Are Dark Knights really that bad right now?

[whiskeybravo]

Living dead should also be changed, its so much weaker than the HG or holmgang in that it requires assistance from another person for it to actually be useful. While holmgang could use assistance its on a really short cooldown and has other benefits to it, but due to the self heal war has it is actually pretty safe to use.

LD is such trash. We were running v6s last night trying to help a friend clear, my buddy that usually goes PLD went DRK. Proceeded to die from Walking Dead after each of those whirlwind things. Every. Time. Many lulz were had, at least.

[Megguido]

Dark knight really lost its identity in SB, most of its skills either got deleted or put into the role skills, the dark arts spam is ridiculous, for every skill you need to use dark arts to maximise dps and if you compare the damage output from warrior to drk, war is so much more powerful and easier to play.

Drk also lacks the raid utility and defensive cooldowns of a paladin, there's also no self heal when not in tank stance while the other jobs have reliable self heals no matter what the situation, sole survivor isn't exactly reliable.

Living dead should also be changed, its so much weaker than the HG or holmgang in that it requires assistance from another person for it to actually be useful. While holmgang could use assistance its on a really short cooldown and has other benefits to it, but due to the self heal war has it is actually pretty safe to use.

It's a shame to reduce the job to that, or you probably don't know how to play it properly.

DRK lacks party-utility, right. But its defensive kit is superior to PLD, and self heals doesn't really define how strong a tank is. DRK have a slight self heal while in Grit, but most of all a 12k HP shield on demand.

Try to use Dark Arts on every skill and ability, you'll be out of mana in a couple of seconds. Dark Arts is spammed during the opener, a lot less frequently during the course of the fight.

DRK needs assistance to not die after triggering LD. But a WAR also needs assistance to not die after Holmgang, and that's not a 15k HP heal that will save you. For example, a DRK can invuln through 2 tankbusters in O8S currently, whereas a WAR has to Holmgang the first then use cooldowns on the second, or force a tank swap. Usually, if LD feels like trash, your healers probably are trash, because healing 65k HP in 10s with two healers is nowhere near hard.

[Garry]

snip

I'd have to agree mostly.

Dark arts on every ability doesn't make the class harder to play it's easier. If they made it so you could dark arts every ability in our kit. It would change how often you dark arts, but it will allow you to use DA when ever you want outside of carve and spit.

Drk as said out of tank stance has one of the better defensive kit as TBN compared to warriors inner beast can actually be used out of tank stance.

Only thing I'm not sure on is the 08s comment. And how warrior coulent use holmgang as it does have a short cooldown, but I guess the boss is untargetable before the tank buster??

Living dead is a weird one. It has a pretty intensely long duration which can used 9 seconds before the tank buster. Also even more so for 10seconds you are effectively holmganged after being dropped to 1. Meaning then following tank swap has alot of safe space in which for you to survive a tank buster and 3 gcs for healers yo manage your health. Which really shouldn't be that much of a problem.

Where drk struggles and the only real problem in my eyes is there is not compelling reason to take a drk as far as the group is concerned. They lack a wow factor.

[whiskeybravo]

Only thing I'm not sure on is the 08s comment. And how warrior coulent use holmgang as it does have a short cooldown, but I guess the boss is untargetable before the tank buster??

It's only 6-sec so it's not long enough to cover both Ultimate Embrace and the following Hyperdrive. It's really only a problem with DRK/WAR, however, since PLD can Cover the Hyperdrives for EZ mode.

But, Holmgang can still negate 3 of the 5 Ultimate Embraces which neither DRK or PLD can do.

[Lyth]

WAR doesn't necessarily need outside assistance after using Holmgang. If you were setting up an 8-WAR clear group, you can just stagger your Holmgang uses and rotate out the tank afterwards, allowing healing from Path and such to tick their health back up. Even in solo play, you can still use Holmgang and follow up with burst healing from things like ToB, Equilibrium, and perhaps even IB/SC chains under IR. Saying that WAR "requires" healing after Holmgang is a bit like the assertion that tanks need outside healing in raid content. All of them generally do, to be sure, but there are workarounds. At the end of the day, you just need to reach some minimum threshold before the next attack.

What makes Living Dead objectively different is that the ability itself kills you. No DRK is capable of outputting their full HP worth of healing in 10 seconds. Nothing short of a prepared healer is going to ensure your survival. You can't use it in an 8-DRK group. You can't use it in solo play. Tanks hate it. Healers hate it. Unlike Holmgang, it generally doesn't provide a recast advantage over Hallowed, so there's nothing to be gained there. Is the 4 second longer duration worth the 2 minute longer recast and death penalty in comparison to Holmgang? Absolutely not.

