Dark Knight: 5.0x Feedback Thread

[Seku]

Uhhhh. You do realize DRK's original design had so little synergy that one of the most common complaints about it was that it basically worked against itself, yes? It would still perform quite well in magic-heavy fights, but the play style itself put a ton of people off from wanting to play it.

Dark Knight did have synergy when it first released. It put INT down up which basically kicked monk out of the raid Meta.

It was also arguably the best Main tank due to Low Blow damage procts and had some of the best Tank Buster mitigation due to the fact that most Tank busters were magic based at the time, which kicked PLD at the time out of the meta.

The only thing that was off was Dark Arts Dark Passenger + Blood price, due to the blind effect forcing mobs to miss you or if you by chance got a white mage that used Holy to stun the mobs.

The simple fix would have of course just been to do what they did with it now. Which is to allow for Blood weapon to be used in and out of Tank stance and have given it the added bonus of restoring MP per enemy hit while keeping it's same value for mp restore. It's not like Dark Knights where hurting for MP any how due to the fact that larger pulls would keep them full and thus allow for them to spam abyssal drain with Dark Arts to keep themselves up permanently, assuming no WHM with Holy.

As for how I think they should go about doing with Dark Knight this expansion though.

1. Lower the cost of the TBN to like half of a Edge / Flood of Shadow and extend the duration of the shield by like 3 seconds. This will be a small reward for people playing the class right as then you will then be in a DPS gained situation as a reward for having the shield burst and mitigating damage, and bring back some of the "Hit me and I hit you back" game play.
2. Lower the Recast time of Abyssal Drain to like 30-45 seconds.
3. Allow for the second hit on our AoE combo to restore a small amount of HP per hit.
4. Get rid of the nerf to Dark Mind, maybe up it's mitigation due to it only stopping Magic Damage. I think the same should be done with RI on warrior. Or make it so that they both just block both damage types.
5. Raise Dark Missonary's aoe magic reduction up to 20%. No reason why it should be lower than PLD's passage of arms.

I would make more suggestions about re-working some skills and bringing back old ones. Maybe putting in some actual traditional Dark Knight themed effects / abilities. But let's be honest, DRK isn't SE's dream child WAR. And before they fix DRK, their probably going to fix WAR and leave DRK in the dust....again.

[Absimiliard]

1. Lower the cost of the TBN to like half of a Edge / Flood of Shadow and extend the duration of the shield by like 3 seconds. This will be a small reward for people playing the class right as then you will then be in a DPS gained situation as a reward for having the shield burst and mitigating damage, and bring back some of the "Hit me and I hit you back" game play.
2. Lower the Recast time of Abyssal Drain to like 30-45 seconds.
3. Allow for the second hit on our AoE combo to restore a small amount of HP per hit.
4. Get rid of the nerf to Dark Mind, maybe up it's mitigation due to it only stopping Magic Damage. I think the same should be done with RI on warrior. Or make it so that they both just block both damage types.
5. Raise Dark Missonary's aoe magic reduction up to 20%. No reason why it should be lower than PLD's passage of arms.

I would make more suggestions about re-working some skills and bringing back old ones. Maybe putting in some actual traditional Dark Knight themed effects / abilities. But let's be honest, DRK isn't SE's dream child WAR. And before they fix DRK, their probably going to fix WAR and leave DRK in the dust....again.

TBN is already more than powerful enough. Gear scaling causes it to suffer a bit in non-savage content, but in savage it is working just fine. Mind you I would love it if they halved its MP cost, but the ability really is good as-is. Halving its MP cost would probably require them to nerf something else in our kit, which we really can't afford.

Abyssal Drain is a bad ability with how tank self-sustain is currently set up. A lower CD would be nice, but I don't see them doing it. Its current CD lines up with GNB's Aurora. That said, I could see them maybe making the healing aspect of it stronger. Right now AB's heal is pitiful unless you've got a ton of mobs on you, yeah? Well, maybe giving it a set potency (a bit less than clemency due to AB not costing resource/DPS) and no increased healing on larger groups instead of a shorter CD would work. Its damage component is already fine for something with zero cost and a heal attached.

Getting back a smidge more MP would probably be more beneficial in the long run than having a bootleg Brutal Shell heal attached, though I would love to have more self-healing on DRK either way. Has the worst self-sustain out of all the tanks right now, doesn't it? I'm still debating between DRK and GNB on that one

Definitely agree about Dark Mind. Or, if they're unwilling to return its mitigation to what it was before, they could lower the cooldown instead. 90 seconds is unreasonable for such a weak and circumstantial ability.

