DRK needs re-tuning/buffing.

[SyzzleSpark]

Whit our lack of defence it fits

We should have no lack of defense. There should not be a definitively less tanky tank. Tanks with more/less utility or more/less DPS, sure. Defense/mitigation? No thanks.

[Crater]

I think the problem is that DRK no longer has a defensive identity.

WAR is the tank with high-uptime, sustained mitigation (Veng/RI/Rampart/Thrill add up to ~75% uptime; that goes above 100% uptime if using IB).

PLD is the 'selfless' tank that mitigates for other people (PoA, DV, Cover, Intervention particularly with Ramp/Sent).

DRK still seems to be stuck as 'the magic tank' in a world where that isn't a meaningful distinction.

I would like to see DRK instead become 'the tankbusters tank', with low-uptime, high-power, high-frequency cooldowns. Dark Mind still feels really good in fights where it works, and I would build on that:

Bump DM to 20%/40% with DA.
Make Shadow Wall a physical-only clone of DM; 20/40% depending on DA, with the same 60s cooldown.

I think that would give DRK a strong defensive niche, and isn't really out of line compared to WAR uptime and PLD party mitigation.

[LegolasT]

To be honest I hope they don't make any major changes. Just tweeks to potency for an increase and in terms of defensive capability change Shadow Wall to be longer mitigation and higher defensive capabilities. With TBN and an improved Shadow Wall I would be happy and I think those are changes that actually make sense with a lot of these complaints. All in all people will always complain I find them annoying cause they really arn't needed right now since none of the content really ask for a particular tank all 3 can main and off tank ALL of the content in storm blood without issue of the job. I honestly think people that complain so hard are the people who just arn't that good at Tanking but that's just my opinion.


PS- I am DRK main beat all stormblood content so far so my opinion is based on experience and me playing the content daily.

[_Pigzig]

if anything it would just replace me pressing dark passenger

why are you pressing dark passenger?

[Eliroth-Kaminari]

i main drk and i can handle sb content expt we dont yet know what V1-4 savage will be.
Problem is if 4.05 patch help out wars from they misery drk will fall off and fall off hard.
only excuse of reason drk is in meta raid comp atm is because TBN but as far as i have use it. it is self defence skill and its not utilty ppl think it is.
If this hype die down ppl move back to highest dps tank comp and thats PLD/WAR spechaly if war gets desired fixes. If so drk only excuse of Utilty TBN wont make cut. i think drk need bring more utility in raid then it does atm.

[Derio]

Shadow wall needs to be buffed or have the cool down time reduced

[DWolfwood]

Shadow wall needs to be buffed or have the cool down time reduced

Man, I didn't expect to see this kind of talk in the forums.

We've already seen the majority of what we'll get in Omega Savage this time around, albeit stronger versions. DRK is going into Omega in a very good place. Dark Mind is going to be extremely strong when coupled with Blackest Night. While there are still some janky abilities that could use work on DRK, the only real problem is their lack of DPS currently.

[Crater]

DRK is going into Omega in a very good place. Dark Mind is going to be extremely strong when coupled with Blackest Night. While there are still some janky abilities that could use work on DRK, the only real problem is their lack of DPS currently.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it's in "a very good place". Rather, I would say that Deltascape v1, v2, and v4 all seem to have taken specific efforts to cater to DRK from a defensive standpoint, and as a result DRK can be said to either be equal to, or have a slight advantage over, Paladin, in terms of personal main-tank mitigation - while providing lower DPS, offering far worse raid-wide/party mitigation, and existing in a tenuous position where any fight that doesn't specifically cater to Dark Mind (for example: Deltascape v3) pretty much puts DRK in the ground compared to PLD.

The above paragraph is almost word-for-word how you could describe PLD's position relative to DRK in Heavensward from 3.2 through 3.4. In almost every case in HW, even when PLD had a clear and obvious advantage in terms of personal mitigation, DRK was the better choice due to higher DPS and more valuable party utility. Except that in Stormblood, DRK's advantage over PLD against magic tankbusters is far lower than PLD's advantage over physical tankbusters was in Heavensward, and Reprisal's HW advantage over Divine Veil was much less pronounced than PLD's DV/Passage of Arms/Cover/Intervention kit's advantage over Blackest Night. And on the contrary, PLD's advantage over DRK in physical-based fights is actually more pronounced in SB than it was in HW, since DRK no longer has Reprisal, Dark Dance, and Foresight.

