Fixing Dark Knight, Properly

[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.