Core Issues With 4.x Dark Knight

[MauvaisOeil]

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.

The bonus attack from SwOath is not calculated on the AA damage of the weapon, but on physical damage like a special attack.

[Reynhart]

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.

Yeah, sure...or maybe you could check who started the wrongful claim in the first place, for which I was only saying that it wouldn't benefit DRK even if it were true...

The bonus attack from SwOath is not calculated on the AA damage of the weapon, but on physical damage like a special attack.

The base potency is. But you're right, not the damage, which is exactly why you can add its potency to those of weapon skills instead of counting it with a different formula.

[Chrono_Rising]

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.

This is a really good and on topic post, I agree that the first two issues are our biggest priority for fixing. From a design perspective I think that our resource management and dps are so closely tied that they could probably be combined into a single issue, but I can also see why you would list them separately for clarity.

What do you think about us generating less mana in dps stance over grit?

[SyzzleSpark]

From a design perspective I think that our resource management and dps are so closely tied that they could probably be combined into a single issue, but I can also see why you would list them separately for clarity.

So, in my opinion, DPS issues can be addressed by simple math and crunching the numbers. Its a numeric deficit. There is an incongruency between DPS<=>Mana due to the latter's usage by defensive abilities, and an incongruency between Mana<=>Blood due to potency values and huge discrepancies in opportunity to dump and/or convert these resources, which makes fixing resource management a bit more involved. TBN is a big smoking gun here. I guess the reason I wanted to list them separately is because I believe one can be completely fixed without touching the other and vice versa. You could trim costs and returns across the board, remove effects from certain abilities and apply them to others, and lower the CD/effects of things like Delirium and make Resource management much more fun, active, and enjoyable without actually netting an overall DPS gain.

Basically DPS can be fixed by raising or lowering numbers (like potencies or costs, respectively), whereas resource management can be fixed by simply rearranging/redistributing numbers, if that makes any sense.

That being said you could obviously introduce changes that would fix both in the same fell swoop, but at this point I'm considering every possible avenue and layout of potential changes and how they could be implemented with minimal unforeseen consequences, and I think the distinction between DPS and resource management in that context is actually of considerable importance.

What do you think about us generating less mana in dps stance over grit?

I don't think that we actually do, overall, considering the massive return of Blood Weapon. In 15s out of Grit with BW of spamming Syphon-Souleater we gain roughly 8500 mana, whereas in the same amount of time in Grit with BP and Syphons, we see something more like 5500 (roughly, again).

The additional mana from Grit-Syphon is only about 2/5ths of the overall gain from BW in a similar timeframe (BW/BP's 15s duration), which means that to be balanced in ST, BP would have to make up that remaining 3/5ths in the same window, which, HAhahaha... it isn't even remotely close to doing. In Heavensward, this is PRECISELY how it was balanced. If BP were brought up to about 720 mana per tick (rendering it equivalent to HW BP, about 1.5x a BW tick), then you would gain about 3600 mana in a 15s window, which combined with the 4800 mana from Grit Syphon, would equal out to about the gains from BW+Syphon out of Grit. Interestingly, without the buff to Syphon, HW BP didn't do this either. If you made BP proportionate to its HW values and also kept the SB Grit Syphon buff, THEN (and only then) our mana generation in Grit would be equivalent to our mana generation out of Grit. But obviously, SE has no idea how to balance this in AoE.

At this point I'm all for them just cutting the crap and making BP a vanilla refresh, which would instantaneously fix this problem, or perhaps applying the Mana return in much the same way as the Blood, where we get, say, 120 mana per instance of damage taken, and 500-600 per server tick. It honestly frustrates me in a very real, IRL sense to realize how obvious the solutions are to people PAYING for the game, but not to the people getting PAID for the game.

That being said, its a bad decision on SE's part as it robs them of a single controlled variable that is constant between stances. Any changes to Syphon or BW/BP or even Delirium now warrant an equal and opposing change to eachother which just opens up more points of failure or details that SE could miss when making adjustments (and miss them they almost assuredly will...)

