Dark Knight under review: Feedback to the Developers and Community Team

[shao32]

snip

if they do it with WAR twice mid expansion they can do it for us too.

and yeah excelent resume about what we need, i hope SE give us a real change now.

[TouchandFeel]

You covered most of the issues and/or solutions that I have been repeating for a while now and I see a lot of overlap between your points and suggestions and the stuff I said in my old and somewhat now outdated suggestion thread , so big thumbs up.

I'm especially glad that you put a good deal of focus on the "feel" of how DRK plays and how it's abilities affect that.

I also find the Burst Recommendation of "Increase the MP pool size relative to the cost of Dark Arts. If you are able to 'store' more Dark Arts, capping becomes less of an issue" quite intriguing and is very much along the line of thought that I have had recently regarding a way to create a burst window for DRK without exactly copying what PLD and WAR have.
For example add an extra effect to Delirium (or potentially another ability but Delirium seems like a good fit) where it also increases your max MP by a certain amount (50%? 100?) for a set amount of time (10s?). Oh even better, what if it doubled your max MP and how much MP you currently have (so if you were full on MP before you would be full with the doubled max) with the increased max amount lasting for something like 10 seconds and then when it runs out it leaves you with half of what your MP was (half MP with doubled max results in half MP at regular max amount).

There are a few things that I would add to the list though.

- The boost from Dark Arts is too similar or simply the same across most abilities, especially the GCD ones. They need to differentiate them. Thing like: have DA Powerslash be +140 potency plus the higher enmity modifier (it is so stupid that this currently doesn't get the potency boost), have DA Syphon Strike do the +140 potency plus return even more MP than normal, have DA Soul Eater do the +140 plus give a little extra Blood over what it normally gives. Overall Dark Arts needs to provide choices and strategy to it's use, not just be a generic and frankly somewhat boring "press for more dps" button.

- Dark Knight needs some form of passive enmity generation that doesn't require having to fall back on your 1,2,3 aggro combo. PLD has abilities like Circle of Scorn, WAR has things like Onslaught, what does DRK have? Nothing. On top of that DRK has two AoE enmity generation abilities, Unleashed and Abyssal Drain, that are far too similar to where they basically fill the same use situations and compete with each other or one overrides the other. I personally feel they need to rework Unleashed to make it an OGCD ability that is resource cost to damage neutral for single targets and can be woven into your basic GCD combos to make it so you don't have to break your flow so much to keep your enmity up.

- Using up two separate Traits for the Blood Gauge is a complete waste and seems shoehorned in just to use up two. Consolidate the Blackblood and Enhanced Blackblood traits into one trait and come up with a new trait to give DRK that adds an extra interesting element to DRK game-play, like the trait WAR gets that shaves 5 seconds of the recast for Infuriate every time certain gauge based abilities are used. That trait is awesome and really adds a lot to how WAR plays and feels, something like that (not exactly like it) would be great for DRK.

[Nedkel]

-Convert Sole Survivor into a HP/MP drain over time. Consider making mob death reset the cooldown to keep the timing element.
-Make the Souleater lifesteal stance independent. If the amount of healing from this bothers you, just make the lifesteal into a Dark Arts property, not a Grit property.
-Make Blood Weapon and Blood Price stance-independent. Consider just reworking Blood Price into something different, because it seems like you're unable to tune it simultaneously for both single target and AoE. It's pretty much worthless in single target.
-Consider removing either the MP cost or the GCD cost on Grit.
-Consider either removing the MP toggle cost on Darkside, or make the ability into a trait.
-DRK relies on a lot of double weaves. Revise and shorten the animation locks on oGCDs, especially Dark Arts and Plunge.
-Consider making Dark Passenger a potency gain in single target, for variety.
-Make Dark Arts only expire on the next GCD, allowing you to activate both the oGCD before it as well as the GCD itself, rather than forcing you to sacrifice one for the other.
-Rework Delirium. Remove the Blood cost. Consider merging Delirium and Blood Weapon (i.e. treat Delirium as an upgraded form of Blood Weapon). Consider having Delirium boost Dark Arts potency while active instead of just dumping an extra DA worth of MP into your pool.
-Increase the MP pool size relative to the cost of Dark Arts. If you are able to 'store' more Dark Arts, capping becomes less of an issue.

