Core Issues With 4.x Dark Knight

[Chrono_Rising]

For PLD, by having Shield Oath, you lose 15% of your damage instantly, plus the effect of Sword Oath wich is basically 50 potency every 2.24 seconds. AFAIK, the best rotation on PLD is GB-RA-RA-HS*5-GB-RA-RA (repeat), this rotation build up your total potency to 8250 (1070 for each GB, 760 for each RA, and 200 for HP Spam). The best part of this rotation is that it's basically a 1 minute rotation to line with Requiescat. So during this rotation, you can use 1 Requiescat for 350 pot, 3 Spirits Within for 600 potency (at best) and 4 Shield Swipe for 600 pot (at best), increasing your potency to 9800. On top of that, you can add Circle Of Scorn and its 250 potency every 25s, basically adding another 600 potency every minute, for a grand total of 10400 base potency. When applying ShOath, you remove 15%, ending at 8840. When applying SwOath, you add 1339 potency to your total (50/2.24*60), ending at 11739. So, between the two, you're losing at least 25% of damage.

Sword Oath is 75 potency per auttoattack hit. Also you include the full 60 seconds for the sword oath buff, this may or may not actually work out since you might not auto when spamming holy spirit.

This analysis in general is not going to match in game application. First, blood price I imagine has a context in which it is restoring as much mana as blood weapon, and the missing context makes it extremely difficult to compare notes on. Warrior is by far the most difficult to play this kind of analysis with because it has so many moves which ignore the damage penalty inflicted by its own tank stance. The only tank which you analysis properly could apply to is paladin because its skills are not changed depending on stance. And thats what the issues with your analysis boil down to.

If you want a proper analysis you will need to go ahead and pull endless amounts of data comparing full time dps stance to full time tank stance to get an actual answer on this one. Play optimally in tank stance, play optimally in dps stance, and compare the % difference in damage.

I have been typing this reply and all of the reasons for why you analysis is lacking, but rather than posting a small novel I settled on just giving the reason above as the reason. I've come to a conclusion. Your post has nothing to do with anything about dark knight design once you stopped talking about dark knight, Dark Knight is the express purpose of this thread. This proves nothing, and is in general taking away from the conversation. What does this have to do with the design and core issues with Dark Knight?

[SyzzleSpark]

Frankly, I really dont think DRK is "the matter at hand". The whole content design that enforce people to drop as much mitigation as possible is what makes tank balance a mess.

It absolutely is when you're posting in a thread titled "Core Issues With 4.x Dark Knight"

If your issue is with the focus on DPSing while tanking then perhaps this game just isn't for you, because that's a "problem" that is outside the focus, scope, and frankly potential of this thread. Again, its muddying the discussion.

Then again, if you think eschewing mitigation at all costs without any qualifying statements or situational if/ands/buts is the nature of tanking in this game, I can say for certain that that is 100% subjective and there are numerous instances of its falsehood to balance out any sad-face experiences that may have turned you off to tanks' motivation to master the risk-reward dynamic of dps vs. mitigation.

I cite for reference Xeno's stream during day 2 (?) of prog on UCOB, wherein he drank up a 70K crit followed by a 30K cleave from Twintania within 4 seconds before finally going down, strictly by virtue of having been in Defiance and making liberal use of IB.

The entire argument falls apart when you realize that when you strip away all of the tank mitigation essentials from every tank (stance, CDs, utilities) the remaining differences are few.

[Reynhart]

It absolutely is when you're posting in a thread titled "Core Issues With 4.x Dark Knight"

Sorry, I thought we were in this thread :

However, in the spirit of not trying to "suggest fixes" I hope others will follow in not posting how to fix the issues, only post what the issues are in their view.

So, yeah, in my view, the issue is "content design". And how it is related to DRK is mostly by TBN, which is supposed to be our all powerful skill allowing us on demand mitigation, but that we barely use because it makes it harder to beat enrage timers by reducing our DPS, or even how Dark Arts is worthless to spend on Dark Mind or Dark Passenger in significant content.

[Chrono_Rising]

Sorry, I thought we were in this thread :

So, yeah, in my view, the issue is "content design". And how it is related to DRK is mostly by TBN, which is supposed to be our all powerful skill allowing us on demand mitigation, but that we barely use because it makes it harder to beat enrage timers by reducing our DPS, or even how Dark Arts is worthless to spend on Dark Mind or Dark Passenger in significant content.

