The sky isn't falling on Dark Knights

[EusisLandale]

A quick recap and update on our MP game:

Grit costs 20% MP
Darkside costs 6% MP, provides an additional 5% damage compared to now, and no longer drains roughly 3-4% every 3 seconds.
Blood Price: Assumed to still be 5% in addition to +5 Blood Gauge for 15 seconds every 40 seconds, Grit only.
Blood Weapon: 5% (Up from 3.5%) in addition to +3 BG for 15 seconds every 40 seconds, Gritless only.
Syphon Strike: Roughly 12.7% on combo
Carve and Spit: Roughly 12.7% if not using Dark Arts. Use Dark Arts.

Darkside's changes are obviously a massive buff to Dark Knights overall making MP management far simpler for not needing to keep the drain in mind.
Individually Blood Price can be looked at as a nerf, however Blood Weapon's buff sets it to be, give or take, equal to what is currently using both skills at once in a single target situation.
For those willing to stance dance a bit while actively tanking, you'll find yourself with much more MP availible to you than before even with Grit's cost, if you don't dance your MP should remain more or less the same as it does currently.

There are now three big cost abilities, taking 25% MP each. Dark Arts, Dark Passenger, and The Blackest Night.
Dark Passenger, while nerfed due to this doubled cost, is still more cost effective single target than using Dark Arts on anything other than Carve and Spit or Grit-Bloodspiller. DA DP has been further nerfed at a loss for 10 Potency, the combined total of 50% MP makes using this far more risky than I'd like outside of situations where you NEED the Blind.
The Blackest Night provides a 5 second buff on a 15 second recast timer. This buff shields yourself for 20% of your HP or another player for 10% of your HP. When it expires, you gain 50 BG. This will most commonly be spent on Bloodspiller.
Bloodspiller is a 380 (520 DA) Potency Weaponskill that ignores Grit's damage reduction. This is rather oddly displayed by stating that their Grit Potency is 475 (650 DA).

This will generally put TBN into rotation rather regularly. Something like TBN, HS, SyS, SE, BS, HS, SyS, SE, repeat. Ultimately you can try looking at TBN into BS as filling the gap left by Scourge (500 per 30s) with a little extra Potency on top (760 per 30s).
This does however lock SyS into providing your MP for TBN into BS, leaving you leaning on BP/BW for the rest of your spells. The lack of Darkside drain on top of Blood Weapon's buff should, as the MT, leave you enough with MP for two DA C&S's and 7-8 other DA skills or individual DPs within every 2 minutes of a fight provided you're stance dancing. My assumption is that these uses will be spent on DA BS when in Grit, DP when out of Grit, and DA SE if neither situation is currently applicable.

Aside from BP/BW there are two other generators for BG. Souleater and Salted Earth giving 10 and 1 per hit.
In general all this means is that you'll have to work in a few more BS hits aside from those given to you by TBN, but you'll also want to make use of the new Delirium
Delirium is no longer a Weaponskill but instead an ability on a 120s recast time that costs 50 BG. It gives you 25% MP immediately and extends Blood Price and Blood Weapon by 8s and 16s. I'm not sure which one gets which time boost as the tooltip I have seen is obviously screwed up saying that Blood Weapon and Blood Weapon get those timers. Ideally this has BW getting the +16s to extend how long you have until you may need to dip back into Grit for BP, going from a 15s Grit 25s Gritless to 15s Grit to 31s Gritless.
Update: That Famitsu link below seems to indicate that it's Blood Weapon getting +8s and Blood Price getting +16s, meaning that we'll be looking at 31s in Grit and 15s out of Grit when using Delirium on Blood Price to maximize MP and BG gains. It would still almost certainly be a DPS gain to use it on Blood Weapon however, though until we get some solid numbers I could be wrong.

Salted Earth's BG gain becomes enough to pay for our new AoE Weaponskill on its own at 8 targets at the end of its duration.
Quietus, like Bloodspiller and Delirium, costs 50 BG and it hits for 160 (210 DA) Potency.
I don't see this one getting anywhere near as much use as BS simply because at the numbers needed to use it regularly you'll probably be wanting DA Abyssal Drain. If only we still had access to Bloodbath, poor Quietus an expansion too late.

As for what we lost for all of this
Reprisal as damage, Low Blow as damage, Scourge, 50 Unleash Potency, and effectively two slots due to the Role Skills
At present, Cross Class provides Dark Knights with Provoke, Convalescence, Awareness, Foresight, Bloodbath, Mercy Stroke, and a whole lot of trash.
Role Skills will provide us with Provoke, Convalescence, Awareness, Rampart, Anticipation, Reprisal, Shirk, and a bunch of trash.
Provoke and Convalescence I don't likely see ever leaving our bars. Rampart is Shadowskin and likely has a permanent slot too. Anticipation is our old Dark Dance minus the option to DA it and is likely fighting with Awareness for the "RNG damage smoothing buff" but probably wins out simply due to frequency outside of autocrit fights like Diablos.
We can simply look at this at this point as having three CC slots as opposed to five, and we're trying to figure out what to put in number three. Reprisal as MT and Shirk as OT or on swap fights.
Overall I see Low Blow, Interject, and Ultimatum as largely useless outside of gimmicks. Ranged and Melee are pretty heavily lacking in slots that improve their damage output, leaving the job of stuns and silences better left in their hands while we improve our defenses.

