Dark Knight Media Tour Feedback

[TouchandFeel]

To be fair, there's not a whole lot of "thought, research, or reasoning" you can apply to some of the changes. They're that bad.

How so? Please elaborate.
Oh, and let's focus on objective bad, not subjective.
I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge issues as long as they are properly backed up with a reasoned argument, I've made some of those exact arguments already in threads about obvious and potential issues with DRK going into ShB.

[Derio]

Realistically you will not want to play it below lvl 70 after 5.0 release simply due to the kit being really wacky.

Its funny because for leveling roulette the adventurer in need is always tank, and I never run it because of how broken the kit is below current level.

I do think Blood weapon should have a longer duration. 10s is just to short.

Im not really concerned as if DRK isnt fun anymore I will just jump ship to GNB until 6.0 when they rework it.

[whiskeybravo]

How so? Please elaborate.
Oh, and let's focus on objective bad, not subjective.
I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge issues as long as they are properly backed up with a reasoned argument, I've made some of those exact arguments already in threads about obvious and potential issues with DRK going into ShB.

I don't particularly care enough (nor, quite frankly, am I qualified enough) to elaborate on DRK specific issues, other than what I said. 1 combo line is a joke, don't need an in-depth analysis to figure that one out.. Living dead is bad for all the same reasons it's been bad the last 3 years.. Plenty of elaboration available. Why Dark Missionary is magic only when every other tank can mitigate either is a mystery as well. Oh let's break down the pros and cons of Copy/Paste Inner Release while we are at it.

SE needs to explain their own thought, research and reasoning more than we do. You're pretty much asking people to make sense of things when all we can do is grasp at straws while trying to find some rationality in their decision making to begin with..

[TouchandFeel]

Realistically you will not want to play it below lvl 70 after 5.0 release simply due to the kit being really wacky.

That's true, but to be fair that has been the case since Stormblood and the introduction of TBN, so it's not really something brought about by the recent changes. Should it have been better addressed when they made the changes? Absolutely, but you can't really argue that it's something they broke with the ShB DRK rework.

Also, while potentially not as extreme as DRK, the other tanks have their kits jacked up as well when synced down .

I do think Blood weapon should have a longer duration. 10s is just to short.

That is subjective, not necessarily objective but you did state it as an opinion instead of an absolute so thank you, that is better than many have been doing. Also while subjective, it is a point to be made that warrants consideration and to be honest it's something I have debated too and haven't quite come to a solid conclusion on how I feel on the matter.

From what I can tell Blood Weapon has been balanced mostly around blood gain with the mp part being an extra that just factors into the general cadence of DRK's mp regain.
This focus on blood and having a 60s recast makes it appear to be an attempt at giving DRK a psuedo Infuriate equivalent. If you then look at the duration and how much blood you could potentially gain from it during the 10s, it's 50 potential blood from whatever weaponskills as long as you fit 5 in, like you would fit 5 FC in for IR with it's duration of 10s. That 50 blood is the same as Infuriate's 50 beast. So I think the 10s was set exactly for that reason.

However there is one big difference between Infuriate and Blood Weapon that I feel is worth mentioning, and that is that Infuriate can hold 2 charges. That is something that I think could, and perhaps should, carry over to Blood Weapon as it could actually have potentially better synergy with DRK's kit seeing as they actually have a burst period built around the 120s recast of Living Shadow which would make holding 2 charges of Blood Weapon to be used and synced up with Living Shadow perhaps a better option than just using it every 60s. While it would make Infuriate and Blood Weapon more similar if you look at just the abilities, it would likely end up playing pretty differently due to the interactions with the kit as a whole being different.

...I don't particularly care enough to elaborate...

If you don't care to back your statements up with substance, then it's really hard to assume they have any.

Anyways, I've already spoken on the whole "1 combo" thing and how it's functionally the same across most of the tanks.
DRK: 1-2-3 combo with 1-2-3-4/5 every ~20s-30s.
PLD: 1-2-3 combo with 1-2-4 every ~20s.
WAR: 1-2-3 combo with 1-2-4 every ~30s.
In fact, of those 3 jobs DRK is arguably the most complex because the TBN->DA->Edge/Flood->Darkside is connected to it.
GNB is really the only one that is noticeably different with the more frequent use of Burst Strike and Gnashing Fang.
You could argue semantics and say that DRK's usage of Edge/Flood isn't technically a combo but objectively it is the same in that it is just a single button press deviation at approximately the same frequency like the other tanks doing their variant combos.
So if the game-play around DRK's combo is a joke, then that also applies to at least 3 out of 4 of the tanks as well and is a much bigger issue with tank game-play as a whole.

