Suggestions for bringing DRK up to par, and QoL changes.

[Lyth]

...

I simply linked your post. There is no issue of 'context'. If you feel that the viewpoint expressed in your own post was inadequately communicated, then it's on you to amend it.

We're playing in an era that pretty much anyone can tell what sort of 'experience' another player here has. Not just in raw stats, but an analytically minded player can glean most of your strengths and weaknesses as a player.

When I say that DRK's burst is resource-gated, I don't mean it in the sense that you had to mentally afk for a minute until your gauge maxed out before you could burst. I mean that the length of your burst window is contingent on the amount of incoming resources. It's not enough to say "TA/Embolden is up, so I'll just DA." You need a steady flow of incoming MP from BW/Delirium so that you can DA every GCD. You need C+S synced so that you get an extra DA usage between SE/HS, as HS can't be boosted itself. You need 100% uptime during this, just like with any buff window, because each tick of BW at baseline is worth 67 potency prior to external buffs. A missed GCD, even a missed auto, is a significant loss.

Ever since Xeno aired his day 3 opinions on DRK, there are a lot of players (most of whom haven't really play the job for any great length of time) who seem keen to write the job off as being simple. It's an opinion founded on ignorance, and there are world-class tanks out there who have expressed opinions to the contrary. It's unthinkable that "job difficulty" has any sort of role in what jobs the best players in the world play. Is it not possible that a couple of the players who cleared the very hardest content ever released in this game were attracted to the job because of its complexity?

It's not an issue of the job being 'unplayable'. There's no such thing as far as the best players are concerned, which is what you're talking about with Ultimate. It's a question of reward-for-effort.

[ArianeEwah]

I see no reason to even discuss this quote, as it was MEANT to be exaggerated.
But unfortunatly either nobody reads the comments before this and just picks on this without any background info, or nobody cares and just wants to nag.

[Crater]

Side note: I do love the "IB is so OP compared to TBN". Willfully forgetting that the entire game is (currently) based around not being in tank stance. Yeah its more powerful than TBN to yourself. But no drk I know would trade TBN for IB if you trapped it behind grit and could only target yourself.

Two things are simultaneously true:

1) Inner Beast is vastly more powerful than TBN when it's actually being used as a primary mitigation tool.
2) Inner Beast is almost never used as a primary mitigation tool, because Defiance (and tank stances in general) is bad.

The problem is that 2) being true has resulted in Warrior being given a disproportionately powerful toolset of non-IB defensive cooldowns, compared to non-Sheltron PLD cooldowns and especially non-TBN DRK cooldowns, to the point where a Warrior that never touches IB is as strong or stronger than PLDs and DRKs using their full kit including Sheltron/TBN. And that makes 1) a huge problem, because a Warrior who then turns around and actually does use Defiance and Inner Beast to bolster their defense becomes so insanely tanky that a full-Shield Oath Paladin or a full-Grit Dark Knight looks like a flimsy little joke in comparison.

These aren't intractable balance issues, but rather than actually tackle them and make things equal, Square-Enix seems to take the approach of just covering for Warrior on both sides: "Warrior's standard mitigation suite needs to be much stronger than the other tanks', because Warrior's active mitigation is stuck behind tank stance, and Warrior's active mitigation needs to be much stronger than the other tanks', because it's stuck behind tank stance."

This stands out as a clear double standard when you look at their approach to Dark Knight, which can basically be summed up as: "It's okay for Dark Knight's standard mitigation suite to be incredibly weak, because they can use The Blackest Night in any stance, but The Blackest Night can't be buffed, because it's already strong and available in any stance, so what more do you want?"


If SE started to approach Warrior the way they do Dark Knight, Inner Beasts's heal would be removed and the mitigation dropped down to 10% for 5s, to compensate for having Vengeance, Thrill, Raw, and Holmgang. If SE started to approach Dark Knight the way they do Warrior, the cooldown on TBN would be dropped to 5s since DRK relies on it so much, and Dark Mind would be changed to universal mitigation, because magic-only makes it too weak for what it does.



