World First tank line up confirmed

[DaulBan]

I think the reason DRK's need for buffs has gotten to the point of calling it unplayable is because SE hasn't talked about it since before SB launch. Square isn't acknowledging the issues with the job so we keep talking about it without any input from the devs and may have started to exaggerate out of desperation for them to mention that DRK's still exist.

Probably because they're waiting for an LL for them to mention any changes if I had to guess. The Devs absolutely will not mention numerical changes before patch notes for 3.2 come out, it'd be super out of place for them to do that.

It's always weird with this forum how people seem to think that the devs will break form and talk about something in a way they never have before. If you guys are expecting them to talk about it wait for an interview or the LL. Enough traffic has been made on the back of DRK fix requests that it's literally impossible that the devs haven't heard of the concerns.

[SyzzleSpark]

Probably because they're waiting for an LL for them to mention any changes if I had to guess. The Devs absolutely will not mention numerical changes before patch notes for 3.2 come out, it'd be super out of place for them to do that.

It's always weird with this forum how people seem to think that the devs will break form and talk about something in a way they never have before. If you guys are expecting them to talk about it wait for an interview or the LL. Enough traffic has been made on the back of DRK fix requests that it's literally impossible that the devs haven't heard of the concerns.

Yeah... except that we didn't just start asking for changes and fixes in 4.1. We've been asking them since pretty much the day the tooltips have come out. There have been two major patches and many minor patches in between and a handful of LLs. They've not given a proper address to any of our concerns.

This is addressed to many, not necessarily the quoted poster: People have been on this forum brainstorming and attempting to figure out ways to fix the job, ways to determine what the job's core problems are, and ways to get SE to notice, for about 4-5 months now.

Now that WF UCOB has hit, people I've never seen post in here before are running in from out of the woodwork to tell us all the feedback we've been giving since 4.0's launch, feedback which they took no part in, (amenable, critical, or otherwise,) is somehow invalidated by one player being an unspeakable badass and clearing UCOB with a viable but still very flawed and weak job.



Lets say you drive a potato-brick. An atrocity on wheels. People have been telling you to get it fixed forever, but you don't. Suddenly one day, it takes you twice as long to get to work in your brick-tato because of traffic, and maybe you also get in a bit of a fenderbender too. Later you tell everyone your car is fine because it got you to work through really bad traffic and survived a minor car accident, so your crappy car must not actually be crappy. The oil leak, screeching transmission, broken a/c, crack in the window and doors that won't open from the inside are a-okay.

[Awha]

snip.

While it sucks, maybe the devs are okay with viable instead of balanced, since true balance is one of those nearly impossible goal, outside of making every class equal. I would like to see changes to DRK, but given how long they have ignored addressing drk, the class may be destined to be the pld the meme tank class of 4.0, but on the bright side drk is a tad better off then 3.0 pld.

If they have yet to even mention DRK, it appears that the devs are okay with the current stance on the tanks, and in their eyes they must be balanced. It sucks, but the main difference between war getting their rework most of the community stood behind the fact that war was in a bad spot, with the drk being in the wf group it will create a divided. That drk from jp low key screwed the drk community wanting change. Prob will not get a rework until the patch after 4.2, if that.

[Crater]

Honestly, the changes to class balance we've seen since 4.0 launched until now have been enormous relative to how reticent and unwilling to enact change SE was in Heavensward. Warrior, Summoner, Dragoon, White Mage, and Scholar have all received post-4.0 changes that are as drastic (if not more drastic) than the changes that Astrologian got throughout Heavensward, and in 3.x, AST was the only class that had such drastic changes applied to the actual functionality of their skills (which is to say, Machinist and Bard also got massive buffs in 3.2 and 3.3, but those buffs just took the form of buffing the hell out of skills that already existed).



It's frustrating (and really, kind of pathetic) that SE seems to only be able to enact these changes 1-2 jobs at a time, and that they completely ignore other jobs to make those changes, and that they only ever react to feedback and problems instead of being proactive and actually anticipating really obvious balance issues, and it's especially galling that they don't actual respond or communicate with the community outside of Live Letter style infodumps, but you really can't look at the way they mishandled Paladin in Heavensward and extrapolate that to mean that they aren't going to do anything about DRK's equally bad predicament in Stormblood, because they've already shown that they're okay with making large changes, that they're okay with changing skill functionality, that they aren't as worried about power creep as the smoothbrains who come out of the woodwork to pretend to be very concerned with power creep now that the spotlight is off of Warrior and onto Dark Knight, etc.