As for Living Dead, yes it is a problem and one that I have been arguing to have changed since 3.0. That is not a new issue though and wasn't caused by the rework for ShB, so it's not at all accurate to equate the problems of Living Dead as problems with the changes. At most you could argue the devs are at fault of doing nothing and that they should have fixed it, to which I would agree.

Dark Missionary being magic only and whether that will actually be a detriment is yet to be determined. For starters most raid-wide damage has been magic damage, so Dark Missionary would work on it. If the way content works stays the same then Dark Missionary will be pretty equitable in most common use scenarios. If you want to harp on Dark Missionary for anything, it should be that it is too simplistic and should have some extra mechanic like, just as an example and not saying they should copy, the way WAR can burn cooldowns to empower SiO.
I get that the "magic only" thing feels bad, but in actual use I doubt it will be as big of a deal as people are making it out to be.

Lastly, you expect the devs to come and give you a detailed breakdown of their designs, yet you refuse to actually analyze their work and try to understand what they have done on your own? Doesn't that seem a tad entitled? I get that we are customers and that they as the company providing the product have a level of onus to address the concerns of their customers, but that stance is perhaps going a bit far. Besides, figuring out the job mechanics, rotations, etc. of the jobs is something that they want players to do as part of the experience and is something that many players enjoy doing, so why should we expect to be handed it all on a silver platter just because some players not only don't understand what they did but are unwilling to even try to understand.

Perhaps I am giving the internet too much credit in expecting a semblance of measured rationale and contemplative discourse, and honestly arguing for such is tiresome.

[whiskeybravo]

Lastly, you expect the devs to come and give you a detailed breakdown of their designs, yet you refuse to actually analyze their work and try to understand what they have done on your own? Doesn't that seem a tad entitled?

No more entitled than asking a non-DRK main to breakdown and explain every detail they (or others) see as a potential problem. At some point it's simply no longer worth the effort. And just because you can justify a bad idea doesn't make it a good one.

[Izsha]

You can infer a lot of their reasoning as it has been vaguely talked around at different points. For example, they have often mentioned how powerful hallowed ground is. But the raid community values frequency and easeof use oover power, duration. It explains why they never mention anything wrong with holmgang and still have that mega timer on hallowed. SE just disagrees with the community.

Fundamentally thats the issue with reworks and most of the complaints every expac. Se gives items different value than players. They want drk to focus more on irs cool darkside element. You see that aesthetically and in the actions. Players want the high skill tank back as drk, se gave it back as gun. They turned warrior from this knifes edge fluid job balancing act into ungabunga fellest cleave. And they did these changes based on a misinterpretation of feedback. Players didnt like dark arts spam. Repetative, no impact. Delierium no impact etc. Well its gone now and drk has more impactful actions. Some stupid streamer started the short bus about crit unreliability during berzerk. Here you go! No more problem! Ungabunga!

SE does respond to feedback. Its just not how players meant it. And part of that is on whiney short sited complaints that get traction and parroted by others (looking at you xeno sheep that bought into a fabricated problem). In that regard Touchandfeel is right. People need to analyze instead of kneejerk everything or you will destroy the jobs you love with poorly thought out salty posts.

[TouchandFeel]

No more entitled than asking a non-DRK main to breakdown and explain every detail they (or others) see as a potential problem. At some point it's simply no longer worth the effort. And just because you can justify a bad idea doesn't make it a good one.

If you propose that there is a problem it is your responsibility to state what exactly the problem is and why with enough substance that someone can properly evaluate the claim. Stating "it's just bad" is not anywhere near doing that.

Also just because you think an idea is bad doesn't make it actually bad, especially when you admit to not wanting to spend the time or effort to properly evaluate it.

You can infer a lot of their reasoning as it has been vaguely talked around at different points.

Precisely, a lot of what the devs are trying to do is not too hard to infer as it's fingerprints are all over the place. It's been touched upon in interviews, articles and other media. It's shown in the patterns of design from their past work in the game as well as their current and upcoming work. There is enough there to gain a basic grasp of it all if one is just willing to actually take a look and inform themselves and their opinions.

As for players asking for vague things with perhaps not thinking through what they are asking for or how they are asking, and the refocusing/changes to Darkside, it funny enough fits pretty exactly with what a lot of people were saying over and over.
"I don't like DA spam, it's not fun", "Darkside as a toggle is dumb, change it", "DRK needs more job identity", "TBN needs to be dps neutral and not a slight loss because of GCDs pushing back resource gain". Sound familiar?
Well guess what, now we have it where DA is a proc so no spamming, Darkside is a buff that we have to keep up with certain abilities, DRK is more focused around the whole Darkside concept and mechanics and TBN is now exactly dps neutral because it cost exactly the same as an Edge or Flood and breaking it gives a free Edge or Flood and those abilities are oGCD so no delay. People's feedback was directly addressed and they got what they asked for.

