Dark Knight Media Tour Feedback

[Ultimatecalibur]

Without the combo you will generate no mana and no blood, so you will not have the ressources to use FoS much, or Quietus, until you reach lvl 72.

At 50, Base MP Regen is 4k MP over 60s, Blood weapon is 1k every minute, sprinkle 2 Souleater combos in every minute and you will have enough to cast FoD twice per minute, but starting at full MP lets you cast 3 even before MP restore comes into play. By 60, you add Abyssal Drain and Salted Earth into the rotation for more DpS. By 70, you have both Quietus and Delirium which further boost Mp Restore and DpS every 90s along with a single Quietus every 60s from Blood Weapon.

Dark Knight isn't as gimped as it seems.

[Chrono_Rising]

PLD pt.1 Physical
Starting with 3 stored Sword Oath ...
FoF-Aton-CoS-Aton-Spirits-Aton-1-Intvn-2-Intvn-3-Aton-Aton-Aton-1-2-4-1-2-3
This is under the assumption that you will be able to fit 5 gcds per 10s for a total of 15 over 30s.

I’m fairly certain paladin rotation will be what it is currently with every other Royal Authority combo replaced with Atonement and your final cast of Holy Spirit being replaced with confiteor.

Based on what you posted you are leaving your entire goring combo at the door under FoF, and I'm fairly certain that is not what you will want to do in general. There are a few open questions about how many stacks we can hold, and how long the buff will be (right now looks like 15 seconds but uncertain if duration will change), and if we can refresh the buff with royal authority, but I don't think the proposed rotation gets the most out of your buffs.

[Chrono_Rising]

I have zero problem with people taking issue with things, even if I disagree. My problem lies with the disparity between the amount of noise being raised, and the amount of thought, research and reasoning being applied.

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.

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.


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.

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".

I point you to the note at the bottom of my post



Anything that appears while still a WIP is basically notation scribble gibberish

Your post has been up and incorrect for approximately 4 hours now. I understand that you are working on the blank spaces and real life gets addressed, and I understand that gunbreaker rotation has the WIP note on it. But it is not clear your note refers to paladin as well.

I quoted you multiple times because you seem to care about accuracy of information as evidenced by said quotes as well as the subjective/objective nature of the issues raised, I agree with your sentiment, and would also like accuracy. While I disagree on needing to say something is opinion, I believe all analysis is done with some level of bias that we need to be aware of, I do agree with you on accuracy.

If you are unable to complete your post in a timely fashion, especially when it has factually wrong information on it, I think the reasonable thing to do would be to erase your rotations and finish the post in a text document where you can work offline and post the correct information when you have the time to finish the work, rather than leaving factually incorrect information on it for an extended period of time.

Edit: there any WIP rotation stuff gone

Thank you.

[Chrono_Rising]

I'll leave you with this comparison, which nicely illustrates the long term evolution of most tank abilities in the game:






One of these things is not like the others. You can say that this is just "flavour", but at the end of the day, even when the devs supposedly try to homogenise things, it's always WAR that ends up with the "ability+1".

And that's why the broader community views WAR complaints so poorly.

I should probably not cross thread post, but this was raised in a different thread and I would like to expand on it in this post.

A number of the skills and directions that have been taken with dark knight look to fit into this scheme that Lyth points out.

Blood weapon 60 second cooldown gives 1 EoS and 1 bloodspiller, all synergy within the kit (like procing from oGCD moves) has been removed as well as removing the speed value. At face value this seems stronger than infuriate, except that you need to pop this at certain times in your GCD as well as meet some skill speed requirements to guarantee getting your 5 hits to make them equivalent. Except now infuriate gives a huge potency buff to Fell Cleave, gives access to an ability which acts to reduce the timer on infuriate, and synergizes with other warrior abilities. Double infuriate in the opener leads to cooldown reductions, inner release leads to even more cooldown reductions.

Delirium on a 90 second cooldown removed blood cost and restores some mp. Ok based on clips the mp gain is underwhelming, 200 mp per bloodspiller, while nice I guess it takes 3 uses of delirium before you see anything from that mana gain, it doesn’t remove guage cost from everything (living shadow will still cost you 50 blood), and has no added potency benefits. Compare this to Inner release which removes all guage cost (not just fell cleave but also upheaval and onslaught), automatic direct hit and crit, and as a secondary effect of the spam reduces the timer on Warriors biggest hit Inner Chaos.