Incidentally, if you look at the Ultimate clears on FFLogs so far, the DRK/WAR in almost every clear has about 40-50% uptime on Grit/Defiance (outliers: One Warrior has a 'low' Defiance uptime of about 30%, and one Dark Knight has nearly 60% Grit uptime), so I don't think that it's fair or accurate to just dismiss tank stance balance out of hand - people absolutely use their tank stance, even at the highest levels of play, when it's actually beneficial to do so.

[Aana]

Two things are simultaneously true:

1) Inner Beast is vastly more powerful than TBN when it's actually being used as a primary mitigation tool.
2) Inner Beast is almost never used as a primary mitigation tool, because Defiance (and tank stances in general) is bad.

etc...

I would agree.

In defiance war rivals pld in defense. Outside of tank stance war is easily the weakest. SE painted themselves into a corner. Buff defense outside defiance and war would just get more stupid in defiance. When the most frequent, powerful mitigation tool has a hard lock on it while the equivalents for drk/pld are not stance locked you create problems. As long as IB is stance locked war will either be OP in defiance and balanced in deliverance or flimsy in deliverance balanced in defiance. They decided for the defiance edging on OP route. (this is one reason I actually like the SIO design. It encourages war to eat up some of that extra defense in defiance, but still usable without any nom noms in deliverance. Not ideal but plays off that awkward corner they walked into).

IMO IB being locked is one of few fundamental design flaws in war. It makes war very hard to balance vs other jobs with much more flexible equivalents. Any long CD ability that makes up 1 for 1 for IB would be OP as fudge in defiance. Having nothing makes war super flimsy outside tank stance. Having a defensive ability locked into deliverance to counter IB would be awkward. SE done fudged up.

But all this still doesn't change the primary point of my 1st post: Designing tanks with the intention of high/medium/low offense and low/medium/high defense is just baking imbalance problems into a jobs 'identity'. Performance should be similar in both fronts and let the playstyle/theme/fantasy of the job drive the differences. We don't need niches. "im the magic tank! Im the offense tank". Differentiate jobs with HOW they play. Drg and blm dont need 'niches' they are both DPS that do similar DPS. But they play NOTHING alike and dont share the same fantasy/concept. All tanks should be similar amounts of tanky and hurty. But playing war shouldn't feel like playing drk or pld anymore than smn feels like blm just because they are 'casters'.

[whiskeybravo]

Two things are simultaneously true:

1) Inner Beast is vastly more powerful than TBN when it's actually being used as a primary mitigation tool.
2) Inner Beast is almost never used as a primary mitigation tool, because Defiance (and tank stances in general) is bad.

They aren't the same type of mitigation tool so it's a little disingenuous to compare them to each other, much less claiming one is vastly more powerful compared to the other. Because guess what?

54k incoming damage with 55k HP
IB = 43.2k damage
TBN = 44k damage

Wow big difference there. And if the DRK is in grit they'll reduce it another ~10k

This is an extremely simple example but one that easily refutes the claim IB is "vastly" more powerful than TBN. They are practically the same.

- TBN costs the DRK damage.. So does Defiance and beast gauge spent on IB instead of FC

- Diminishing returns also exist, so 20% IB isn't always 20% reduction - but a 20% hp shield will always be 20% regardless of other CDs being stacked.

- IB is exclusive to the War - TBN can be transferred to party members. Whether or not this is actually valuable is a separate concern. At the base level they do not have the same functionality.

And what are the main complaints with TBN anyways? Mana cost? Duration? Recast? In all the DRK threads I don't think I've seen anyone mention increasing the shield amount (on self), so that leads me to believe "power" is not the concern - it's mainly functionality and value.

And yes, I'm a warrior main and don't particularly like playing drk, but there are a lot of times I wish I had a way to help out a party member or my co-tank outside of reprisal/Shake it Off which are really needed for raid damage. But when you say stuff like IB is so powerful - and I literally spent the last 3 months or whatever raiding and never using IB - I have to chuckle a bit.

If SE started to approach Warrior the way they do Dark Knight, Inner Beasts's heal would be removed and the mitigation dropped down to 10% for 5s, to compensate for having Vengeance, Thrill, Raw, and Holmgang. If SE started to approach Dark Knight the way they do Warrior, the cooldown on TBN would be dropped to 5s since DRK relies on it so much, and Dark Mind would be changed to universal mitigation, because magic-only makes it too weak for what it does.

