If You Were A Class/Job Designer...

[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.