This next one is still up in the air, but our Invuln may have recently seen the same treatment.
Right now Holmgang and living dead seem to be balanced as equivalents, which is also problematic, but it may have gotten worse. The language in the holmgang tooltip has been changed to remove the rooting downside. Currently we have 180 second cooldown for 6 seconds of cannot be killed with the drawbacks of needing a target and a rooting effect. In other words we have 30 seconds of cooldown per 1 second of cannot die on Holmgang. It sounds like one of drawbacks have been removed with no change in cooldown/invuln. Living dead currently has 300 seconds of cooldown per 10 seconds of invuln, with the drawback of dying if the healing condition is not met as well as having a variable timer. That is 30 seconds of cooldown per 10 seconds of invuln, except that we still have a death condition as well as having a variable amount of invuln time because we can be healed out of our invuln state early. The cooldown/invuln time is as bad as 300 cooldown/1 second of invuln to 30 seconds of cd/1 second of invuln.

I’m not saying warriors need a nerf, but I would love to have some of this game play synergy as part of the dark knight kit as we did in heavensward. Dark Knight originally had these great synergies within its kit, and each expansion we see more of them removed and returned as warrior lite type skills with reduced benefits. We are continuing to get the bad parts of this kit, like 10 second buffs that need to be timed and have skill speed requirements, but see a much smaller portion of the payoff.

[ADVSS]

How come they couldnt put a bloodpricey after effect onto Shadow Wall? I mean the 55pot counter damage of vengeance-let that stay a WAR thing, it would fit DRK more if they baked it into some of their cooldown usage (They did get rid of BP didnt they?or am I wrong)[personally id never of let BP go, but if the devs wanted to do it in favor of having BW only

[Chrono_Rising]

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.

Yes, they sort of addressed it while ignoring other key feed back. Like playing the job for the fast pace. Dark art on your dark arts was not interesting and left little to no room for anything else, and if you needed to mitigate in your opener, well then you have to give up dps for it because you had 0 oGCD spaces left in the first several GCDs pushing your oGCD moves out of raid buffs.

Having a single GCD rotation was also mentioned as not being interesting. That was not addressed, and we didn't really get any more resource management to compensate for there now literally only being GCD combo.

I tried to address in the OP that the proposed new version of darkside actually isn't representing any kind of choice. If you use all your EoS casts in the first 20 seconds of battle, you'll need to press EoS again before a minute is up to avoid overcapping mana, which means darkside will get reapplied regardless as long as you manage mana. Darkside management on shadowbringers dark knight is a red hearing, it is really just mana mangement disguised as buff maintenance. This is why in the OP I asked for versions for EoS and FoS which did more damage but did not extend darkside, because then we would have an actual choice in where things get applied and how to manage our mana, blood, and darkside buff.

I like the concept of TBN breaking gives a dark arts which can be used for a "free" EoS. However, what the kit seems to lack right now is synergy. TBN still has the danger of not breaking, it still is risk dps risk without dps reward, adding dark arts effects to moves in addition to the free proc is just my thoughts on how to lessen that while adding interaction into the abilities.

Snip

Nails it from what I can tell currently. We have little to no management, save doing things for trick attack, and if you don't have a ninja then alot of this doesn't even apply.

[WhyAmIHere]

How come they couldnt put a bloodpricey after effect onto Shadow Wall? I mean the 55pot counter damage of vengeance-let that stay a WAR thing, it would fit DRK more if they baked it into some of their cooldown usage (They did get rid of BP didnt they?or am I wrong)[personally id never of let BP go, but if the devs wanted to do it in favor of having BW only

Because as has been shown in 4.0 and for now in 5.0, SE has no idea what DRK is supposed to be in each expansion. In 3.0 there was a lot of emphasis put on mana management and oGCD proc synergy. Come 4.0 the mana drain from darkside was removed because reasons, and we were given a shoddily designed blackblood gauge to deal with. DRK obtained their new job gauge system later than anyone else, and as has been shown by the 5.0 media event, the acquisition of skills made no sense while leveling. (That is, the first skill you obtain at 62 is a skill that started as a 120s recasted ability, New Delirium. This was later dropped to 80s. Come 5.0, the order in which these skills are obtained will be adjusted... why this could not have been done in the 4.x expansion is beyond me, in hindisght seeing these changes.) DRK received very little in terms of attention from SE when it came to the issues with its tool kit, where PLD in 4.0's initial release had a few issues, and by 4.2 WAR was overhauled into something completely different from how it was in 4.0.

Come 5.0 we lose even further complexity and sense of reason for why DRK exists beyond "lore." Darkside is no longer a skill, now a tacked on effect to two new skills. (I'll point out it took at patch in 4.x, not sure which off hand, to make it so darkside didn't fall off after dying.) These new skills have become what the job's core will be: use on cooldown to maintain your darkside buff, but don't overextend their usage for the purpose of still having access to TBN should the need arise. What's this mean to me? It means a detachment of established job flow by segregating further the interaction between MP and blackblood, not directly through gameplay but by game feel as they're now less of a thing to worry about. You dump your MP, regen it over the fight, use TBN to give you a free cast of your darkside-extending-mana-dump skill, and sprinkle in bloodspiller and quietus as needed. (Which, due to how this lax focus on MP in 5.0 seems to entail, SE removed the MP restoring effect from Quietus... which they had to add in a 4.0# patch because they nerfed DRK's overall MP restoring ability via blood price...)