The problem with this theory is War had Vengeance, Thrill and Holmgang before Inner Beast was ever changed to 20% damage reduction. They didn't have enough to compete with PLD before, the only mitigation tool we've got since ARR is Raw Intuition, which can quite easily kill you if not used carefully or used without awareness.. Equilibrium is nice as well, but it's not mitigation, and the self heal is locked behind the forbidden Defiance stance -which is nice in dungeons but hardly ever used beyond the pull in raids.

Dark Mind should've been changed upon release since they got rid of Dark Dance, those 2 CDs where obviously designed to be used interchangeably as needed. I like what someone else mentioned about replacing Dark Mind with Shadow Skin and adjusting effect accordingly.

[Aana]

snip

Minor nitpicks, but your IB/TBN example is the best case scenario. On a single hit TB they are pretty comparable (just like shelltron). SE seems to have moved away from the multi hit tank busters so IB doesn't 'feel' as strong as it did in say Coil T9 nael. Shin's morn is the only thing off the top of my head that is multi hit in the current patch which obviously favor's IB significantly, ignoring the heal. IB is at worst equal to IB/Shell. At best it outperforms both significantly. If they stick with big 1 hitters for the sake of shelltron then IB will naturally be a bit deflated and more equal. But if they bring back multi hits as a staple war will get a large edge. Just one more case where jobs don't determine balance, content does.

Also to enhance your point of 2.0, war didn't even have vengeance. Vengence had zero mitigation just the counter attack effect. War had TOB and foresight for mitigation. You had to sit on 5 stacks of wrath to keep the heal buff that's baked into defiance. Use IB and you lost your heals lol. 2.0 war was utter trash this game has not seen its like since performance wise. War was duck taped into the beast it is today from that pile of poo. We have a couple of residual issues stemming from cobbling war into a passable job from that hodgepodge. One being IB locked in defiance making it hard to balance in a meta that avoids tank stance.

[Crater]

A Warrior and a Dark Knight start out with 75% max HP, both in their tank stances, with a base HP max of 57k and an incoming tankbuster for 50k.

This means that the Warrior starts with about 53.5k HP out of 71.25k (Defiance), and the Dark Knight has 42.75k out of 57k.

The Warrior uses Inner Beast, which heals for about 6k, bringing them to 59.5k, Inner Beast reduces the tankbuster to 40k, and they're left with 19.5k (about 27% of max HP). They can then drop Defiance, and will have 19.5k out of 57k, or about 34%.

The Dark Knight shields them self for 11400 HP, while Grit reduces the hit to 40k. They take 28.6k damage and are left with 14.1k HP, or 24% of their max. They then drop Grit, but their HP doesn't change, so they're still left with 24% of their max HP.



In addition to this, Inner Beast can be used more frequently than TBN (maximum of 5 GCDs to apply, which is 15s minus skill speed, but is sped up by extra BG from consecutive Path combos, and they get a free one every 60s or less from Infuriate), whereas TBN is on a strict 15s cooldown.

Inner Beast can also be used consecutively, either by saving 100 BG or by using Infuriate (or both!), to mitigate separate attacks that are fewer than 10-15s apart, or can even just become a 12-18s Rampart effect against steady incoming damage - TBN cannot.

It is, as I said, vastly more powerful than TBN, once you've committed to using it as a primary mitigation source.

[whiskeybravo]

I mean I'm not going to deny, warrior is a beast in Defiance. Hands down the strongest defense IMO. But we don't have tank in Defiance anymore, so rip IB'ing anything really. Unlike a few DRKs who would like to see WAR knocked down a peg or 2, I'm all for DRK getting buffed to oblivion. I've always been a war main, regardless of what shape they were in, so it makes no difference to me. I want to see DRK get stronger so I don't have to cringe every time I'm paired up with one lol.