You've made no point about content design. What you have posted is an egregiously flawed argument that dark knight might lose the least amount of damage in going into tank stance. Even though it like is still behind in dps in any stance, or any mix of stance dancing. It has nothing to do with anything.

Your post:

Blood Weapon has indeed 37% uptime. Considering it gives à 10% haste buff when up, it provides, on average 3.7% haste. If you reduce the delay to 96.3% (100-3.7), you increase the DPS by 100/96.3 = 3%
So, by having Grit, your base loss is 23% damage (80%/103%) = 77%. From some testing, I found that you can use at best one more Dark Arts during a Blood Weapon window than a Blood Price window unless you use Delirium (which increase the gap up to three...damn that Blood Price nerf). So, you'd gain around 700 potency (5*140) over the course of 2 minutes, so around +15 pot/GCD. I'm not even sure it makes up for BloodSpiller's "increased potency" in Grit by comparison, to really change that 23%

For PLD, by having Shield Oath, you lose 15% of your damage instantly, plus the effect of Sword Oath wich is basically 50 potency every 2.24 seconds. AFAIK, the best rotation on PLD is GB-RA-RA-HS*5-GB-RA-RA (repeat), this rotation build up your total potency to 8250 (1070 for each GB, 760 for each RA, and 200 for HP Spam). The best part of this rotation is that it's basically a 1 minute rotation to line with Requiescat. So during this rotation, you can use 1 Requiescat for 350 pot, 3 Spirits Within for 600 potency (at best) and 4 Shield Swipe for 600 pot (at best), increasing your potency to 9800. On top of that, you can add Circle Of Scorn and its 250 potency every 25s, basically adding another 600 potency every minute, for a grand total of 10400 base potency. When applying ShOath, you remove 15%, ending at 8840. When applying SwOath, you add 1339 potency to your total (50/2.24*60), ending at 11739. So, between the two, you're losing at least 25% of damage.

As for WAR, it's much simpler. Having Defiance up already reduces your damage by 20% (Corrected) while Deliverance increase them by 5%, so your base loss is around 24% (Corrected). And any Beast ability linked with Defiance is a DPS loss when compared to the corresponding Deliverance ability, even if it ignores the damage penalty. The only tricky skill is Onslaught, I haven't really tested if the increased HP makes up for the damage penalty.

Keep in mind that these calculations consider 100% Tank stance vs 100% DPS stance, and I'm fairly aware that they don't apply as they are in real content, when you take into account the mechanics. And, again, I don't claim that DRK deals more damage. If you have one job at 3000 that loses 25% damage and the other at 2800 losing 23%, the first one is still higher.

Frankly, I really dont think DRK is "the matter at hand". The whole content design that enforce people to drop as much mitigation as possible is what makes tank balance a mess.

Just ends with a statement about content design. Nothing you have said up to this point has anything to do with content design.

[Reynhart]

Sword Oath is 75 potency per hit.

Not really. It's 75 potency affected by attack speed, the same calculation as auto-attacks. So 75 for 3s delay, and 75/3*2.24 = 56 with the Susano Sword. And if it was 75, it would only make the gap between ShOath and SwOath even higher, enforcing even more my "claim".

First, blood price I imagine has a context in which it is restoring as much mana as blood weapon, and the missing context makes it extremely difficult to compare notes on.

The context of my test is that during its window, Blood Price restores not enough MP or Blood to make a real difference...so basically, it's just used as a 40s timer.

You've made no point about content design.

The very first sentence after the exchange regarding my initial question :

To be fair, even if Turtle DRK would deal more damage than Turtle PLD (Or Turtle WAR), since turtle tanking is basically an inefficient tactic in current content, it wouldn't do anything to make DRK "better".

[Chrono_Rising]

No, it's not. It's 75 potency affected by attack speed, the same calculation as auto-attacks.

Yes, and you quote it as 50, not 75. Yes it scales with skill speed, but the base potency is still 75 per autoattack. Updated original post to explicitly say autoattacks.

The practice of turtle tanking is related to content, but if you feel the content needs to change to support this then this is a much bigger issue that just a little ole issue with dark knight.

Even if you analysis was correct, and to be very clear it isn't, what does it prove except that maybe dark knight retains more damage in tank stance than paladin or warrior?