It doesn't take much more than a layman's cursory understanding to see DRK feels lackluster. the "1-2-3 sometimes 4" GCD rotation is disappointing, but as has been said isn't much effectively different from what WAR/PLD/GNB will be doing... except it is, but not on a mechanical level.

It's disheartening on a gamefeel level. Before yes all DRK effectively did was souleater combo, even moreso if you had a WAR co-tank and a party of DPS/Healers that knew how to manage their aggro. But most of all DRK has been a process of stripping away more and more of what it used to do come each expansion since it's release. A trimming away of abilities has left DRK with a hollow husk of what it once was. No more haste from blood weapon; sole survivor removed because, yet again SE made a change, an improvement to a skill, but later on removed it because reasons; mana / blood management has devolved from being this involved process that required attention and skill into this "oh i have enough MP/Blood for this? okay" lameduck pittance of effort to utilize; we still have the arguable worst tank invuln in the game; our capstone ability from stormblood, TBN, has devolved from an on-demand shield with a skill ceiling for effective use to a now "use this once or maybe twice a minute" button that only serves to extend darkside effectively, and act as a shield secondarily; ShB's capstone ability, The Living Shadow, is lackluster when paired with the rest of the job's kit in that, yes it's great from an aesthetics / class lore mindset, but from a gameplay setting it's just another button to press with no impact on literally anything else you do.

Every time SE touches anything with DRK's kit, more and more is stripped away, from a gameplay loop perspective to a job identity perspective, save for one thing. DRK's lore is that it is the job of those that pay a cost for everything they do. That seems to be the only element of its job identity that continues to be used when DRK's skills are designed, that they should have a cost. But as has been demonstrated time and time again now, SE does not know how to make paying those costs feel meaningful nor impactful. It has been simplified, reevaluated, reduced again, and then further simplified because reasons. Any and all feedback from the community is not heeded, a failing of the 1.0 mindset of "we know what's best for you," if you'll pardon the hyperbole. DRK's general reception from the playerbase will change come 5.0, due to it being the figurehead job for the expansion.

As much as people will recant "wait til 5.0 to play it, you don't know how it even plays" and "all we know is outdated information from an old build, things can change," you're right figurative person, both of those things are true. Until people level DRK to 80 and play it, and until we see the tooltips / toolkit DRK has all anyone has is speculation. But it's not against scientific theory to hypothesize what the outcome will be with the evidence provided.

This rant definitely went sideways, but I feel it was essential to convey ultimately that: everything DRK can do, the other tanks do better. DRK's design has had the edges trimmed away so much, been refined and distilled so many times in development, that it's lost the essence of what it once used to be. It has no flavor, no substance, nothing that the playerbase has been asking for. This is SE's DRK design, like it or leave it. I just worry that, after taking it through the expansion, playing the job, seeing what people smarter than I have said over and over and over again, and comparing it to what its peers offer, DRK will be just that, left behind by those but the most devoted to the aesthetics of DRK, the selfsame thing that too has been slowly eroded.

[Lyth]

Identity
I think the issues related to DRK have been fairly clearly laid out.

The single biggest issue is identity. PLD has a strong support aesthetic. WAR hits really hard. The devs made a point that WAR would still have the highest potency attack. They each have a fairly clear cut theme that's inviolate. You can't out-PLD a PLD. You can't out-WAR a WAR.

With DRK, it becomes a lot less clear. What are we? Last expansion, I would have suggested that we're supposed to be the 'fast' tank. The natural progression, I would have thought, would be to build on that. We don't need the Fellest Cleave. We needed fast, multi-hit attacks. Attacks aesthetically similar to Suzaku's Flurry of Blows. Attacks similar to Omnislash. It's clear that they've gone this route instead with Gunblade and Continuation (i.e. Renzokuken/'Continuous Blade'). That's fine, but we need to keep searching for an aesthetic then.

Shadowbringers' solution to this seems to be: well, you hit hard. So are we suddenly WAR now, except with purple flames? We already know that we're not going to be able to compete with WAR in their own design space. We all know that our Fell Cleave will always be weaker than their Fell Cleave. Our Inner Release will always be weaker than their Inner Release. So why are we going this route? And if we do ever reach parity on these big hard hitting attacks, then where's their individuality?