I don't see where a TB being multi-hit has anything to do with it. Whether it's 55k one hit or 5 hits of 11k, an 11k HP shield will block 11k damage (unless they are so spread apart TBN falls off before it breaks). Any attack in which a TBN falls off an IB will fall off, too. The only advantage warrior has is it can blow all of it's resources to chain 3 IBs together, which is nice in theory but has probably never actually happened in reality (at least during SB). Sheltron is at an obvious disadvantage in that regard, since it's literally only for one hit.

I'd dispute the idea that if they bring back more multi-hit attacks it would give war a large edge. Nobody is tanking in Defiance unless they have to, hence people will find any way to do without IB.

[Aana]

Snip

The multi hit comment was more aimed at shelltron. IB is 'similar' to both shelltron and TBN for single hits but dumpstering shelltron on multi hits and being more effective for extremely hard hitting tank busters than TBN. IB scales with mob damage, not your stats which limits TBN at a certain level of damage and doesn't have the 1 hit issue of shelltron. TLDR IB has no weakness so its at worst equal to TBN/Shell but has potential to be better depending on circumstance. But has the (frequently in drk threads) glossed over HUGE downside of defiance locked.

The constant comparisons of tank vs tank mitigation always pick the favorable matchup for argument. If you are a sad drk you talk about how OP IB is and how many more/better CDs war has. But war's can just turn that right around pointing at the no tank stance meta that removes equal, passive parry boosts and the entirety of IB making war hands down the flimsiest tank out of tank stance while pld/drk loose literally nothing defensively besides the stance itself. The comparisons are never fair. But in the real world when regular people ACTUALLY tank (not some speed run raid group that makes up 0.01% of the playing population) and tank stances are on and off intermittently the game looks a lot more reasonable.

But heaven forbid anyone be reasonable in forums. I mean, some people have compared Drk to 2.0 warrior. NO JOB is that bad.

[whiskeybravo]

A Warrior and a Dark Knight start out with 75% max HP, both in their tank stances, with a base HP max of 57k and an incoming tankbuster for 50k.

This means that the Warrior starts with about 53.5k HP out of 71.25k (Defiance), and the Dark Knight has 42.75k out of 57k.

The Warrior uses Inner Beast, which heals for about 6k, bringing them to 59.5k, Inner Beast reduces the tankbuster to 40k, and they're left with 19.5k (about 27% of max HP). They can then drop Defiance, and will have 19.5k out of 57k, or about 34%.

The Dark Knight shields them self for 11400 HP, while Grit reduces the hit to 40k. They take 28.6k damage and are left with 14.1k HP, or 24% of their max. They then drop Grit, but their HP doesn't change, so they're still left with 24% of their max HP.

All that really tells me is Defiance > Grit. It's actually kind of funny, even in your own example the warrior takes 30% more damage but somehow the conclusion is drawn that IB is still more powerful than TBN.

In addition to this, Inner Beast can be used more frequently than TBN (maximum of 5 GCDs to apply, which is 15s minus skill speed, but is sped up by extra BG from consecutive Path combos, and they get a free one every 60s or less from Infuriate), whereas TBN is on a strict 15s cooldown.

Inner Beast can also be used consecutively, either by saving 100 BG or by using Infuriate (or both!), to mitigate separate attacks that are fewer than 10-15s apart, or can even just become a 12-18s Rampart effect against steady incoming damage - TBN cannot.

It is, as I said, vastly more powerful than TBN, once you've committed to using it as a primary mitigation source.

It'd be a minimum of 5 GCDs, since anything beyond the first IB you'd have to count the extra Heavy Swing. TBH I don't see what the issue would be if TBN could be executed a bit more frequently, it's still somewhat locked behind the time required to restore MP. But that aside, it costs a warrior a lot to chain IB's together like that. Even if IB is conditionally more powerful than TBN, it's never going to be as freely usable as TBN, so quite frankly it should be more powerful. TLDR; Lock TBN behind grit and make it only usable on the drk - then we'll talk. As it stands a DRK can augment any CD they're using outside of tank stance with TBN, which should be weighed more heavily considering the current meta. Whatever TBN lacks compared to IB in shear power, TBN makes up for by being able to be used outside of grit. And that's really the bottom line.

IMO - what needs to change is the rest of DRK's mitigation kit so it's not so reliant on TBN - the same way war is not reliant on IB.