Fixing Dark Knight, Properly

[Crater]

What is the point of a threat combo if you can reach the big threat maker withouth connecting the chain ?

There are a lot of reasons why you might choose to use Spinning Slash for your enmity in that instance rather than Power Slash.

First, it's important to remember that the enmity difference between Spinning Slash and Power Slash isn't that high. At 220 with a 5.25 modifier, Spinning Slash is 1155 enmity-potency; at 300 with a 5.5 modifier, Power Slash is 1650. That's a difference of less than 500, which in the grand scheme of things is not particularly high. For comparison, the difference between Savage Blade and Rage of Halone is almost 670 enmity-potency, and the difference between Skull Sunder and Butcher's Block is 700.

Second, it's important to note that Spinning Slash does not have a Dark Arts effect. I'm sure any 3.x DRK will remember specifically using Delirium as a combo finisher instead of Souleater in order to hold on to a Dark Arts that they'd already popped. Currently, Hard Slash is the only GCD that won't consume DA, and there are a lot of instances where you'd like to be able to hold onto it a GCD longer, even if it costs you a 30 potency loss in damage (particularly if DA becomes more important as a modifier for defensive abilities).

Third, there's the difference between losing 30 potency directly by using Spinning Slash instead of Syphon Strike, and the difference between losing 10 Blood and the self-heal from Souleater. On paper, in a vacuum, 30 potency is roughly equal to 10 Blood, but there are frequently specific points where an extra 10 Blood won't help you, and specific points where 10 Blood will provide you with a big gain in damage - making a decision about which one would be more helpful at any given moment would be a skill-based element of optimization added to the class.

Finally, it's just an issue of timing. If an add pops when you're in Mid Stance, you can use Spinning Slash to secure aggro; if it pops when you're in High Stance, you can use Power Slash. There are a lot of cases where either enmity skill would provide enough enmity, but you're forced to use both of them, back to back, even though you'd much rather just do the pickup with Spinning Slash and then go right into Souleater - similarly, there are times when you'd much rather use Syphon Strike on the main target right before an add spawns, but are forced to use Spinning Slash and eat a massive damage loss, just so that you'll have Power Slash available on an add.

I don't like your idea of Dark art beeing a cost to refund ability. It's removing the fun of MP management, even if it's only for utilitary skills. I get that you want to remove the cost of "helping others", which is fine for your design of Dark mind, but I don't find it fulfilling on TLD or SW.

I feel you there - I really do - but you just cannot design a balanced version of DRK that has to manage their MP between offense and defense.

If you balance DRK against WAR assuming that DRK is going to use x% of their MP to augment their defensive abilities, then a DRK that uses that x% of their MP to augment offensive abilities instead must deal more damage than the WAR. If you balance DRK against WAR assuming that a DRK is going to use 100% of their MP to augment their offensive abilities, then DRK must have defensive abilities that match WAR's even when used without any DA augmentation. Ultimately, no matter how you try to do it, DRK is going to end up either overpowered or underpowered in comparison. And given all of 3.x through to today in 4.1, it's overwhelmingly likely that DRK ends up on the "underpowered" side of that line.

MP management has to be decoupled from DRK's standard defensive cooldowns. There's just no other way for it to work. The MP management aspect between offense and defense still exists, mind you, but would be limited to TBN, which is a much more manageable situation that is a lot more feasible to balance.

I don't think TBN with a so complex mechanic would be good either.

It's actually a deceptively simple change - certainly much easier to get your head around than any sort of counter-attack type of mechanic.

What it boils down to is: You can use TBN to mitigate whenever you need it, as long as you have the MP, but using it consecutively will become more and more costly, until you stop using it long enough for the 15 second 'cooldown' to expire.

[Crater]

Despair is my issue here, as it serves no purpose but to punish someone with a 'fake' cooldown of 15 seconds.

The 'first' TBN (Despair 0) is the DPS gain.
The 'second' TBN (Despair 1) is a loss, because you only gain the bonus 10 blood at Despair 2 or above. This is the 2.4k for 40 blood.
The 'third' TBN (Despair 2) is a loss. 3k for 50.
Every TBN after is a greater loss.

In other words, the more the Dark Knight needs their shield, the more they are punished for it.

No, you need to read it more closely.

Despair is applied when TBN's shield is applied. The stack check is performed when the shield breaks.

Your first TBN applies one stack of Despair when it is used, and so when the shield breaks, you already have one stack.
Your second TBN applies one more stack of Despair, so by the time the second one breaks, you have two stacks.