Another direction that we could have looked at is resource stealing. But a lot of this has been de-emphasised with the return of in combat MP regeneration. Blood Weapon is up less often, up for a shorter duration, and doesn't add anything on multiple targets. The wording also suggests that it no longer procs off of oGCDs like Plunge and C+S (Weaponskills and Spells only). Blood Price is gone (but realistically speaking, it died at the start of Stormblood anyways). Quietus doesn't steal MP. Sole Survivor is gone. Pretty much the only improvement is this regard is the now consistent healing on Souleater, but most tanks seem to have an equivalent to this now, on top of additional self-heals.

Just as an added comment with regards to combos: This business of 'combo complexity' has never made a whole lot of sense to me. You could have the most elaborate combo system in the world, but at the end of the day, it's going to be a fixed rotation that becomes muscle memory. It has nothing to with the technical challenge of a job. What influences the difficulty is the number of situational decisions that you need to make, which in turn come out of things like resource expenditure, off-global usage, and so on.

That being said, when I saw the benchmark, I thought that they had built in a new combo based off of MP consumption and was excited for a little bit.

Practical Considerations
Let's put this aside for a second. Maybe the job doesn't offer you anything particularly unique from a gameplay perspective. But how will it work in practice?

There are obviously some unanswered questions here. It's hard to gauge what the final dps numbers will be like, at the moment. But there are certainly some things that we can comment on. TBN is looking really good (probably the one redeeming part of this kit). But there's also a worry about how this thing is going to break in practice. Are we going to be afraid to use it outside of tankbusters for fear that we'll lose the resource value?

This magic tank nonsense is another issue as well. Identities are always based around strengths, not weaknesses. Rather than describing DRK as tanks that are strong against magic damage, it's probably more accurate to describe them as tanks that are weak against physical damage. If you want a magic defense theme, build it into the player's counter-attacks. Instead of "defends against magic damage only" it should be "counterattacks against magic damage only". That's how you keep flavour without making a tank into a situational liability.

Living Dead is unchanged, an looks to be even worse with rising HP values and the loss of Convalescence. Someone pointed out earlier that DRK has always been behind in the self-healing department anyways. That's fine. So then why do we have this healing penalty again? That's not to mention the fact that, when you look at the Invulns, DRK and GNB again suffer from that 'middle tank syndrome' in which neither get to be as good as the two tanks on either extreme.

I would have settled for a UI gauge that showed your healer how much required healing was left. They did it for shielding. I would have even settled for a public acknowledgement from the dev team that the invulns are a problem.

Feedback
The question of feedback was raised. Should players explain the reasoning behind their complaints? Absolutely. But I think that most of us realise that anyways. Explaining why you don't like something always carries more weight than simply stating that you dislike it. I think we've done a fairly good job of that.

Should the devs explain the reasoning behind their decisions? Absolutely. We're not entitled to anything. But when other companies are doing it, then it becomes an industry standard. You may not always agree with the reasoning, but some engagement and interaction is better than none. It's better than talking to the silent wall that is this dev team at the moment.

One more point worth mentioning: have a look at this thread, over on the healer forums. I'm not sure what the accuracy of this is, but four battle system designers for 17 jobs? Go figure.

In short, it was a mess, and it still is a mess. There is a lot of detailed feedback out there from the past year and a half, at least some of which has been clearly translated and passed on. I think what most of us want to see is specific comments on these issues. And it's tiring waiting for yet another live letter in the hopes of hearing even an off comment on these long standing balance and identity problems, only to hear more discussion on glamour inventory space and housing. I don't even care if the devs speak out on these job related issues and say something incredibly silly. I just want to see them get commented on.

[Danelo]

:/ No wonder there aren't any new ideas and everything seems to be a poor mans version of superior abilities, minus any kit synergies, from WAR (comment on linked thread).

I have to be honest, I'm really shocked things look the way they do for DRK right now. WAR's the golden child and DRK is the badly beaten step child of SE but all jokes aside (kinda joking) there were a ton of well thought out and interesting ideas on this forum and on Reddit about DRK kit and different synergies within the kit. Maybe it's naive of me, but I thought at least these forums were checked out be SE for feedback. I know some in the past have been commented on by staff.

I absolutely agree with you, Lyth, about SE responding to the community regarding this. Given what seems to be overwhelming and almost unanimous dissatisfaction from the DRK community (what's left of it), aside from those I highly suspect as wanting to maintain OP tank status for their preferred job(s), it would seem a wise move to address this now rather than wait it out. Maybe a response in the forums "we hear your concerns based on the media tour build and we look forward to addressing those concerns" or "we hear you and this the direction we are going and to this end we have implemented X". The silence is deafening and disconcerting considering the backlash to the rework design.

[ADVSS]

I wonder, is the JP community generally happy about this DRK rework, or are the DRK there discontent as well with certain concerns as we are?