr: The main issue with DRK is they're built around WANTING TO BE HIT and then are given skills that clash with this ideal by bolstering dodge chance and inflicting blind at the expense of their main resource.

[Shurrikhan]

tl;dr: The main issue with DRK is they're built around WANTING TO BE HIT and then are given skills that clash with this ideal by bolstering dodge chance and inflicting blind at the expense of their main resource.

Ever since I decided to level DRK to 60, for exactly these reasons I've been asking that either DA-DD 1) nearly guarantee parry, instead of adding further dodge, 2) the dodge component stacks with the original parry bonus (perhaps adjusted 40/15% or so, to make the DA cost -> miti a bit less OP) or 3) [my favorite], Blood Price is changed to 'per attack attempted against you', and Low Blow and Reprisal become triggerable by dodges. Most times I bring the idea up though, I'm told I'm just making the job too easy. I just saw it as making a toolkit make sense and a bit more flexible, rather than locking a BP opener into normal DP, SW, and maybe a few DA-ADs. /shrug

[Syzygian]

snip

In AoE situations most DRKs let up on their AD spam about 1-2 GCDs before BP is gonna fall so they will be topped off on MP. From there its just HS (DA) SS (DD) DE (Awareness/Foresight or something) HS (DA) SS (DP) DE - and you still have about half your mana left and you're dodging left and right. You still get off the big DADP hits you just wait slightly until you're not gonna be losing BP returns from it. And honestly if you really must have all of your AoE lumped very nicely together, you could just weave your DADP into the tail-end of your AD spam.

The "why do I have abilities the let me dodge when I wanna be hit/parry stuff" grievance is as old as the expansion, but good players that main DRK have long-since worked around it, with fantastic results in the context in which it matters (dungeons/trash). Its just a matter of using your abilities efficiently and its fallacious to consider it a design flaw IMO. I could see the argument if BP was a persistent buff, but it isn't - you have 25 seconds of downtime in which DRK doesn't care if it is hit or not.

And yes, if you're dodging you'll see fewer LB/Reprisal procs, but remember the context we're discussing - AoE/trash/dungeons. Whether or not you get to poke 1-2 mobs out of 8-9 with LB or Reprisal is pretty moot, and the sheer math of the scenario suggests that even if you're dodging, with that many mobs hitting you, you'll still get procs. If this were a boss, yeah, that would suck. But you can't dodge bosses until you severely overgear them.

There are things about DRK I'd like to see improved on but the dodge/parry/proc/blood price mechanics have never really bothered me, nor has holding back on the crazy evasion CDs until BP has fallen. There's countless instances of jobs holding off on certain CDs or abilities for an opportune moment or point in their rotation, so its nothing new.

[JackFross]

Stuff about DADD/DADP

Yeah, I'm aware of how to properly use them, and I usually do use them that way, I just feel they took two routes with DRK and couldn't decide which one was better.

It's like they built it as a parry tank (Low Blow resets, Reprisal, Dark Dance) and then, late in development, someone suggested maybe making it an evasion tank instead, so they added on some additional evasion skills for no real reason other than "why not?"

It's just disjointed and fractured, when you look at it from the outside. Sure, they can be used well if you understand them and apply them right, but I just think it's a little... stilted? Not handled correctly? Dark Arts could be an incredibly varied cooldown. Instead, it's used -solely- for offense in quite literally all raid content in the game, except for the incredibly rare (also borderline nonexistent) moments when DA+DM is actually worthwhile. Its options outside of Souleater and Carve and Spit are limited and not very impressive in the light of 22000+ maximum health and bosses who are immune to Blind and who have 100% hit rates, regardless of your dodge rate.

Maybe I'm just jaded, but it feels like they went all over the map with making Dark Knight's kit. It's NOT synergenic - skills do NOT compliment one another. It's the "magic tank" because Delirium and Dark Mind, but also tries to be the "parry tank" because it's packing dark dance and parry synergy. All of this couples with it being far and away the squishiest of all three tanks in normal situations (WAR packs buffer health and has an on-demand 20% damage mitigation, PLD packs 20% base mitigation and a shield and an on-demand auto-block, DRK packs... 20% base mitigation.) to make me feel like something was lost in translation when designing the Job.

That's not to say it underperforms OR that any of the mentioned skills are useless - it's just saying that the Job feels disharmonious.

WAR is the damage tank - they can shit out an incredible amount of damage in a short period of time.

PLD is the heavy tank - they take the least damage in most circumstances and are just generally bulkier than the others.