They need to eliminate DRK's lopsided magical vs physical defenses, just as they removed PLD's in Stormblood - and they absolutely should not be waiting two goddamn years for the next expansion to do it - and they need to actually give DRK a niche where it clearly and obviously outshines the other tanks, just as PLD outshines the others at keeping the party safe, and WAR outshines the others at being able to stack cooldowns or keep them rolling for sustained mitigation. The former can't happen until DRK has something as good as Dark Mind for physical mitigation, and we're even farther away from the latter, because Dark Mind simply isn't strong enough (even when paired with Blackest Night) to offer that kind of clear advantage over the kit that PLD and/or WAR can now bring to a magic mitigation fight.

Edit: And of course, this is before even getting into any issues with DPS.

[SyzzleSpark]

snip.

DRK already is the "tank buster tank" and that is the problem. Our pants are down for everything in between which feels awful. We don't have a single cooldown native to the job with a duration longer than 10s! My god.

If they wanna make DRK the "shield tank" like SCH is the "shield healer" they need to add similar effects to our other abilities and give them longer base durations. As it is, DADM is useless vs. regular DM+TBN unless we very specifically have TBs like A12s chastening heat (multi-hit, magical).

This is the problem with differentiating tanks based on defensive identity. You have to make content cater to whichever one is the weakest which is bad design and feels horrible in the hands of a player.

I wouldn't say that our kit is lopsided towards magic any more than WAR's is lopsided towards physical because of Raw intuition, or PLD's is lopsided towards RNG because of Bulwark. Its lopsided towards TBN. I would gladly take a hit to TBN's uptime and frequency of use for the rest of our kit without it to not be so laughably weak.

[Crater]

...

DRK isn't really any more well-suited to tankbusters than PLD or even WAR right now.

For Blackest Night to outperform Sheltron in terms of eHP, the PLD would have to be using a shield that only mitigated ~17% of the damage on a block, when an at-level shield is almost always at least 20% mitigation (meaning a 5% eHP advantage versus TBN), and can climb as high as 24% by the end of an expansion - at which point it's a ~31% eHP boost compared to TBN's 20%. So TBN only beats Sheltron for tankbusters in the event that A) The tankbuster is multi-hit and Sheltron will only catch one of them, B) Sheltron is mistimed and gets eaten by an auto-attack, or C) we're not talking about a tankbuster so much as about a "tankbuster" that deals such light damage that it makes an appreciable difference in DRK's favor that damage is applied to the shield before touching your HP.

And that's just Sheltron. TBN isn't really doing any more for DRK than Sheltron is doing for PLD, at least with regard to tankbusters, and in a lot of cases, is doing less. But setting aside role skills and invuln cooldowns (the former are by definition identical and the latter are basically well-balanced against each other and largely make their respective active mitigation skills redundant), PLD has two other Block-based mitigation cooldowns, both of which will solve Sheltron's issues with multi-hits and auto-attacks, they have Sentinel which is a strictly superior version of Shadow Wall, and they have Cover, which is fairly close to a second Rampart.

By contrast, DRK's only supplemental abilities (again excepting role/invuln skills) are Dark Mind and Shadow Wall. So a strictly-inferior version of Sentinel, and a good-but-ultimately-not-overwhelmingly-better cooldown which is useful on magic tankbusters and might as well be Shake It Off if all the boss's real tank-directed damage is physical.

On a fight with physical tankbusters, DRK is basically in a position as bad or possibly worse than the position that PLD found itself in during HW in fights like A4S or A12S.
On a fight with magical tankbusters, DRK carries a slight advantage over PLD, but that advantage is significantly less than the advantage that PLD had over DRK during HW in fights like Thordan, Sephirot, or A7S.


To give DRK that niche, the advantage they have against magical tankbusters needs to be significantly bolstered, and to avoid literally just swapping DRK and PLD's places from one expansion to another and repeating the same mistake of making one tank a gimp in fights that don't cater to their specific physical/magical needs, they need to be given equal capability versus physical and magical, much like they did with PLD.


If they don't give DRK that niche... Then we're basically waiting another two years and hoping that 5.0 gives DRK five new defensive cooldowns, because there's no way that they could get anything that would give them WAR's sustained mitigation uptime, or PLD's suite of party/target-other mitigation. And I really have no idea what's left, besides bumping Darkside up to +50% damage and then saying "now DRK is the halfway point between a tank and DPS".