With regards to the O8S Ultimate Embrace discussion, there are only two UE/Hyperdrive combos in the fight, and neither PLD nor DRK are capable of mitigating both sets on their own. WAR, on the other hand, is the only tank capable of mitigating 3 UEs. The extra UE is a much better deal, because each UE mitigated with an invuln means that you save double the number of defensive cooldowns.

A lot of players are talking about how FFXIV's formula is in dire need of an update. Personally, I don't think another expansion of WAR/SCH/NIN dominance will be good for this game. But to break that recurring theme, you have to systematically go through these jobs' advantages and rework things into something more equitable.

[Hierro]

WAR doesn't necessarily need outside assistance after using Holmgang. If you were setting up an 8-WAR clear group, you can just stagger your Holmgang uses and rotate out the tank afterwards, allowing healing from Path and such to tick their health back up. Even in solo play, you can still use Holmgang and follow up with burst healing from things like ToB, Equilibrium, and perhaps even IB/SC chains under IR. Saying that WAR "requires" healing after Holmgang is a bit like the assertion that tanks need outside healing in raid content. All of them generally do, to be sure, but there are workarounds. At the end of the day, you just need to reach some minimum threshold before the next attack.

What makes Living Dead objectively different is that the ability itself kills you. No DRK is capable of outputting their full HP worth of healing in 10 seconds. Nothing short of a prepared healer is going to ensure your survival. You can't use it in an 8-DRK group. You can't use it in solo play. Tanks hate it. Healers hate it. Unlike Holmgang, it generally doesn't provide a recast advantage over Hallowed, so there's nothing to be gained there. Is the 4 second longer duration worth the 2 minute longer recast and death penalty in comparison to Holmgang? Absolutely not.

I had no idea 8-class clears and solo play were the golden standards for judging a class. Learn something new every day.

[Miyafuji]

It's a shame to reduce the job to that, or you probably don't know how to play it properly.

But the job is primarily dark arts spam and if you're constantly capped on mp then its a major dps loss/shield loss.

DRK lacks party-utility, right. But its defensive kit is superior to PLD, and self heals doesn't really define how strong a tank is. DRK have a slight self heal while in Grit, but most of all a 12k HP shield on demand.

My response to the thread is in general about DRK, which is what the thread is about. I'm not talking about current end game raids although o5s with the tank ghost for Drk is/was very iffy in comparison to the other jobs in which HG mitigates it all and War doesn't care because of the insane burst damage.

Paladin can easily solo a lot of content, same with Warrior yet Drk is the one tank that suffers in comparison which is somewhat due to the lack of a reliable self heal and LD being useless without someone backing you up, there's only so much a 12k shield can do for you while Pld has a 16k heal which they can even buff to reach 23k per cast which isn't even mentioning the crit chance which heals for around 34k buffed.

Try to use Dark Arts on every skill and ability, you'll be out of mana in a couple of seconds. Dark Arts is spammed during the opener, a lot less frequently during the course of the fight.

DRK needs assistance to not die after triggering LD. But a WAR also needs assistance to not die after Holmgang, and that's not a 15k HP heal that will save you. For example, a DRK can invuln through 2 tankbusters in O8S currently, whereas a WAR has to Holmgang the first then use cooldowns on the second, or force a tank swap. Usually, if LD feels like trash, your healers probably are trash, because healing 65k HP in 10s with two healers is nowhere near hard.

The point which you've seemed to have missed is that the shield won't save you when you LD, you cannot save yourself when you LD if you ever do content without a healer you will die from LD. Warrior with holmgang is different as they have reliable self heals in which even if they drop to 1hp from a tank buster, they can easily bring themselves back up solo, LD's cd is almost twice as long as Holmgang's as well.

Some more buffs to Drk would be nice, like souleater restoring a portion of hp (like 30%) based on damage dealt, and the debuff for LD requiring a top up of 50% hp for the debuff to be removed for example.

[Duskane]

Drk in more of a awkard state if anything

Just gonna pitch ideas see what people think, they won't happen but a guy can dream

I would like living dead to reverse damage for 7 seconds ,
So you heal all damage during that time it would be fitting (somewhat) thematically and help Drk lacking self recovery

Also for sol survivor to heal 20% hp and mp right away and get extra 20% if target dies within 15 second

When your self recovery is a 2 minute CD to wait 15 seconds to heal and gain some mp

I just want scourge back (it looked so cool why even remove it)even if it came back as a combo move off syphon strike and it gives 10 to blood Guage like soul eater
And the obvious soul eater heal out of grit

[Lyth]

...

If that's news to you, then you'll also be very interested to learn that self-sustainability is a very important quality in a tank. In prog, your ability to survive with your healers dead or otherwise occupied not only allows more room for error, but it allows your team to see how the next new mechanic unfolds. In some cases, it can even save runs. Outside of coordinated raiding, the ability to potentially 'solo' content is nearly universally useful, not only in making runs more forgiving (if you're playing with people you don't know, the more self-sufficient you are, the better), but also in non-standard content like Deep Dungeon (solo runs!) and soloing old bosses.

