Quote Originally Posted by MiniPrinny View Post
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Speaking of their capabilities, Dark Knights, due to their weird mix of magical and physical damage need a total of at least five other Jobs to maximize their own damage output. Those five being Ninja, Bard, Machinist, Dragoon, and Monk. Going down the list, Ninjas are required not only for the slashing debuff provided by Dancing Edge and overall boost from Trick Attack, but also Shadewalker, which allows the tanking Dark Knight to have more leniency in removing Grit. Bards offer Foe Requium and, while I do not suggest this, Rain of Death to grant the Dark Knight not just more damage, but also free up their accuracy requirement a bit. Machinists offers the Rook Autoturret's Hypercharge, which increases their considerable physical damage output as well as the rest of the team's. Dragoons offers Battle Litany, an ability that has made the Job invaluable in any composition. And finally the irony of Monks, while not doing anything directly to boost the Dark Knight's damage, they free up innumerable Souleaters over the duration of a fight, Souleaters that would have been Delirium under different circumstances.

Now, this team could only exist in single-tank encounters, which there are extremely few of in Heavensward, as well as an encounter that would not require heavy magic damage supplied by having at least a single caster. In addition, this is more than any other Job in the game. Every other Job is either exceptionally self-reliant in comparison, or offers more to the party than what they take. Dark Knight is neither, it takes, and gives very little in return, and what it can give, it would rather not. So, while yes, Darkside gives an illusion of being independent, Dark Knights are heavily reliant on the situation at hand as well as possessing the right party composition, a composition that is also very awkward to maximize their output. This is a problem, a huge, disgusting problem that will slaughter the Job in the long run should their skill set remain unchanged.
While most of your post is reasonable; these 'job requirements' are really superfluous.

In particular the MNK argument. You don't really stop rotating Delirium in a standard DRK rotation because you cannot maintain permanent DASE. Even if you argue in niche situations where a MNK would throw it on a newly spawned add instead of you, it really doesn't mean squat because generally adds don't do any threatening magic damage that would require the 10% to be rotated in, and you would rotate it yourself otherwise as the aforementioned inability to maintain perma DASE. This is a marginal and completely niche situation. Delirium has such an extensive uptime, it really doesn't mean squat if it drops for a 3-5 seconds, because more often than not, you'll have it up again because DE > SE.

Thus it really boils down to 'four' jobs that aid in DRK's upper performance in a broader spectrum.
Bard? Foe Requiem at best applies to what... Dark Passenger. Sometimes even. This marginal gain is again, almost equivalent to a War 'needing' a Bard for Warden's Paen.
AoE Situation? You are always going to have a BRD for every AoE situation simply because Casters are flat out > than Phys here, and no physical orientated debuff can be conveniently applied to everything without sacrifice in massive potency loss that would've came from natural AoE GCD.

Three.

Battle Litany, Trick Attack, and Rook Hyper charge. All of which apply to WAR and PLD equally, and all of NIN's utilities are effective on all tanks. You can argue Shadewalker does indeed benefit DRK and mostly PLD more, but again, marginal gain in the grand scheme.

So really, the only janky thing is that you would actually want a NIN DRG BRD MCH to fully feed the DRK parse, and as far as I can tell, that's feasible when everyone has everything on farm. Even then, the BRD is going to be replaced with a MNK because it's own personal DPS outstrips the tiny 15-30pot you would get for a Foe'd Dark Passenger that happens... every 2 minutes?