Oh and Izsha, this might be of interest to you since you really liked the burst rotation complexity of 3.X WAR, start breaking down all the levels and tiers of the proposed ShB DRK burst rotations, from what I can discern it looks pretty complex compared to what we have seen before, and it and GNB's burst rotations seem the closest to the way that 3.X WAR worked in regards to optimization, with DRK potentially taking the complexity crown due to the extra layer of double-resource management layered on top.
I'm curious to see your take on it.



Anywho ... I'm not saying that people have to agree with or like the dev team's decisions, or that they don't make mistakes because of course they do. There are things that I think are mistakes like the situation with the tank invulns. I'm just saying people should be informed and not just reactionary in regards to their decisions. If you want to argue that something is bad or doesn't work, then argue it properly so people and the devs can understand what the actual problem is. Don't just cross your arms over your chest and go "I just don't like it, it's bad".

[whiskeybravo]

If you propose that there is a problem it is your responsibility to state what exactly the problem is and why with enough substance that someone can properly evaluate the claim. Stating "it's just bad" is not anywhere near doing that.

Why do I need to rehash stuff that's already been discussed ad nauseum, some of which has been discussed LITERALLY for years. Not to mention, again, that I'm not even a DRK main. I can barely manage to get my thoughts on WAR correct, much less another job entirely.

Look, I understand what you're asking for. All I was originally saying is that some of the things (like Living Dead) are so bad that it's just redundant to repeat all that again, why do you need some detailed analysis from someone claiming Living Dead is still bad. It's been bad since it was created, and it hasn't changed at all. So all the same reasoning still applies, nothing changed.

1 combo line... DRKs have been sarcastically complaining for all of SB about how they just have one combo. What does SE do? Literally delete the only other combo so they really only have one now. It'd be comical if it wasn't so sad. So what if someone can demonstrate that "in the flow of combat it might not be that different" - it's still a bad look and utterly disregards the feedback that's been accumulated over the last year and half..

And really? You're going to try to argue that Delirium isn't a knock-off Inner Release but worse? Please..

Those are just some of the things that are difficult to truly find any rational reasoning for. That's all I really meant.

[shao32]

snip

ok i think we are talking about diferent things so i will try to explain my point of view the best i can, first of all this have nothing to do with DRK performance compared to the other jobs but the relation of gameplay betwen the player and the job.

im a DRK main since 3.0 to the point when the job was released the first thing i did was pick the job and level it to 50 to play the story with it, so i will expline the involution of DRK mechanics by expansions.

DRK have been know by his particular and original gameplay based on MP, primary based on the darkside system and the dark arts system and secondary systems like the parry and the reprisal low blow sinergy.

Darkside start as a MP drain that allowed you to have acces to different skills like dark arts, dark mind ect ect and lock you from getting MP from party members, this mechanic allows us to have a gameplay based on tactical MP management with great rewards and diverse ways to spend you MP and such, in SB they removed the MP drain and nerf some MP skill making MP being used exclusively with DA most of the time simplifying the gameplay around this mechanic, but the skill still lock you from get MP from outsiders and activate certain skills keeping certain feeling of tactical use and now in 5.0 darkside MP recovery lock from others it's gone and no longer activate anything becoming just a generic keep me up damage buff that only a donkey will let fade off, complety brainless.

dark arts was the bread and butter, a tactical skill that allow us to have a dinamic combo system, have DA? use soul eater, you don't have DA then delirium, breaking monotony, his effects including gaining more DPS when used on certain aoe skills with 2 or more targets to increase the self sustain, doge, blind or pure raw magic mitigation, DA was a tactical skill combined with the darkside mechanic make the job interesting and no so heavily based on a static rotation.
dark arts get nerfed on SB mechanically speaking, combined with the darkside nerf dark arts become just a 140 buff for you next action but hey still have diverse effects on other skills, in 5.0 DA is removed, no more interactivity with other skills just nothing, it's replaced with a generic pair of oGCD that they unique purpose is prevent you MP get overcaped since yeah MP uses are reduced to only 3 skills now, DA have isues for being to spamy but now that skill that give us so much fun in the past is gone.