The way you're describing it only makes sense if you assume that the stack is applied as the shield breaks. However, this presents two big problems: 1) It would mean that if the shield doesn't break, you can apply it over and over at 1800 MP, with a 2s cooldown, and never incur a Despair penalty. This would allow you to, in any situation where an auto-attack doesn't break TBN, just click the skill off after reducing an attack to 0, and reapply it, to get 100% damage reduction at a cost of only 1800 MP per shield. And 2) It would increase the 'soft cooldown' of the skill to an effective 15-25s, depending on when the shield actually breaks, whereas the way I've written it would keep the 'soft cooldown' at 15s.

There's a reason that I worded it so that the bonus blood is applied at two stacks or higher, and then immediately proceeded to say that a second consecutive usage of it would net the same costs/gains as the current version of the skill.

[InfiniDragon]

I like some of these ideas and others not so much, but I had a humble suggestion regarding your proposed change to Dark Arts. Instead of making the DA version restore MP to where it yo-yos (since we all know how janky SE server ticks can be with this stuff), why not instead make Dark Arts free but the modified attacks (that you wished to have an MP cost) take MP to use?

Anyhow, I'm glad more folks are making threads like this. Even though I'd much rather see DRK in old WAR's position (an HP draining offensive focused tank that is fairly self-sufficient, a lot like classic DRKs) any discussion that's good discussion increases the chance that SE will finally notice one of the 18 gazillion threads about our job.

[Kabooa]

No, you need to read it more closely.

Despair is applied when TBN's shield is applied. The stack check is performed when the shield breaks.

So it would look like:

TBN 1: 1800 cost, 40 blood (Gain)
TBN 2: 2400 cost, 50 blood (Neutral)
TBN 3+: Loss to greater loss

This is somehow...not significantly better. If I had to choose between these two, I'd ask if it could just remain the same. It is a layer to a system that doesn't do much, but as I stated, punish someone for needing their mitigation tool.

Here's the thing. If it's a DPS gain, people are going to do it. That's just the way it works. So the first TBN in the sequence is fine. It'll get used, people will get the blood, get a dps gain, and be happy, then not touch it again for 15 seconds. Until you start to need it more than once every 15 seconds. And that's where we run into the problem. Mitigation isn't something you want to have to juggle into your DPS rotation. That's why TBN is neutral. You use it as you need it, and if you use it right, you basically go on as you were without issue. If you don't need it, you Dark Arts. If it's a DPS gain for it to break, then people are going to use it to gain that damage, not to effectively mitigate.

This is why Despair is a trap. It's disguised as a DPS gain, but it's effectively no different than just buffing bloodspiller with TBN now. It's only a gain once every 15 seconds. It punishes you for needing the shield more often than that, with enough of a punishment that would discourage use of it outside those windows, and if an encounter existed that required a Dark Knight to maintain TBN through Despair, it puts them in a worse position than now, because the other tanks don't need to do that for their Shelltrons.

You would get the same defensive coverage by simply reducing TBN's cooldown as it is now, forego Despair, and slightly boost Bloodspiller and Quietus potency for a minor DPS boost.

[Crater]

If I had to choose between these two, I'd ask if it could just remain the same.

You shouldn't, because this proposed version of TBN with Despair is a straight, unambiguous, clear-cut buff to the current version of TBN.

I'm just snipping out all this stuff about how it "punishes you for needing your mitigation more than once every 15 seconds", because none of it matters when you are currently punished for needing your mitigation more than once every 15 seconds by not having that mitigation every 15 seconds.


Yes, people would be using the 0-Despair version of the skill as often as possible to boost DPS, only holding it when the delay in use will produce useful mitigation. This is a good thing. Paladins trigger Sheltron as often as possible, even when they're off-tanking and the mitigation is irrelevant, because it's a DPS boost to proc Shield Swipe. That is 100% a desirable outcome - in fact, it's almost an identical outcome: Shield Swipe is 150 potency on a 15s cooldown; Bloodspiller is in the neighborhood of 140 potency, and this would essentially be an option once every 15 seconds. The 1-Despair TBN would be used in places where TBN is currently used, which is also fine.

In most cases, yes, you would then refrain from using it for 15 seconds, and would wait out the soft cooldown on Despair. That's the whole point. If you do that, then the skill is essentially unchanged from the current version, which is exactly what I intended. However, you are then given the option to sacrifice DPS for more mitigation, which is something that Dark Knight cannot do right now, but which Warrior and Paladin are both capable of (in slightly different ways).

And yes, it matter that you have the ability to do that. You don't need to bother with the "Here's the thing: People will do things that gain DPS..." stuff - nobody is being educated, or whatever you think is going on. Not everything is an optimized speedrun. People make mistakes, or people are unfamiliar with attack patterns during prog, or sometimes losing a little bit of damage for a little bit of extra mitigation in one place can pay off by gaining a much bigger amount of damage later on. Having the option to do those things is important - particularly when the rest of the class's design leans on TBN as a primary mitigation source, in a way that the equivalent skills on the other tanks do not.