Dark Missionary is currently a slightly inferior version of GNB's Heart of Light. Their effects are the same, I grant you, but GNB gains access to theirs a full twelve levels earlier. I would love to see it made stronger, but the fact that GNB shares the exact same ability is going to interfere with convincing them to do that. Buffing one would likely necessitate buffing the other to avoid the online equivalent of a riot.

And warrior? Well, can't really argue with that one either. We'll probably end up seeing the warrior-god-of-tanks trope on full display again before too long. WAR and DRK are currently relatively well balanced; WAR has slightly stronger DPS normally, while DRK surpasses it when given the correct set of raid buffs. The one thing WAR does not currently have an answer to is TBN, and I hope they never do get something comparable.

[Freyyy]

Compare it to DRG's Blood of the Dragon, and say it's still complex. I dare you.

I said multiple times in my post that it wasn't complex and that it has never been because it's not the center of DRK's gameplay. What the hell even is this response ? Have you played DRG since SB ? BotD has nothing complex it's literally just toggle it on for free and do your rotation then everything automatically comes together with little to no thought process involved. In case you lose it (oh god), you can freely reapply it instantly because it has a very short CD. BotD used to be a bit complex in HW but not since SB.

HW Darkside allowed you to bank mana for future fights at the cost of its 12% damage bonus. This was common towards the ends of AoE pulls, when down to too few mobs for your AoEs to be worth its mana cost against so few, at which point you'd start readying for the next mass-pull by dropping Darkside and Syphon-comboing (be it into SE or Delirium). You could also drop it for any periods of pure downtime 3 or more server ticks long. Given that you ShB DRK essentially cannot drop it, it allows no such banking, and it encourages little to no downtime-awareness, I have no issues calling HW Darkside more complex or active than ShB's.

Yeah I should have accounted for that. It doesn't make for much more complexity though. It's just toggle it off when downtime is big enough (which wasn't that often) and toggle it back on when boss comes back. I'm not accounting for dungeons when I'm talking about job complexity either, but I guess you could since a majority of the playerbase doesn't do anything other than dungeons anyway.

It doesn't contradict the fact that ShB Darkside is still more active (active doesn't mean complex!) than both of its previous iterations since you get it by regularly pressing a button that deals damage and spends resource instead of just toggling it on at the start (and sometimes off and back on again in HW when downtime was sufficient during a fight). It also doesn't contradict the fact that Darkside has never been a complex mechanic to begin with so I don't see any reason why it should become so in ShB.

I'm pretty sure that's because of the gauge. If devs didn't decide to give it that fancy timer people wouldn't mind it at all. With that said, I would personally like it if they made it more complex because I like complex jobs (I've even posted suggestions on these forums for that prior to ShB's release), but I don't think that it's a groundbreakingly needed change. Other things are more important for DRK right now (like LD for example).

Sorry for the late answers to these, haven't been looking at the forums much these days.

[RadicalPesto]

Compare it to DRG's Blood of the Dragon, and say it's still complex. I dare you.

Shadowbringers traits have turned Blood of the Dragon into basically a toggle with a duration identical to its cooldown, meaning that in the very unlikely case you drop it, it can be instantly reapplied.

BotD is in practice just as simple and lacking in interaction as Darkside is, specially now that Life of the Dragon also starts as a 30s timer instead of copying your remaining BotD duration.

[Shurrikhan]

It doesn't contradict the fact that ShB Darkside is still more active (active doesn't mean complex!) than both of its previous iterations since you get it by regularly pressing a button that deals damage and spends resource instead of just toggling it on at the start.

It used to use one button. Now it uses none. It remains a non-decision that has no means of failure except by forgetting to activate it at the start of the fight, which has since become... less punishing, if that's somehow a measure of anything. I fail to see any difference except that it lacks the aforementioned minor complexity you just admitted HW Darkside had and ShB Darkside does not.

That's not to say I wish to waste a button on it. I'd rather have ShB's Darkside design over SB's given that the latter was already a non-mechanic. But you're not going to convince me that ShB Darkside is somehow more "active" than HW DRK's by going from 'barely a mechanic' to 'something entirely autonomous'.

I would not be able to tell the difference between the mechanic being removed completely and potencies increased by 10% save that I could hold onto Edge of Shadow for one further GCD or server MP tick, whichever would come first.

I'd gladly point out that we could basically say the same for Enochian, Greased Lightning, and Blood of the Dragon save that they require further button-spam, but fellow non-mechanics don't make the one any better.