the blood mechanic was an addiction on SB, it's basically a bar to spend you new 3 actions bloodspiller, quietus and a saddly reworked delirium, you use you gauge on bloodspillers and delirium mostly and this come the best part, delirium is/was a buff that grant you resources and extend the duration of bloodweapon to gain even more resources, with fits DRK theme pretty well, comparations with the old delirium aside the skill grant's us something unique to us and now it's gone, replaced to a copy paste inner release bcs why not.

several old oGCD like dark passenger, carve and apit, low blow, ect are being nerfed or removed, they literay remove the choise of carve and spit and you now get both effects, dark passenger from being used regulary to never used single target to being removed to add a new flashy version equally useless on single target.

in resume DRK will have darkside mechanic involuted to a generic buff that don't need effort to keep up, dart arts and his effects removed to get a generic oGCD without sinergy to other skills, aoe rotation gutted again, his unique aoe playstyle to 1-2 combo and more oGCD, and delirium mechanics complety sustituted by the mechanic from other job, i mean there is nothing left.... only TBN and just to become more harder to break and more punishing that ever.

i don't say the new DRK won't work, of course will works, it's become so simple and easy it will work, DRK lost his iconic gameplay his own feeling his own flow and i don't care about his performance, it's like a dragoon that no longer have jump or a ninja that have his mudra removed and sustitute to a chackra system.

meaby something sounds confusing, im sorry if i wasn't as clear as i want but there is a lot of stuff to cover and become a bit harder, probably i will miss something too, and sorry for the wall ^^

[Kyni]

Anyways, I've already spoken on the whole "1 combo" thing and how it's functionally the same across most of the tanks.
DRK: 1-2-3 combo with 1-2-3-4/5 every ~20s-30s.
PLD: 1-2-3 combo with 1-2-4 every ~20s.
WAR: 1-2-3 combo with 1-2-4 every ~30s.
In fact, of those 3 jobs DRK is arguably the most complex because the TBN->DA->Edge/Flood->Darkside is connected to it.
GNB is really the only one that is noticeably different with the more frequent use of Burst Strike and Gnashing Fang.
You could argue semantics and say that DRK's usage of Edge/Flood isn't technically a combo but objectively it is the same in that it is just a single button press deviation at approximately the same frequency like the other tanks doing their variant combos.
So if the game-play around DRK's combo is a joke, then that also applies to at least 3 out of 4 of the tanks as well and is a much bigger issue with tank game-play as a whole.

Ok your “combo” comparison is wrong on a few levels. Obvious disclaimer that everything below is based on the media tour.

1. Your PLD is just flat out wrong. It's gonna look like this: 1-2-3-1-2-4-5-5-5 repeat. That's not even considering the requiescat window every minute. Which brings us to:
2. Why are you including bloodspiller and EoS ( an ogcd) for DRK but exclude fel cleave and also ignore pretty much every ogcd except the former mentioned EoS. If you compare something you should apply the same rules to everything and not cherry pick what you want and no EoS giving darkside has no bearing on gcds or combos at all currently, so saying EoS is objectively a combo is like saying a bike is a car, because both have wheels.

So after pointing this out let's correct this comparison a bit:

PLD: 1-2-3-1-2-4-5-5-5 with 6-6-6-6-7 once every 60 seconds
WAR: 1-2-3 with 4 every ~20 seconds, 4-4-4-4-4 every 90 seconds, and 1-2-4 every 40 seconds
DRK: 1-2-3 with 4 every ~20 seconds and 4-4-4-4-4 every 90 seconds

Huh the last 2 look oddly similar and yes DRK has a bit more going on in the ogcd department than warrior, but in reality not that much.

The assumption of using EoS once every ~20 seconds only holds up in theory or in condition that are not optimal ( aka no trick attack and even then you still probably pool for one of many 90 seconds raid cds). In reality you are going to dump all 3-4 you get in a minute in that 10 seconds raid cd window along with every damaging ogcd that is currently ready ( except salted earth and living shadow, the first doesn't snapshot and the second has this 7 seconds start-up time so use it before the window). Yes this means double weaving and yes you are not going to use EoS much outside of the window. And about darkside? It has a mx duration of 60 seconds, so it will still be up for every trick window and one use of EoS will make sure it's still up for 90 second pooling ( you are going to have to dump one anyway for a 90 second window).

Warrior in comparison pools infuriate and gauge for every even trick window (the odd ones are covered by IR). Considering that DRK' s mp seems to be now tuned to give exactly enough for the previously described tactic, WAR now has more resource management than DRK. The only thing resource based gameplay on the DRK is that you want 1 TBN per minute to break to pool the fourth EoS. That being said the last part is tuning based and could still change although unlikely.