You would get the same defensive coverage by simply reducing TBN's cooldown as it is now, forego Despair, and slightly boost Bloodspiller and Quietus potency for a minor DPS boost.

This is wrong, though. A reduced cooldown with no other changes quickly takes TBN from "this is overall probably the most powerful active mitigation tool (for good reason)" into "this is completely broken and overpowered and makes every other tank obsolete".

Consider, if TBN's cooldown were simply reduced, what would happen if a DRK sat in Grit, used Hard Slash -> Syphon Strike, and then cast TBN, over and over again. You would be unkillable, and whatever damage you lost from playing that way would be recovered because there would never be a reason to bring two healers to a fight again.

The ability to use TBN more than once in quick succession is very important to DRK's future, because TBN is the only active mitigation skill that can't be used that way - but the progressive decay in MP/damage efficiency is equally important, simply to keep the skill from careening out of control and destroying the game's balance.

Despair is not intended to, nor would it ever, "trick" people into thinking that it's there to improve their DPS (the fact that it can be used to square the circle of people avoiding TBN entirely because "it's a DPS loss" is just a nice, small side effect). The change is there to improve flexibility in DRK's mitigation toolkit, which is currently massively lacking compared to the flexibility that the other tanks offer.

I like some of these ideas and others not so much, but I had a humble suggestion regarding your proposed change to Dark Arts. Instead of making the DA version restore MP to where it yo-yos (since we all know how janky SE server ticks can be with this stuff), why not instead make Dark Arts free but the modified attacks (that you wished to have an MP cost) take MP to use?

This is a good idea! I'd kind of wondered if there was a way to make the proposed interaction between DA and DRK's defensive skills a little bit less clunky, and had sort of thought of this myself.

The possible problem with it is basically: What happens when you use the 'free' DA, but then don't have enough MP for the skill you want to use it on? Would the skill fail to execute, or would it simply perform the non-DA version of the skill? And if it's the latter, would it consume the DA effect anyway, or would it stay active (possibly getting used on a skill that you didn't want to DA in the first place)? And maybe more importantly, how would you write the skill tooltips to reflect this behavior, so that new players will understand how their skills work?

Not saying it wouldn't work (in fact, in a lot of ways it's probably better than the version that I've written), but programming the functionality and figuring out how to convey that functionality to players might be more complicated than simply having the skills refund the MP that you spent on DA.

[Kabooa]

In most cases, yes, you would then refrain from using it for 15 seconds, and would wait out the soft cooldown on Despair. That's the whole point. If you do that, then the skill is essentially unchanged from the current version, which is exactly what I intended. However, you are then given the option to sacrifice DPS for more mitigation, which is something that Dark Knight cannot do right now, but which Warrior and Paladin are both capable of (in slightly different ways).

They can. It's called Grit. People just want to avoid it like the plague. So rather than complicate TBN with that, you could just put Grit off the GCD. Your on demand mitigation sacrificing DPS.

You could also utilize your Weapon stance proposal to achieve this aim. This honestly has the potential for more defining gameplay than modifying TBN from its current point, both allowing for optimizing DPS potential or achieving active mitigation.

Despair only opens up a can of worms under the guise of filling in the Dark Knight's mitigation toolkit. From what I've read from other Dark Knights, the primary issue is tying cost into mitigation in a toolkit that still needs its 'free' sources filled out. This doesn't address that. It just encourages TBN to be used for a DPS gain, avoiding the neutral version at all costs unless you're definitely going to die, and never looking at the skill again at 2+ stacks until the timer resets.

[Crater]

They can. It's called Grit. People just want to avoid it like the plague. So rather than complicate TBN with that, you could just put Grit off the GCD. Your on demand mitigation sacrificing DPS.

Don't be dense. Every tank has a tank stance.

And really? This idea "only opens up a can of worms under the guise of filling in the Dark Knight's mitigation toolkit"? What about half an hour ago when it "only punishes people for needing their mitigation tool"?

If I give you a good reply to this post, what is Despair "only" going to be doing an hour from now? Is it "only" going to add another debuff to a UI that just spent an expansion trying to clear up debuff bars? Is it "only" going to push DRK over the line into the nation's leading cause of carpal tunnel syndrome by forcing another couple button presses per minute? Is it "only" going to remind people of the crushing existential nightmare that their lives have become since they started playing this game?

Sorry dude, but I'm done until you start coming up with something substantial to say here. Try harder.