Updates:
Dark Knights are potentially bringing vulnerability debuffs to the party now.

I think this will help with theorycraft, its from famitsu and their version is more up to date compared to the embargo versions.
https://www.famitsu.com/images/000/1...8c78dcb82.html

Seems sole survivor will increase damage by +10% against the target, this utility itself is a big reason to bring DRK alone.

Sorry I didn't sound clear, but yeah Sole Survivor dmg works in PvE too if the tooltip is not wrong. It doesn't mention anything about PvP like in the NIN tooltip for example.

https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/13...engeki-etc.%29

Translations from the tooltips that I posted earlier.Also 100% confirmed the Sole Survivor change.

On the matter of Bloodspiller as Scourge's replacement:

They did.
30 seconds: 1 Bloodspiller = 380/475, 3 Souleater combos = 2040, HS, SyS = 400
Total: 2820/2915
Now count in the 5% increase compared to now on Darkside: 141/145
Finally pair that Darkside gain up with Bloodspiller, used just once every 30 seconds in Scourge's place.
141 + 380 = 520
145 + 475 = 620
This is already a gain over Scourge without using any additional GCDs. But here's the thing, Bloodspiller can be used more than once every 30 seconds without losing any of its potency due to overwriting and its own potency is higher than any GCD it ends up delaying.
Then you count in Darkside buffing auto attacks, Carve & Spit, Plunge, Dark Passenger, Salted Earth, and every Dark Arts boost you can squeeze in.

We didn't lose Scourge, we got the bulk of it able to be unloaded all at once and the rest of it baked into everything else we do. I wouldn't be too surprised if Bloodspiller and Darkside's buff compensates the loss of Reprisal and Low Blow too.

As for the cost of it, given that The Blackest Night will be the source of the vast majority of our Bloodspillers, every second one can be seen as where Darkside's MP drain has been moved to. The other? It shares a cost with Dark Arts and will push out a part of our combo; A 230/325 Potency Gain over Hard Slash, 130/225 over Syphon Strike, and 100/195 over Souleater. This is, in four out of six possible scenarios a higher MP to Potency conversion than Dark Arts can manage and is applicable to taking up two slots DA never can.
Simply put the loss of Scourge compared to everything we gained is not a loss at all in potency and very rarely even able to be considered a loss in cost efficiency.

Sources:
My own poking at my yard's dummy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ktzoXqa178
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MqlCEiT-04
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYzrmh71OoA

[WolfKid]

Do you know exactly if The Blackest Night give 50 gauge on, like you said, time expire, or when it gets destroyed? A 50 gauge fill every 20 sec sounds a little to good if you ask me....

[Adventica6]

I am freaking excited for the new drk, even more than the new jobs with all these changes.

Double the amount of dark arts, simpler rotation, and no mp drain in darkside are just a few of the changes.

I also feel drk will benefit the most from sam/nins slashing debuff with these new skills.

I sort of always struggled with the old darks mp, always watching my little mana bar instead of the game.

[Giubba]

what it puzzle me atm is the relationships between mp and the new blood bar.

The impression i got is that the blood bar is kinda underused or better saying i was expecting to see more skill that would have a blood usage instead we have a little pool of skill that use a lot of blood and many skill who generate blood point

[Bhearil]

Seems that you only get the 50 blood gauge if the shield gets broken otherwrise you just have wasted 2400 mp :/

Really hope is just a rumour

[Jhett_Magnum]

What do you mean 25% of mp each thats far less darksides than we had before?

[Jhett_Magnum]

Dark arts*

[TheCount]

It seems to me Dark Knight just got dumbed down, really. Not a fan either of it taking away the abilities it did, even an entire combo.

But that's why I leveled warrior, at least their mechanic seems more fun

[Cabalabob]

One interesting thing about quietus is you'll be able to use it while out of grit with blood weapon, there were a few AoE scenarios in HW where DRK was OT for trash packs, or simply didn't need grit (a few times in gordias for example). If you aren't getting hit for blood price it's hard to recover mp in an AoE scenario and since all DRKs AoE moves cost mp DRK had to rely on a lot of single target moves to keep up their AoE. Quietus + blood weapon will be a good way to recover mp between abyssal drains/unleashes.

[Claire_Pendragon]

Bloodspiller is a 380 (520 DA) Potency Weaponskill that ignores Grit's damage reduction. This is rather oddly displayed by stating that their Grit Potency is 475 (650 DA).

Below is incorrect.
It's actually not the same, it does more in grit, and a DPS loss out of grit.

with -20%(grit) and +20%(DS) = +0%, that means its potency is 650 +0%, unaffected by the stances.
w/o grit, that means its 520 +0%(no grit) +20%(DS) which is 624 potency.

so you lost 26 potency being out of grit.