DRK balance

[Nalien]

I have a few gripes with Dark Knight at this point;

MP management - This was fine before the last update, but now with Dark Arts on a 3 second cooldown, you can fit a few more things in (a Dark Arts Dark Passenger for example) which increase MP drain. Could do with either some stronger MP recovery, or lower Dark Arts cost at this point.

Evasion - Dark Arts Dark Dance + Dark Arts Dark Passenger is a great evasion combo. Unfortunately, Dark Knight isn't built around evasion. Blood Price requires you to take a hit, but that's fine, you can time Blood Price when Dark Dance and Dark Passenger are on cooldown. Reprisal and Low Blows, however, require a parry, not a dodge. I feel like they should also trigger from dodges, given we have such a strong evasion combo...

Blood Price - Like I said, requires you to take a hit to restore MP. You can avoid using it with the aforementioned combo, but sometimes you'll evade hits anyway... I'd quite like this to have "Reduces evasion to 0" or something similar, just so you absolutely always get the most out of it... Perhaps add some slight mitigation to it as well, to make up for the removal of evasion.

Dark Arts - Perhaps to help justify a reduced MP cost/better MP recovery, I'd quite like to see more skills given additional effects with Dark Arts... Blood Price and Blood Weapon could switch from MP recovery to HP recovery with Dark Arts. Sole Survivor could reverse its effect; If you die during its duration, the target takes damage? Slap a DoT on Unmend? Vengeance style effect on Shadow Wall? Just like Ninjutsu (which has 15 potential executions, but only 7 effects), there is a lot you could do with Dark Arts but currently aren't...

Cross Class skills - I kinda want Lancer skills instead of Marauder... Keen Flurry for obvious reasons, Feint would be nice in PvP, and if any tank was going to forgo defense in favour of attack, its Dark Knight. Invigorate is less desired these days, since they reduced TP costs, but prior to those changes I certainly wanted this... Meanwhile, all Marauder offers is Mercy Stroke (granted, this stacks nicely with Sole Survivor), Foresight which is OK, and Bloodbath, which is as fitting to Dark Knight as Blood for Blood, but we could get the same thing out of Dark Arts Blood Weapon... Need Provoke, Awareness is nice with Dark Dance, and Convalescence is great in general but really helpful for Living Dead.

On that last point though, I think cross class skills need an overhaul anyway... It's a really boring system at the moment, letting us pick from 3 classes would actually put some element of choice in which would be great, but really I don't want to use another Jobs skills... I'd rather have a series of Job quests that unlock replacement skills... So rather than having Provoke on Dark Knight, we could have something unique (perhaps something akin to a very potent reverse Shadewalker?) that could even work with Job specific mechanics. So Dark Knight could have unique versions of its cross class skills with Dark Arts effects (Dark Arts "Convalescence" could improve the MP recovery on Blood Price/Weapon and Siphon Strike, for example), Ninja could have a version of Second Wind that has different effects based on the venom being used, Scholar and Summoner could have an cross class skills that involve Aetherflow (either using it up, or granted an extra stack), and so on. Just have the quests to unlock these involve the class guild the skill originated from (so Dark Knights version of Provoke requires you to have completed the Lv30 Gladiator quest, for example).

[FallenWings]

...
MP management - This was fine before the last update, but now with Dark Arts on a 3 second cooldown, you can fit a few more things in (a Dark Arts Dark Passenger for example) which increase MP drain. Could do with either some stronger MP recovery, or lower Dark Arts cost at this point.

...

Dark Arts change doesn't really impact the rotation that much.

Just because you can use Dark Arts more in a small time frame, doesn't mean you should.

Dark Arts Dark Passenger is still poor usage of your mana as far as single target is concerned. All the change really did was improve quality of life for DRK. An example like, for some reason you needed a Dark Arts Dark Mind now, but just came off using Dark Arts for CnS/SE. Now you can do it 2 seconds earlier in those situations.

[AronVillar]

I have a few gripes with Dark Knight at this point;

Dark Arts - Perhaps to help justify a reduced MP cost/better MP recovery, I'd quite like to see more skills given additional effects with Dark Arts... Blood Price and Blood Weapon could switch from MP recovery to HP recovery with Dark Arts. Sole Survivor could reverse its effect; If you die during its duration, the target takes damage? Slap a DoT on Unmend? Vengeance style effect on Shadow Wall? Just like Ninjutsu (which has 15 potential executions, but only 7 effects), there is a lot you could do with Dark Arts but currently aren't...

).

I like your suggestions, specially in the Sole survivor ability, although it would make him too much OP and an DoT in Unmend or put bleed effect on mobs when we use Abyssal Drain combined with Dark Arts