[SyzzleSpark]

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"Its called Grit" Are you for real? Every tank has a tank stance. That's not even part of the discussion. Sacrificing DPS for mitigation actively is the demesne of things like Clemency, Inner Beast, and Equilibrium, even PoA. DRK has no equivalent of such abilities.

Anyway just to put an addendum to this back and forth about TBN, Crater's adjustments nearly double the ability's efficiency provided you don't abuse it.

For simplicity's sake we'll just consider TBN as it is now to be a 0/0 gain/loss and disregard the PPGCD optimization people often get hung up about.

Current TBN: +50 blood -2400 MP per 15s. net zero gain/loss in DPS. If used 4 times a minute you spend 9600 MP for 200 Blood.
Crater's TBN (if used twice in a row): +90 blood -4200 MP per 17s (factoring in the 2s recast). Here you spend 4200 mana (about 245 potency) for 90 blood (252 potency) while gaining double the mitigation. The actual potency gain is closer to 10 accounting for the recast/stacks. Basically even if you double TBN as often as possible without ever reaching 3 stacks, you're seeing a very small but still measurable gain in DPS, and a huge gain in mitigation. Meanwhile if you don't need the mitigation and simply use TBN every 15s without gaining more than 1 stack, you spend 1800 mana (about 105 potency) for 40 blood (about 112 potency) for a 12 potency gain.

Idk, math was never my strong suit, but it smells like a buff, looks like a buff, walks like a buff, and talks like a buff, I'd say its a buff.

[Kabooa]

Sorry dude, but I'm done until you start coming up with something substantial to say here. Try harder.

Alright, analysis then.

The purpose of Despair, in your own words, is to provide Dark Knights a means of exchanging DPS for Mitigation on demand.

This purpose is firstly contradicted by introducing it as a mechanic that starts with a DPS gain. You are not sacrificing DPS for mitigation on demand. You're gaining DPS for utilizing Mitigation.

Despair is meant as a counterbalance. It's to say "Hey, you need this mitigation, but now you're going to pay harder for it." You've already contradicted the point of it by rewarding the player with a DPS gain on the first hit, so it's inconsistent. By making TBN a straight up damage gain in that one circumstance, the rest of the design will only be seen as sub-optimal in its use. It won't matter that the second use within 15 seconds is just like it is now. It's now sub-optimal. And since TBN has such a short cooldown by comparison to other abilities, holding on to TBN to get the maximum damage with the best timed mitigation is a loss.

You lose DPS if you have to use TBN again within 15 seconds, and you lose DPS if you hold on to TBN if the tank buster is a few seconds late, since you probably don't want to risk it breaking on an auto attack critical, or weakened by any auto attack really. By making it an objective gain in damage, you have removed the focus from its primary purpose, which is to not eat !@#%, and have placed it on 'How can I get as much damage out of this as possible'.

This is why despair is both a needless complication (because the "optimal" use of TBN ignores it, and will basically just be like it is now if Bloodspiller had, like, +50 potency), and a can of worms (An ability, not stance locked, punishing you for using its intended purpose.).

If TBN were still DPS neutral, then it is more consistent with what your proposed design is. In this scenario, you utilize TBN primarily for its defense. You gain no notable DPS advantage for keeping it on cooldown after Despair fades. The ability's focus would be on the most efficient mitigation to keep your DPS neutral instead of keeping it from falling. Even in this scenario, it's undesirable to utilize TBN more than absolutely necessary, but you aren't actively being punished by utilizing it as its needed, instead of 'as much as I possibly can to do durmage'.

Even in the defensive mindset, it would require a significant change in raid design to make this TBN even a choice. Because in both scenarios (Neutral and positive) the choice is pretty obvious. Avoid Stage 2 and up at all costs. And in the raid encounter where you would need to utilize it consecutively? I don't see anyone feeling good about that, because it doesn't shore up the inequity of the tank mitigation kits.

Which brings me back to the weapon stance. Flesh that out. I think you'll find TBN doesn't need to change if you provide the tools you want into the Dark Knight's weaponskills.

[Tanathya]

I strongly agree with most of what you suggest, especially fond of Part I. Personally, and as you said since Dark Arts lost its purpose to be just a simple potency boost, I'd definitely take the boost out of a few skills, especially from Syphon Strike, make it cost a bit more, and add even more potency to Souleater, for example. I'd also love the Carve and Spit change suggestion; get both bonuses (MP restoration and damage boost) without the need to use Dark Arts. Carve and Spit feels even clunkier than in 3.0 when used with Dark Arts, due to Syphon Strike having the potency modifier added. Also, the stances suggestion would make the whole thing actually fun, and would set it apart from WAR and PLD.