My Rework of Stormblood Dark Knight

[Ekimmak]

For a moment, I wondered if Shadow Form is too powerful.

Then I remembered that Paladin gets a version that has a guarantee on it, so nah, it's fine.

[MiniPrinny]

For a moment, I wondered if Shadow Form is too powerful.

Then I remembered that Paladin gets a version that has a guarantee on it, so nah, it's fine.

Your comment made me lol really hard.

But on topic: Yes to all of this. I mean, I'd still love to have Scourge back, because Scourge felt good, but this... This is fine, no, more than fine.

[Cheyze]

I mean, I'd still love to have Scourge back, because Scourge felt good

I miss Scourge, too, and would like to see it come back.

Too bad a lot of people will reason it's just a button you press every 30 seconds and forget about it.

[Eyvhokan]

Just make it a second combo ender, though I don't know what it would particularly fulfil at the moment.

[Zegreiart]

Soul Eater – Lvl. 38 - Weaponskill
Cast: Instant – Recast:2.5s – Cost: 50TP – Range: 3y – Radius: 0y
Delivers an attack with a potency of 100 - Dark Arts Potency: 240
Combo Action: Syphon Strike - Combo Potency: 300
Combo Bonus: Absorbs a portion of damage dealt as HP. Increases Blood Gauge by 10.
Dark Arts Combo Potency: 440
Dark Arts Combo Bonus: Increases Blood Gauge by 20.
Dark Arts fades upon execution.
Removed Grit requirement for HP absorb. Increased Blood Gauge gain from 10 to 20 with Dark Arts.
Removed the Grit requirement for the HP restore to make it more in-line with Storm’s Path in terms of self-sustain. Added the additional Blood gain when DAed to provide an additional reason to choose to DA Soul Eater over the adjusted Syphon Strike by providing a slight boost in resources in the form of Blood. Essentially a slight boost in MP when DAing Syphon Strike, a slight boost in Blood when DAing Soul Eater.

I like your idea for it giving more Bloodgauge. However, I feel like it should heal for more. 440 potency damage is fine with me, but it should have another line that converts the damage done to healing potency so that the heal can crit and direct hit crit. This takes 3 GCDs and DA to do. It should heal us for a pretty hefty amount or DA instead ignores the damage penalty effect of Grit when using Souleater. Noticable control over our own health.

Dark Passenger – Lvl.40 – Ability
Cast: Instant – Recast: 60s – Cost: 2400MP – Range: 10y – Radius: 10y
Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 150 to all enemies in a straight line before you.
Additional Effect: Lowers the damage dealt by 10% for all enemies hit for a duration of 10s.
Can only be executed when under the effect of Darkside.
Dark Arts effect and Blind effect removed. Recast changed from 30s to 60s. Potency increased from 100 to 150. Additional effect of 10% reduced damage dealt by enemies hit added.

In my opinion this is completely backwards. Dark Passenger should be our version of Decimate. This move seriously needs to clean house when we press that button. It's done so in every FF that's featured a Dark Knight. You damn near kill yourself to unleash a ton of damage. In this instance, we'd DA to up that potency and then hit them with the boomstick. The damage down is a little OP given that we do have tools to mitigate the damage and do so easily. I don't really see a reason for it. I'd like to see our iconic abilities actually do what they're meant to do rather than have tiny bells and whistles on them. Just pure damage. But if you want a bell and whistle, have it increase our gauge to 50 instantly on use.

Blood Price and Blood Weapon should interchange with one another when we drop grit or just retool the ability to be Blood Weapon. Which instantly gives us back half a DA cost of MP and without a Delirium, 2 DA worth of MP. With Delirium it'd give us a full DA's worth of MP back and 1 additional DA's worth of MP over it's new duration.

The problem isn't our bloodgauge, it's our MP. The gauge is super easy to fill and use. What limits us is our MP. We have no tools that give us control over our MP for a burst of it, much like a BLM's Conversion. We can hide behind TBN, drop some HP for a chunk of MP, and keep going. Our MP should be looked at like our HP from the older FF games in how it's used and what it does.

