Are Dark Knights really that bad right now?

[DRKoftheAzure]

The primary reason Dark Knight has fallen out of favor, even with mechanical short comings addressed, is that it's been reduced to Dark Arts spam. It is effectively a tank that emphasizes the idea of 'Activity is not engagement'. Basically every change you have cited here emphasizes that to the extreme.

True.

Soul Eater doesn't matter now. It'll never get used, because your version of Delirium gives MP. Ask anyone how "Damage vs defense" goes when making the choice. Especially since Syphon Strike gets the health restore in your version, so you literally lose nothing in this transition. You Syphon -> Delirium every time, Soul Eater sees less play than Power Slash.

That depends; are you going to be main tank or off tank?

Darkside into Dark Arts doesn't change gameplay. Folding this into Dark Arts does nothing, and I'm sure just as many people will be upset that their full time damage buff is now also on Dark Arts. Spam it more, that's what people love, right?

Obviously bait.

Your Blood Weapon change isn't that clear. Does it become Blood Price? Does it share the CD / Ability slot with Blood Price? Moving forward all your duration increases refer specifically to Blood Price.

If not: Meh. Who cares. You just moved the duration increase from Delirium to Blood Weapon.

If so: Full time Blood Price/Weapon upkeep? This is maybe the only change that might result in interesting decision making, but even then, also completely nullified by the vast amounts of blood you want your Dark Knight generating.

Blood weapon upgrades into Blood Price. You got the "Darkside upgrades into Dark Arts" right but not "Blood Weapon into Blood Price".

Quietus, maybe. Abyssal drain, no. Full DA scaling on Abyssal Drain is dumb. You're talking something like a 4k heal per enemy hit on a basic GCD that's fairly easy to maintain in large pack. Blindly spamming buttons is what we need less of, not more.

Don't we already do that with current Dark Arts spam?

Sole Survivor change is counter intuitive and ultimately meaningless. It's a selfish ability. Making it something to blow during a party burst window means you don't get to take advantage of it as you need to. It's just another buff you throw onto the boss every 2 minutes, but 2% is also such a small number, its presence would not only be unnoticed, but not missed.

Also obviously bait.

TBN: Stop trying to turn Dark Knight into Dark Warrior.

Just remove party effect Warrior's Shake It Off and have only effect the Warrior.

[Lyth]

I don't think that tanks or healers should be differentiated on the basis of raid dps buffs. On their own, they can be the deciding factor to bring a certain job. Even small things, such as the way in which Veil and Shake can be exploited to generate additional Limit gauge, end up influencing popular job picks. If we start adding Trick Attack analogues to the tanks, everyone is going to start demanding to get one on their job, and we're going to end up with a 5.2 rework in which an unwanted WAR ability gets converted into Balance card 2.0.

If you got rid of Slashing, removed Limit gauge generation from barrier shields, and categorised tank dps on a spectrum from Burst to Sustained such that no tank was the best at both, you'd allow for the tanks to feel different while preventing dps from being the primary reason for picking a given tank. Ideally, it should be balanced such that a burst orientated tank pulls ahead on a low uptime fight, and falls behind under high uptime (target dummy) conditions.

Setting aside gameplay issues for the moment, I'd like to see changes to DRK focused around a particular theme, to give it a sense of identity. If PLD is thematically about supporting the group and protecting allies, I'd like to see DRK focused on survival and being the last person standing. It's already thematically implied, with skills like "Sole Survivor" and "Grit".

The obvious way to do this is to make lifesteal into a core Dark Knight feature. There are a lot of requests for Souleater's self-heal to occur out of Grit. There's no reason why that can't happen. You could build it into things like Bloodspiller and Quietus as well, so that you get that sense of stealing resources (HP/MP/blood) as you slice through your opponents. Similarly, Soul Survivor would have more value as sustain if it slowly fed you resources over time, rather than dumping it all in once the debuff expires.