[Shurrikhan]

1. Lower the cost of the TBN to like half of a Edge / Flood of Shadow and extend the duration of the shield by like 3 seconds. This will be a small reward for people playing the class right as then you will then be in a DPS gained situation as a reward for having the shield burst and mitigating damage, and bring back some of the "Hit me and I hit you back" game play.
2. Lower the Recast time of Abyssal Drain to like 30-45 seconds.
3. Allow for the second hit on our AoE combo to restore a small amount of HP per hit.
4. Get rid of the nerf to Dark Mind, maybe up it's mitigation due to it only stopping Magic Damage. I think the same should be done with RI on warrior. Or make it so that they both just block both damage types.
5. Raise Dark Missonary's aoe magic reduction up to 20%. No reason why it should be lower than PLD's passage of arms.

1. That would remove any risk to arguably the most powerful mitigation/sustain-over-time CD in the game outside of Nascent Flash-Chaotic Cyclone-Chaotic Cyclone-Decimate-Decimate on trash.
2. That's fine, actually.
3. Why? You just gave that over to Abyssal Drain, and Stalwart Soul is already powerful enough to make Quietus painfully situational in trash where you can make use of TBN on CD.
4. RI blocks all damage. Camouflage is the only other typal mitigation, via parry, but even it has a universal mitigation component to an average total of 15% mitigation. RI, like Shelltron, are also not equivalents to DM. Their slot equivalents are effectively Thrill of Battle on Warrior and non-existent (replaced by base block chance) on Paladin.
5. Passage of Arms is a longer CD which costs the PLD its movement, any further mitigation opportunities, and its uptime -- in many ways the most punishing CD in the game if used outside of jump phases, especially given that the buff can still be slow to apply to higher-latency party members, making it difficult to reliably weave. There is absolutely no way DRK should have something stronger than that, "anti-magic" tank or no.

[Freyyy]

snip

I actually agree with you on everything you're saying. I think we basically just don't mean the same thing with the word "active". Things like that happen sometimes and I may be the one mistaking then. Might be just a "feel" thing.

_________________________


I'd like to respond on the TBN issue that has been discussed a few times recently tho. People wanting it to become free are really starting to worry me. Do you want every job to just do everything for free ? Just press a button anytime and you get things ? How is that fun ? They've already ruined WAR with this mindset, please don't take DRK away.

I don't think that they should reduce or delete TBN's MP cost. I think that they should in fact do the opposite and give the other tanks' equivalents similar "drawbacks" that'd be refunded with proper use of the ability, or at least requirements (and Oath gauge isn't one, might as well be a CD). If you delete every single drawbacks/requirements on every single ability on a job it suddenly becomes way easier and less engaging. Look at what happened to WAR, who used to heavily rely on IB for mitigation. It was a very cool mechanic (and used to be my favourite tank skill in the game in ARR) but instead of expanding the tanking aspect of the class around it they just gave the class Fell Cleave on top of more free and frequent mitigation buttons which made IB obsolete and then outright deleted it in ShB while replacing it with the same thing but... Free, just on a short cooldown and with no damage attached to it (RI).
I think they should've done it the other way around. Reduce the number of CDs (like delete rampart for example), just give us the big 2min CD and the "unique flavor" CD (Camo, DM, Thrill, with a rework for the first two, and give one to PLD), and put a better emphasis on active mitigation directly tied with resources like old IB and TBN. Make it reward good use with a refund of its cost or similar things so that it ends up being (at least) DPS neutral if you don't use it mindlessly and tanks would feel much more unique to eachother. They could have multiple tanking skills that work like that or some of them could be amped by pairing it with something else (like Heart of Stone paired with Brutal Shell, but way better). Instead of giving tanks more abilities that just deal damage without anything else attached to it.

I'm more concerned about these aspects on other tanks right now than anything on DRK. I'm concerned about the evolution of tanking in general in this game. I like ShB's global changes, but I dislike that the tanking aspects of tanks is so same-y and free/passive/without consequences (besides TBN).

[Deceptus]

1. That would remove any risk to arguably the most powerful mitigation/sustain-over-time CD in the game outside of Nascent Flash-Chaotic Cyclone-Chaotic Cyclone-Decimate-Decimate on trash.

Curious how you're putting 4 GCD's (lets be generous and say 2.35s) in a 6 second window?

[Kabooa]

Curious how you're putting 4 GCD's (lets be generous and say 2.35s) in a 6 second window?

0 latency.

-.5 for the ability activation, first gcd at 5.5, 3.0, .5

Edit: Hoooo, i mussed there.

[Shurrikhan]

Curious how you're putting 4 GCD's (lets be generous and say 2.35s) in a 6 second window?

Typo; one Decimate too many. Largely irrelevant to its relative power, though, given that it only takes at most a Chaotic Cyclone and a Decimate to outperform TBN anyways if against 5+ targets (your minimum full pull) thus being able to outburst TBN every other time and break even with it the other use per minute -- hence, TBN's lone competitor for flat miti/sustain over time.