[Chrono_Rising]

I don't think that we actually do, overall, considering the massive return of Blood Weapon. In 15s out of Grit with BW of spamming Syphon-Souleater we gain roughly 8500 mana, whereas in the same amount of time in Grit with BP and Syphons, we see something more like 5500 (roughly, again).

The additional mana from Grit-Syphon is only about 2/5ths of the overall gain from BW in a similar timeframe (BW/BP's 15s duration), which means that to be balanced in ST, BP would have to make up that remaining 3/5ths in the same window, which, HAhahaha... it isn't even remotely close to doing. In Heavensward, this is PRECISELY how it was balanced. If BP were brought up to about 720 mana per tick (rendering it equivalent to HW BP, about 1.5x a BW tick), then you would gain about 3600 mana in a 15s window, which combined with the 4800 mana from Grit Syphon, would equal out to about the gains from BW+Syphon out of Grit. Interestingly, without the buff to Syphon, HW BP didn't do this either. If you made BP proportionate to its HW values and also kept the SB Grit Syphon buff, THEN (and only then) our mana generation in Grit would be equivalent to our mana generation out of Grit. But obviously, SE has no idea how to balance this in AoE.

Looking at a 15 second window BW will hands down beat SS and BP, no contest. But over the full 40 second interval of the cooldown Siphon Strike and Blood weapon return about the same amount of mana, with blood price just being extra, or am I looking at this the wrong way?

Clearly it is very desireable to have all that mana front loaded, I'm not debating that; I tend to feel dark knight's issues stem from not being able to dark arts enough, so I tend to be a little biased towards resources.

[SyzzleSpark]

I see what you mean there. That's something I didn't consider.

In a 40s window, assuming an average of 6 Syphon Strikes (spit-balling here, accounting for stray Bloodspillers and such):

Grit: 2400*6+(~600BP)=15000
No-Grit: 1200*6+(~6300BW)=13500

However, if we consider that maybe out of Grit, BW enabled you to squeeze an extra Syphon into that window, it becomes closer, at 15000:14700.

So sure... that's actually relatively balanced I suppose. Although I never really considered BP/BW/Syphon respective of Grit/No-Grit to be a huge issue for the job, even back at the beginning of 4.x's launch when it was such a shock to the system that the returns had been so wildly re-adjusted, it didn't really bother me much compared to the litany of other issues I was noticing. Basically, I personally don't consider it a "core issue" as it were.

That being said, there are other aspects of resource management that I feel DEFINITELY need changing, and changes there will likely trickle down into a need for changes to BP/BW/Syphon, as I touched on earlier by describing the lack of a static variable in MP regeneration that is consistently static between stances, with high uptime, unaffected by other points of failure in the design. But I think we're splitting hairs here.

[saber_alter]

Wouldn't mind Dark mind giving the party a magical shield when dark arted. dark passenger and sole survivor being useful outside of their niches would be good too. having more than one combo, and a larger blackblood toolkit would be nice as well.

can my edgy greatsword class not be physically painful to do any sort of content with?

[Xenosan]

It's hard for me to imagine any raid mitigation added to DRK that isn't *free*. Yes, a cost-free ability... ..radical concept for Dark Knight.

But having DA as an requirement on DM or TBN for raid mitigation is even more needlessly 2-step than confession stacks / lilies; more stress and DPS tax on a resource already stretched thin.

Just make it free. If from Dark Mind, then from base DM gives 10% DR to all nearby members. + old reprisal or some similar damage down debuff on target. Prefer not to see MP shoulder another responsibility,

[SyzzleSpark]

Just make it free.

Something free for DRK? Hydaelyn forefend.

[WhyAmIHere]

Something free for DRK? Hydaelyn forefend.

Yeah, a demonstration to the front door and exit.