You don't need any individual hit to give you a lot of life back. Finding the correct value is a tuning issue. You just need small but regular amounts that allow you to keep going just that extra bit longer. I'd like to see DRK be the tank that your team counts on to survive long enough to show them how the next mechanic unfolds. Relentless resolve.

A Living Dead rework would fit in with this as well.

[DRKoftheAzure]

I don't think that tanks or healers should be differentiated on the basis of raid dps buffs. On their own, they can be the deciding factor to bring a certain job. Even small things, such as the way in which Veil and Shake can be exploited to generate additional Limit gauge, end up influencing popular job picks. If we start adding Trick Attack analogues to the tanks, everyone is going to start demanding to get one on their job, and we're going to end up with a 5.2 rework in which an unwanted WAR ability gets converted into Balance card 2.0.

If you got rid of Slashing, removed Limit gauge generation from barrier shields, and categorized tank dps on a spectrum from Burst to Sustained such that no tank was the best at both, you'd allow for the tanks to feel different while preventing dps from being the primary reason for picking a given tank. Ideally, it should be balanced such that a burst orientated tank pulls ahead on a low uptime fight, and falls behind under high uptime (target dummy) conditions.

That's good argument and that got me thinking that while 2% increased damage received might not matter, but add in 20% reduced damage dealt might make Sole Survivor more appealing. Of course it would need to generate the same of LB gauge like the barriers, but the problem with the current Limit Break system is that it is shared amongst the party, which really ruins it for tanks and healers, A complete rework of the Limit Break system would be needed going into 5.0

Setting aside gameplay issues for the moment, I'd like to see changes to DRK focused around a particular theme, to give it a sense of identity. If PLD is thematically about supporting the group and protecting allies, I'd like to see DRK focused on survival and being the last person standing. It's already thematically implied, with skills like "Sole Survivor" and "Grit".

The obvious way to do this is to make lifesteal into a core Dark Knight feature. There are a lot of requests for Souleater's self-heal to occur out of Grit. There's no reason why that can't happen. You could build it into things like Bloodspiller and Quietus as well, so that you get that sense of stealing resources (HP/MP/blood) as you slice through your opponents. Similarly, Soul Survivor would have more value as sustain if it slowly fed you resources over time, rather than dumping it all in once the debuff expires.

You don't need any individual hit to give you a lot of life back. Finding the correct value is a tuning issue. You just need small but regular amounts that allow you to keep going just that extra bit longer. I'd like to see DRK be the tank that your team counts on to survive long enough to show them how the next mechanic unfolds. Relentless resolve.

A Living Dead rework would fit in with this as well.

Aside from Living Dead rework, that was what I was getting at. Granted you would need to rework all of WARs abilities that have lifesteal mechanic into just either raw damage or increase HP recovery via healing magic, while also increasing the HP boost effect on WAR. If WAR is going to have a niche it should be "big numbers, ungha-bungha!" and whenever I play PLD I always forget Divine Veil is even on my hotbar, mostly because of the barrier effect doesn't apply to the PLD so Divine Veil needs to be tweaked to where the barrier is also applied to PLD.

[AbandonHopeTD]

Give us Scourge back.

[KatsuraJun]

Give us Scourge back.

Agreed. Return Scourge, make Dark Passenger a good CD even in single target situations and I'll be happy with just that. I don't care about the Dark Arts spamming personally. I've played DRK as my main tank since it was released and the reasons I like it are still there (resource management focused gameplay instead of rotation nonsense.) But losing the awesome scourge animation and making DP bad when it used to be one of our best skills? That sucks.