Does that mean we don't have dps issues? Do we not still have mitigation issues? Do what I feel are resource issues no longer really issues? Does it address how the class feels to play, or inconsistencies in its design? Does it mean we have better selfsustain?

Does it address this:

Please tell me if I miss something, but essentially blood weapon's entire function is to compress our 40 seconds of grit siphon strike into 15 seconds of no grit mana and generate blood.

In 40 seconds in grit I can siphon strike 5 times: in grit this equates to a bonus 6000 mana generated over a 40 second interval. We also are moving our GCD .8 GCDs (1.8 but blood weapon also moves us up 1 gcd during this interval) every 40 seconds, meaning that we will being getting an unaccounted for 6th siphon strike every 80 to 120 seconds due to GCD migration.

Blood Weapon: increases my autoattack speed and GCD by 10%, my BIS for dark has me at 2.38 GCD. I expect from blood weapon 480(15/2.7+15/(.9*2.38))= 6028 mana and about 37 blood.

Blood weapon is just returning the mana we would have generated if we stayed in grit for the 40 second cooldown. Though this is an advantage during bursts (remember we line up for every other one) but this means most of the damage gain is actually coming from not having a grit penalty and the blood generated.

In particular this means that we actually gain more mana in grit with the use of blood price than we do out of grit with blood weapon. So switching off grit actually does lower our mana resource pool as compared to our tank stance.

Most importnantly: Does losing the least in activating tank stance mean groups want to take dark knight over a warrior or paladin who will dps more, mitigate more, and give the group higher defense through shields? Because to me, if this were even true and you analysis does not accurate reflect this, this seems like a fairly useless trophy to put on the dark knight shelf, and it looks pretty lonely.

[Reynhart]

Yes, and you quote it as 50, not 75. Yes it scales with skill speed, but the base potency is still 75.

Of course I did, since I specifficaly said "50 potency every 2.24 seconds". But yes, I should have said 56 potency. Again, wider gap.

Also you include the full 60 seconds for the sword oath buff, this may or may not actually work out since you might not auto when spamming holy spirit.

Holy Spirit has a shorther cast than your auto attacks, so you'll still do all your AA even when spamming HS.

The practice of turtle tanking is related to content, but if you feel the content needs to change to support this then this is a much bigger issue that just a little sole issue with dark knight.

DRK has its issue, sure. It's probably even worse than PLD was in HW, but I think most of it is related to how the jobs are designed vs the content. For example, the penalty regarding Oath and Beast gauge at 4.0 wouldn't have been a problem if bosses hit hard enough to discourage repeat stance swap. Giving TBN as the only new mitigation skill wouldn't be a problem if DPS wasn't that much more useful than mitigation. And even if stance dancing or tanking in DPS stance was kept, a turtle setup should offer some values, by redisrtibuting raid DPS between members (For example, healing a turtle should give healers significantly more time to DPS)

Even if you analysis was correct, and to be very clear it isn't, what does it prove except that maybe dark knight retains more damage in tank stance than paladin or warrior?

Nothing else

Does that mean we don't have dps issues?

No, but I never claimed that.

Do we not still have mitigation issues?

No, but I never claimed that.

Does it address how the class feels to play, or inconsistencies in its design?

Feeling is a very subjective point, I personally find it more fun to play than WAR.

Does it mean we have better selfsustain?

No, but I never claimed that.

Most importnantly: Does losing the least in activating tank stance mean groups want to take dark knight over a warrior or paladin who will dps more, mitigate more, and give the group higher defense through shields? Because to me, if this were even true and you analysis does not accurate reflect this, this seems like a fairly useless trophy to put on the dark knight shelf, and it looks pretty lonely.

No, it doesn't...it's almost as if someone clearly acknowledged that keeping your tank stance all the time was worthless...I can't remember who it was...

To be fair, even if Turtle DRK would deal more damage than Turtle PLD (Or Turtle WAR), since turtle tanking is basically an inefficient tactic in current content, it wouldn't do anything to make DRK "better".

[Chrono_Rising]

Of course I did, since I specifficaly said "50 potency every 2.24 seconds". But yes, I should have said 56 potency. Again, wider gap.

Read the tooltip, 75 potency scaled with autoattack or56 potency.

Regardless of the sword oath potency, your analysis doesn't actually reflect how tank stance interacts with skills, and your listed reasons for content issues again rely on the other two tanks penalties and not dark knights. Also, everyone can dps and do content both tanks and healers. It just requires teamwork. And given your above post it appears you recognize that the entire discussion you posted has nothing to do with the price of tea.