I love the ideas, however you would end up with DRK exceeding in DPS over two other tanks.

With DP having higher potency, MP being easier to manage with delirium, blood weapon and blood price changes, and higher mp pool, with soul eater outside of grit, sole surviver guaranteed dps and healing spell, with dark side as a passive and blood weapon enhanced DA potency bonus.
End up with something stronger and easier to tank than warrior.

Those all changes would be overkill, making DRK a DPS level dealing unkillable destruction machine.

Look at the warrior, everyone before patch was complaining how they are stopping to play him, because he will be weaker, but end up being stronger. With pure buffs like these i could easly say DRK would be a "pick drk or kick" class.

[Aniya_Estlihn]

if they do it with WAR twice mid expansion they can do it for us too.

I'd hope so, but I am more bothered by the fact they wait till each new content update to release job changes;I probably should have clarified that. Once they're done tuning job changes for any class they should roll them out just like any other mid-patch hotfix.

[Dhaid]

DRK's main gameplay aesthetic is speed. This comes from a combination of a shorter average GCD length (due to Blood Weapon) and frequent oGCD use. In Heavensward, it was second only to NIN in terms of actions per minute.

Geez, that sounds awesome! I wish I'd been around to actually play this DRK. I've only gotten DRK to 50, but even then I can feel a few moves falling short of impressing, mainly those magic-only defense buffs..

[SkyEdge1]

These are phenomenal suggestions. I've always wanted to play DRK but, every time I switch to it from PLD it feels clunky and unsatisfying, its lacking like 3 or 4 skills in its kit and it feels so unrewarding and slow compared to the effort of just keeping it alive. I'm not an expert on tanking by any means but these suggestions feel closer in line to balance than anything DRK has received thus far.

[Rathael]

Wow onslaught adds enmity? This is something (as a non-warrior player) I did not know. They could start really simple by adding some enmity to plunge to help off-grit tanking.

Looking forward to some fresh changes though. It's getting old being inferior.

The fact that Shadow Wall is 30% and the Paladin equivalent is 40% is a bit of a joke for me. That is an enormous discrepancy for no return. I mean sure, dark-mind is pretty good. It's very clunky to use though. It's another ability along with TBN that means you have to ensure a 50% or higher mana pool for powerful tank busters. If you want to use Dark-mind, you have to be well WELL prepared in advance. I'm pretty sure the other tanks can just keep an eye on boss cast bars and react when they need to, without this requirement to prepare their mp bar. On top of that, staying high mp is somewhat risky for a DRK because of the constant threat of losing DPS to mp capping... especially with the regen skills up.

TBN costs mana to maintain. Block doesn't. Paladins and warriors, as far as I can tell, are also allowed to regenerate mana during fights. DRK is not. There is, again, no return for this.

On living dead... Hallowed ground doesn't just have no after-healing requirement, it also completely blocks damage, allowing you to utterly negate mechanics. Again, there is an enormous advantage to the paladin here with absolutely no return for DRK. They could remove the heal-to-full requirement and hallowed ground would still be much more powerful than living dead, so it would be nice to at least have that removed.

I love the flavour and feel of DRK as it is. I think they are right to maintain it's identity and not streamline too many abilities. I don't want to be playing big-sword-paladin-2.0. I wan't my own identity... but it's insane how many actions on the other classes are just 'better' versions of DRK. I don't understand how just enormous differences can be made during the development process.

Alternatively a good start would be a bunch of potency increases to bring DRK DPS up to warriors. At least then we'd feel compensated for the weird utility discrepancy.

[Derio]

I hope a GM brings OP post to the development team because it has pretty much outlined everything the DRK community has been feeling for almost the past year. And I hope the post doesn't fall on deaf ears.

[GoneEnigma]

Fantastic post. I'm not a big numbers guy and so I appreciate the Identity bit as I feel that it's just as important. I miss my fast "You'll pay for that" DRK in HW

[Xan_Kriegor]

Awesome topic. I would add some things to the OP but TouchandFeel has already done that. I guess with both posts we have all of the DRK's problems described clearly. Good work guys!