I want to say give DRK a generic raid damage down debuff like the other two but part of me doesn't want every tank to just have the exact same tools at their disposal. Possibly some kind of DA+TBN thing would be interesting though, where it puts it on a 30 second recast instead but applies a raidwide shield could be interesting since it's a huge investment of resources (two times the normal cost in MP) but will max out your blood gauge with multiple shields popping - meaning for it not to be a dps loss you'd have to completely empty your blood gauge before using it while also making sure your MP is sufficiently high, while also being certain you won't need TBN in the immediate future to take a TB. More resource management gameplay! Might be broken though since it'd be up basically whenever you'd need it and has no real downside if you use it properly, while Shake it Off and Veil have much longer recasts.

[TouchandFeel]

Give us Scourge back.

If they were to bring something like Scourge back I would like to see them do something more with the ability and not just have it be a one button "moar deeps" ability.
For example they could make it so that it applies a DoT on the target just like Scourge but then also places a HoT on yourself, implying that the ability is slowly draining the enemy's life away and giving it to you. They could keep the animation/audio and just name it something like Vampiric Strike. Something like that would cover a number of common requests for DRK: getting Scourge back, better self-healing that is not stance dependent and a greater job identity through shifting DRK towards having more elements of a drain tank.

[DRKoftheAzure]

If they were to bring something like Scourge back I would like to see them do something more with the ability and not just have it be a one button "moar deeps" ability.
For example they could make it so that it applies a DoT on the target just like Scourge but then also places a HoT on yourself, implying that the ability is slowly draining the enemy's life away and giving it to you. They could keep the animation/audio and just name it something like Vampiric Strike. Something like that would cover a number of common requests for DRK: getting Scourge back, better self-healing that is not stance dependent and a greater job identity through shifting DRK towards having more elements of a drain tank.

That Vampiric Strike actually sounds like a good level 50 weaponskill and gives 10 and generates 1 blood per DoT tick(plus have it be HoT as you mentioned) and is an alternate combo finisher for Syphon Strike and it also has the lifesteal effect. Just need to buff Souleater blood generation to 20. And knowing the dev that worked balance adjustments for DRK, you know there is going to be a Dark Arts potency attached to it(please don't do that, fix Darkside and Dark Arts first if do decide to add Dark Arts potency)...

[Bhearil]

Wish that Dark arts gave a flavour to skills instead of a spammable flat 140 damage (aside Dark Passenger)

[DaulBan]

DRK plays like SAM, but instead of Shinten we got DA and animation lock problems. Whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing or something you can manage probably depends on your own personal valuation of how you wanna play the game. Personally it's fine, and given that DRK DPS looks like it's going to be rather competitive this tier I'm fine with that.

Ignoring changes you would like to see for a sec, DRK is more or less undeniably a good job right now. If you liked DRK in HW then surprise surprise the DRK kit is better now than it was before. It is more interactive in damage placement, it has more defensive options, it has some semblance of management at higher levels of play. Whether you like that gameplay or not is largely irrelevant in my eyes; if you don't like how DRK plays you can play a different job, and accept that the SB iteration isn't what you wanna play. The job itself strictly got better in kit since HW, particularly since 4.3, and I would hesitate to ever use the word 'bad' when describing it.

It is worse than PLD and WAR, but that is very different from being bad.

[Bhearil]

Problem is that being an inferior job than PLD/WAR while also being harder and clunkier to play its the very definition of being bad.

Its been brought closer to the other tanks with the recent buffs but the core issues will remain until 5.0. People dont enjoy to put more effort for less reward and mechanically speaking DRK is by far the hardest tank to play due to resource management and weaving skills. Pushing 3 buttons to do what others do in 1-2 is not very compelling

If it were the opposite,(easiest tank to play) people wouldnt complain as much if you paid for ease of play with a lower power cap compared to the other tanks(unless the difference were similar to RDM been beaten even by BRD), but thing is that only playing perfectly DRK gets closer ( but still is unable to reach them) to the other 2 while the difference grows larger when you are not. And not everyone can play a job at 90-95 percentile skill levels

To put in perspective, a bad DRK is so far behind a bad PLD/War is not even funny, while an excelent DRK still lags behind an excelent WAR/PLD despite being more skill demanding