I don't think you are posting to do anything constructive at this point, as you are only commenting on autoattack potencies, and staying entirely silent about the fact that you completely ignore jobs having attacks which ignore their tank stance penalty despite assuming 100% tank stance uptime or glaring issues in their resource generation. I think you are just posting to argue. And I'm done wasting my time responding.

[Reynhart]

Read the tooltip, its 75 not 50.

Yeah, read the tooltip : Deals additional damage with a potency of 75 after each auto-attack. Damage affected by weapon delay.
Or do the math...
The current weapon delay of 2.24 change the effective potency of SwOath by the same calculation of auto-attacks. Why should I use a value that can't even be used in real situation, since no Sword has a 3s delay ?

In real situaiton, SwOath with a 2.24 gives 56 potency to the additionnal attack, not 75.

[SyzzleSpark]

The very first sentence after the exchange regarding my initial question :

To be fair, even if Turtle DRK would deal more damage than Turtle PLD (Or Turtle WAR), since turtle tanking is basically an inefficient tactic in current content, it wouldn't do anything to make DRK "better".

See, right here is when it should have clicked that this is a topic for another thread, but instead you're poisoning the well in here. It has no bearing on a discussion of core issues with 4.x Dark Knight because it refers to core issues with 4.x tanking (if you even agree that this is an issue, which is far more open to debate than DRK needing several fixes/buffs). When you make such a topic a point of contention in a thread like this one, you dilute the discussion by bringing the other tanks and the meta into a discussion about a job's design in and of itself, which just derails the thread as you can plainly see.

*****************

Back on topic...
Cursory overview of core issues as I see them:

*1. DPS
->Lowest sustained DPS, lowest burst DPS, no contribution to raid DPS, meaning having a DRK in your party is a 100% DPS loss assuming a given player can play WAR/PLD with an equal degree of skill or there is another player available that can do the same. Tank stance DPS is not a metric because it does not represent a measurable ceiling since sitting in tank stance for 100% of a fight (either by virtue of maintaining excessive mitigation that is not beneficial, or if mitigation is needed, by virtue of not utilizing swaps and thus giving both tanks equal DPS stance uptime) is essentially playing the job incorrectly, a situation around which we should not balance design decisions for any job or jobs, as that is how we got into this mess in the first place.

*2. Utility
->TBN as a utility is undertuned and cannot be accounted for by healers anymore than Parry investment could have been in 3.x
->A party is simply missing a massive amount of raid mitigation in the absence of either PLD or WAR.
->Tertiary or personal utilities (things like having high mobility, extra stuns, gap closers, CC, extra AoE or ranged DPS potential, etc.) were largely eradicated as a balancing metric between the tanks with the introduction of the CR ability system and new skills like Onslaught, essentially amounting to a healthy dose of homogenization.

3. Mitigation
->Reliance on defensive CDs tuned for spike damage to mitigate sustained damage.
->Piggy-backing off of the above, CDs are short in duration and mostly lengthy in recast.
->Mitigation outside of TBN is very poor, a symptom of balancing decisions intended to orbit TBN's design, which is problematic for reasons discussed in the resource management section.

4. Resource Management
->Blood gauge is poorly balanced by everything costing 50 gauge and no less.
->Conversion from Blood to Mana is on a 120s CD whereas the reverse conversion is on a 15s and entangled with a primary mitigation tool in TBN, meaning the choice is typically already made for us on our resource management via this ability as per whatever the current mitigation needs are at a given moment. In essence, in order to effectively utilize TBN at most basic level, we need to A. Need the mitigation, B. Have a surplus of mana, and C. have a shortage of Blood, which is FAR too many checkboxes to mark off every 15 seconds.
->Mana has been cemented as a standardized DPS resource whilst still being used to pay for mitigation; no other tank has this problem, in fact very few jobs in general have this problem.
->Blood gauge consumption is never a greater gain than an equivalent consumption of Mana, and occasionally is a loss, making "not capping out" the sole motivation for dumping the resource at all. The logic of its usage is circular.

*Mitigation and Resource Management are problems and are in many ways intertwined with DPS and Utility. However I have *'ed DPS and Utility due to these core issues representing a 100% loss to a group utilizing a DRK in lieu of either alternative, and therefore I believe these two areas are in the most dire need of addressing.