DRK is the other tank - it just kind of exists as a third option. Fun as shit to play, but it doesn't have a niche. And, imo, that's a problem.

[Duelle]

DRK's niche is nonexistant. I think a good niche would be selfhealing with damage-shields at key moments. My Souleater redesign would allow for damage smoothing; and their cooldowns being changed to something less potent to compensate for Dark Arts Souleater; while being able to be augmented by Dark Arts to be made different (not just strictly better) would, to me, be a much more interesting design than "Dark PLD". Play into their MP management. Make MP management be a huge part of their mitigation. Something like your Dark Passenger suggestion is great; a huge MP sink to mitigate damage.

Any changes to DRK's mitigation focus would pretty much call for a redesign of the job. Granted, I don't think that's a bad thing, but as I suggested in my write up a couple of pages back, it would also require a redesign of WAR because WAR has the drains and self heals that would be characteristic to DRK.

Assuming it were to get a focus on drains and damage shield, DRK should take drains in a direction beyond "hits mob to recover HP", and regardless of what they do I'd like to see it get something similar to my suggested Dread Spike.

give PLD a defensive resource in 4.0.

PLD is actually very solidly designed, and doesn't really need much of anything as is. Adding more buttons for the sake of adding more buttons to push is not going to help the job nor make it fun.

[JackFross]

Because it is a mechanic. You can heal for more; probably way more then your taking away depending on how you play. Warrior will never be replaced right now because hes decreasing the damage of the entire raid by 10%; which far outweighs even Dark Knight's healing if it was increased by 500%.

Right now Warriors out heal Dark Knight's and Out Damage them. So... yeah. *shrugs*

I dunno how you fail to see that you just supported all of my points in that first statement.
And, Warrior has leech, but also doesn't spend its health to deal damage.
Storm's Path is also really not used nearly as often or to as great effect as everyone seems to think it is...

Then don't call it one then.

I can get behind the whole "It shouldn't be Dark Knight if it's not gonna be Health management" thing, to some extent. I'm one of the few who sees the Dark Knight as primarily based in its flavor/aesthetic than the whole spending health to deal damage aspect. In that regard, it's spot-on.

I resent the implication that it's "poorly-designed" though. It's anything but that. Its kit has incredible synergy (with a few key holes I outlined earlier in this thread) and it has the most engaging, fluid combat system out of all three tanks. It's incredibly fun to play and incredibly challenging to play well.

I won't deny that the mitigation toolkit of DRK leaves a LOT to be desired - they have nothing truly unique to themselves that's worth a damn save the best magical defensive cooldown in the game (which, imo, isn't really good enough to differentiate them). That's certainly an issue, and a lifesteal modification to the Job would potentially fix that, unless it fell into the trap of 2.0 WAR - which was the lifesteal/self-heal tank. It was so bad that PLD/PLD was favored, since WAR brought literally nothing of worth to the table. Then they added mitigation to Vengeance and Inner Beast - which used to be literally just a counter-attack cooldown and a 300% heal based on damage dealt.

So, while I agree that lifesteal would be neat, they've tried it before and failed fantastically. I'm not surprised they didn't try again.

I agree pretty much entirely with this and your prior post; but let me just defend my pitch of the Darkness ability

Yeah, I got that out of what you said, re: Darkness. It doesn't change my arguments against it. If it costs almost your entire mana bar, it needs to be more MP efficient than 4-5 DA+SE in a row, since that's what you get out of a full mana bar if you drain it normally. Also important to note is that, if you're playing the Job correctly, your Mana will NOT be full after Blood Weapon runs out. So, as I said, the skill would need to either be INSANELY potent, or it would be a complete waste of mana. It has a long charge time, uses all of my remaining mana (while I have a skill on a 30s cooldown that uses mana and another on 60s that needs mana when it's ready), and also spends some health (possibly mitigated by a self-shield) in order to deliver a single attack.

I just don't think that meshes well -at all- with the Dark Knight's current toolkit, especially if you're gonna then inject even more uses for Dark Arts into it.

Everything else you said is directly in line with what I feel regarding Dark Knight's current status.

However, I play both DRK (on my main) and PLD (on my alt) and enjoy both immensely. My only complaint for PLD is the decided lack of AoE damage. There's absolutely nothing else about their kit that I would feel is a pressing concern to change, aside from potentially adding something along the lines of a TP restoration skill. Their mitigation kit is deep and powerful, their offensive skills are simple and not very difficult to properly manage (which is a hallmark of the Job, and not something I would see fit to change drastically) and I think the changes they did in 3.2 did more than enough to fix the vast majority of other issues they had.