Sole Survivor - Lvl.58 – Ability
Cast: Instant – Recast:120s – Cost: 0 – Range: 0y – Radius: 0y
Increases the “portion of damage absorbed as HP” effect and the “MP restore” effect of weaponskills for a duration of 20s.
Effect changed from a percent of HP and MP restored on target killed to increasing HP and MP restore from weaponskills.
Essentially this change was made to remove the requirement of having to kill the target to get the HP+MP restore while trying to give it a bit of a unique feel to it as opposed to a “push button get resources” ability like Equilibrium. The “HP returned” boost would double regular returned amount. The “MP restore” boost would be +1200mp per weaponskill use (not targets hit in the case of Quietus) ex: a regular Syphon Strike restores 2400MP, under the effect of Sole Survivor it would restore 3600MP.
Note: This affects weaponskills only; so only Syphon Strike, Soul Eater, Quietus and the new Blood Spiller. Abilities like Abyssal Drain would not be affected.

I like the concept of this. However, I'd trim the restored amounts down some to compensate with my proposed changes. Other than that, I love that you address the real issue with us: MP to Bloodgauge damage.

I had more things to say, but I forgot where I was going with a lot of this because I've been back and forth from this post for awhile now, lol. Anyway, nice job!

[aqskerorokero]

Just add more power to bloodspiller.

[TouchandFeel]

Since DRK is now under consideration for changes by the dev team and people are again posting or reposting their change ideas, I decided to update/tweak some of my old proposed changes and to bring them back into visibility.

The biggest changes since my initial posting are to Dark Passenger and Delirium.

So take a gander and let me know your thoughts.

EDIT:

Another change that I was debating but not fully sold on and was curious as to other people's thoughts on was to change it so that you unlock the Blood Gauge at lvl 60 instead of 62 by swapping the Blood Gauge trait with the Enhanced Vitality III trait.

Then with Blood available at 60, making Carve and Spit work off of Blood instead of MP while providing a greater MP restore when used. Something like below.

Carve and Spit - Lvl.60 – Ability
Cast: Instant – Recast:40s – Cost: 30 Blood – Range: 3y – Radius: 0y
Delivers an attack with a potency of 300.
Additional Effect: Restores 2400 MP.
Removed DA effect. Changed to cost Blood instead of relying on using MP (w/DA usage). Decreased recast from 60s to 40s. Decreased potency from 450 (w/ DA usage) to 300. Increased the MP restore to 2400MP.These changes were made because I wanted to both have an ogcd attack that cost Blood instead of MP and to have an ability that cost less that 50 Blood like the others do. I also wanted a single target focused attack that traded Blood for MP like how Quietus works in AoE. The recast was dropped to 40s to better line up with other abilities like Delerium and Blood Price/Weapon. Then the potency was decreased to balance out the Blood cost and the increased MP restore.

[Zeggy]

Most of these seem like pretty knee jerk reactions.. I like the 'general' theme, and there's a lot I like like the change to blood weapon healing outside of grit, and Blood spiller giving a heal inside of grit. I'd like to make a suggestion for Shadow form though. Where instead of it being a random 50% chance of not taking damage, shadow form creates a clone of yourself that repeats your abilities at like.. 25% of the damage or even less, but it takes the damage for you. So say you use Shadow form, you create a little shadow of yourself beside you and it starts doing attacks at the same time you do, at a far less amount, lasts for say... 6-7 seconds, and any damage you take is transferred to the shadow instead, and if it loses all it's HP before it's duration, then it dies. Make it so it can't be healed.

[TouchandFeel]

Most of these seem like pretty knee jerk reactions..

I'm curious as to what you mean by this and why you would think this, particularly since many of the changes I have proposed have gestated over a long period and gone through multiple revisions based on general feedback on the forums and I even provided my though process and reasoning for many of the more drastic changes.

Would you mind expanding on your quoted thought so I can gain a better understanding?

[Zeggy]

Would you mind expanding on your quoted thought so I can gain a better understanding?

I'll try to be brief about it. When I say knee jerk reaction, I don't necessarily mean "This was ideas chosen quickly". I mean "This ability isn't used often so make it overly good" or "Make a change just to have a change" without necessarily thinking about what could make the class better as a whole. And I want to start off saying that I do like a lot of the general ideas and I like the ideas for the following abilities: Unleash, Soul Eater, Blood price (the MP part), Shadow wall, Soul Survivor (Probably the best one in my opinion), Blood Spiller, Plunger. Continuing in next post