You might even argue that the potential for self-sustainability is one of the main reasons that you could convince a non-tank main to level a tank on the side. There are a lot of people who have WAR levelled. It's probably not for the aesthetic. Did you know that there are more named Final Fantasy protagonists who use anchors as their primary weapon than there are ones who use axes? WAR is easy to pick up, does a lot of damage for minimal effort even at lower skill levels, and offers a lot of versatility through its self-sustain. Even if you have no attachment to the job or tanking in general, WAR is still something that's handy to have levelled.

Under normal circumstances, you would have expected DRK to be pretty good at self-sustain, given its series lore of HP manipulating abilities, as well as its in-game lore of fighting well past exhaustion. There are two things that get in the way of this. First, lifesteal seems to be stuck in a turf war between WAR and DRK. WAR should never have had a claim to it in the first place, outside of the fact that Bloodbath was part of the mishmash of random abilities on 1.0 MRD, alongside the ability to be good at parrying and killing plantlife (5.0 perhaps?) Rather than having both jobs be lukewarm at this, I feel that WAR should drop lifesteal and focus on the temporary HP route a la Thrill/Defiance.

Second, Living Dead pretty much kills any chances you have of surviving without focused team support. The devs tried to be overly clever with the ability, but it's convoluted and feels bad to use. It's also probably the only ability in the game which requires another player on another job to know how it works in order to safely use it.

There are several tank balance issues that should be addressed. The balance between burst and sustained dps is an example. Jobs with high burst should do lower dps under high uptime conditions (otherwise, what's the point of not playing a job with a small duration burst window which accounts for most of your dps?) Why do we still have mandatory 100% uptime buffs like Slashing (and Piercing)? These should have disappeared alongside STR down, INT down, and damage down with the launch of Stormblood (I suspect they would have, too, except that their removal would mean having to actually go back and individually adjust job potencies to compensate for it). Raid-wide shields like SiO and DV shouldn't influence LB generation if they are going to be exclusive to certain jobs. But I think the self-sustain issue affects players across all skill levels.

[Megguido]

But the job is primarily dark arts spam and if you're constantly capped on mp then its a major dps loss/shield loss.


Paladin can easily solo a lot of content, same with Warrior yet Drk is the one tank that suffers in comparison which is somewhat due to the lack of a reliable self heal and LD being useless without someone backing you up, there's only so much a 12k shield can do for you while Pld has a 16k heal which they can even buff to reach 23k per cast which isn't even mentioning the crit chance which heals for around 34k buffed.

The point which you've seemed to have missed is that the shield won't save you when you LD, you cannot save yourself when you LD if you ever do content without a healer you will die from LD. Warrior with holmgang is different as they have reliable self heals in which even if they drop to 1hp from a tank buster, they can easily bring themselves back up solo, LD's cd is almost twice as long as Holmgang's as well.

Some more buffs to Drk would be nice, like souleater restoring a portion of hp (like 30%) based on damage dealt, and the debuff for LD requiring a top up of 50% hp for the debuff to be removed for example.

I definitely agree on some points. Mostly: DRK is kinda trash on solo content, compared to WAR and PLD. But PLD is the king of cheesing solo content, and it has all it needs to carry any dungeon, even if everyone else is dead. Of course DRK is weaker than PLD on that. But I'm not sure SE is balancing jobs on their ability to run solo or easy content, but more around Savage and Ultimate content, which was my point.

I was talking about using Living Dead in an organized party (where it's good actually), not in solo HoH/PotD or dungeon run with only one healer that wasn't aware LD exists. Even a WAR will have a hard time surviving alone after a Holmgang'd tankbuster, unless you use Equilibrium and Inner Release and spam Inner Beast, but then you're murdering your damage. LD is not an "Oh-shit" button you use when your healer is sleeping, it's a defensive cooldown that must be planned to really shine. If used in an emergency, the healer might have to react fast or else you're dead. PLD is better on that point since Hallowed can be used both as defensive and as an emergency button.

Also, yes, the shield won't help you once Walking Dead is triggered. The point of a shield is to not need LD in the first place, because you reduce enough the incoming damage.

Souleater restoring HP out of Grit makes more sense than Storm's path imo, why a big chopping axe skill restores health whereas a litteral draining move doesn't ? And reducing the health required to cure Walking Dead is one of the change I'd like to see on DRK.

All in all, it depends a lot on the point of view. Raiders might find DRK good, with its defensive kit, even if he's a bit undertuned compared to PLD and WAR about party utility or damage. On easier content, DRK might look undertuned.