The important thing is just to stay on message, and keep the feedback up. Actual data is on our side, here: DRK objective performs more poorly along just about every conceivable metric you could measure a tank by, and DRK's popularity has absolutely fallen off a cliff since they broke WAR in 4.1. A single world-first clear is not a metric that they can use to justify balance concerns, particularly when the player in question is on record saying essentially "I didn't play DRK because it was actually good, I just like the class".

The people pushing the "DRK got world first, therefore no problems can exist" narrative are almost exclusively people who play WAR and PLD who want to make sure that their classes they on top, or a small handful of DRK headcases who can't deal with the cognitive dissonance of only being willing/able to play one class when that class brings nothing to the table that a competitor class can't do better, and have to turn it into a justification for why the class is actually really great or that the disadvantages don't matter. The people who actually affect the usage statistics (ie: The people who can and will pack up and move to some other class from DRK) have pretty much already spoken, and that's what SE is most likely to respond to. Vocalizing exactly why that's the case will give them direction as to how to actually fix it.

[SyzzleSpark]

While it sucks, maybe the devs are okay with viable instead of balanced, since true balance is one of those nearly impossible goal, outside of making every class equal. I would like to see changes to DRK, but given how long they have ignored addressing drk, the class may be destined to be the pld the meme tank class of 4.0, but on the bright side drk is a tad better off then 3.0 pld.

If they have yet to even mention DRK, it appears that the devs are okay with the current stance on the tanks, and in their eyes they must be balanced. It sucks, but the main difference between war getting their rework most of the community stood behind the fact that war was in a bad spot, with the drk being in thewf group it will create a divided. That drk from jp low key screwed the drk community wanting change. Prob will not get a rework until the patch after 4.2, if that.

I don't really think its fair to say he screwed us, and that's not the kind of attitude I'd want us (people that would like to see DRK fixed) to convey, tbh.

As far as being the meme class, I really don't think we should send a message that that is okay. Yeah perfect balance is not a readily attainable goal, but plenty of players here on the forums have made a lot of very simple, good, and easy to implement suggestions that would work wonders without robbing PLD or WAR of their specialities. I do not want to send the message that it is okay for game balance issues to just sit and stew in their juices for multiple patches at a time. Like Crater said in the post above, it shouldn't take much to be proactive.

Speaking of specialties, I tend to disagree that we are better than 3.x PLD.

3.x PLD had a number of things it could do better than 3.x DRK, like mitigate physical damage, and provide spot-raid mitigation (i.e. things like Cover and DV can be put where you want them when you want them, unlike the old Reprisal for instance). These made PLD an all-round better choice for a decent handful of raids. 4.x DRK, while viable, can't really be said to be better at anything than 4.x WAR/PLD. 3.x PLD had a niche, 4.x DRK doesn't.

And that's really all we've been asking SE for: a niche. Give us something that we are REALLY good at, a thing (just one thing) that we can do better than the other two tanks that is meaningful. A competitive edge. We don't wanna be better than them at everything, or get carbon copies of all their skills. We just want to have a specialty.

[Awha]

snip

PSU: You recently made changes to the Warrior job that has caused some dark knights to now feel slightly less useful in the end game scene, with certain moves like Dark Passenger feeling much less useful. Are there any plans to address these potential balance issues?

Naoki Yoshida:
While we are always looking closely at community opinions on adjustments, the team currently feels that these recent changes have not made a largely visible disparity between the classes. Many players are tackling the Unending Coil of Bahamut (Ultimate) and the trends in strategy and party composition is also a big indicator for us as well. However, I do not think it wrong to say that the contribution warrior can now bring with Shake it Off is more visibly apparently when compared to dark knight.

Rip I guess. Pretty sure they just justified DRK being used in Ultimate as an indicator to DRK being fine. Full interview http://www.psu.com/feature/34640/int...future-content

Seems like if we want changes we will have top stop playing DRK all together, seems to be the only metric they will react to, or maybe viable = balance to SE.

[DaulBan]

-snip-

I'm not saying that what SE does when it comes to talking about balance is good, I'm saying they're stubborn and don't like making changes to some jobs sometimes for one reason or another. Why did SMN get a lot of changes when they didn't ask for a whole lot? Most of the people who play them (including me) would have waited until 4.2 for any changes because SMN was already fine. Why didn't DRK get the changes? Who knows, it doesn't make sense sometimes.

Personally? I have no horse in the DRK buff race, I play PLD/WAR for raid because my co-tank categorically refuses to play anything but DRK. A lot of the changes I read seem cool, some fanciful, I just hope that when the patch notes for 4.2 drop there isn't a riot because not every box is being ticked for changes the community brainstormed on its own.