What could DRK have learned from FFXI?

[Seku]

Heavy armour does not make a job a tank. DRKs throughout the series wore heavy armour to compensate for the fact they were consuming their own hp to deal more damage. There was nothing tanky about them. Sure they could tank by giving up their identity as a DRK (e.g. NOT consuming their own hp), but at that point you might as well be using a knight/paladin (something even Cecil realised).

The point here is that unlike most DRKs throughout the series, FFXI DRK didn’t just not use its skills to tank, it had skills that actually let it tank as mentioned in the OP. Yet none of these skills made it into FFXIV.

In other words, the only iteration of DRK in ff history that had tank-like skills was not drawn from for a tank iteration of DRK.

You can say “oh well ffxiv is doing its own thing”. But you could give a job a club, cloth armour and time magic and call it dragoon. But that would be dragoon in name alone since it doesn’t bring anything that identifies it as a dragoon.



Counter attacks I’d say belong more on WAR. The reducing defense and consuming own HP however I think they avoided that because a tank that consumes its own hp would be a healers nightmare.

That left drain tanking as the only thing that could really fit as a “DRK theme” but like you said when DRK released WAR also had a monopoly on that with skills like bloodbath, storm’s path and inner beast. And this left DRK in kind of an identity crisis because it didn’t want to copy WAR.

Fast forward to today and how ironic. WAR has lost a lot of its drain identity to be more of a dps tank. And DRK is now, go figure... copying WAR.

Yep which is why I'm saying that they can
1. Make it into a DPS job (not going to happen).
or
2. Find a way to over fill it's normal health bar (like warrior did) while keeping the same damage reduction abilities and then allowing it to use said HP to deal damage. It would be like making another version of TBN. Call it Drain (or w/e). You deal damage to the enemy, you get a increase of hp (which is what TBN does effectively, as you gain 25% of your health but in a shield variation) and then use said new HP to dish out more damage.

They could re-work Dread Spikes, but it would end up functioning like vegence or w/e from warrior. Or invincible +1. In short, warrior is actually probably acting as a typical Dark Knight would without the HP consumption.

Other than that, there is no way to really make a true Dark Knight in FF14 as they already messed up by making it a tank and then before it even arrived they had given all concepts (that I can think of) that it could have used to Warrior. With their current trend of balance, it's highly doubtful they will allow for it to gain enfeebles due to fear of it becoming a tank that is desired above all others.

11 focused way more on strategy and customization rather than pre-defined fights and class builds. Which is what made it unique.

So the tactics remake. Because gafgarion and cid never once took damage from their sword skills. In the original.

And i said if you count x-2 as one of the versions where DRK took their own hp to deal damage. All other drk renditions never did any of that. Except for original jp hard mode iv and even then darkness was such a weak skill cecils normal attacks did more.

Cid is a swordsaint and Gafgarion "dark knight" later was translated into Fellknight. Obviously so that SE could make the difference. They also both happen to be NPC's that you don't keep in your party. Also, in the IV remake, darkness takes 10% of your health to double your attack for 3 turns. So...yeah it does take damage to increase damage.

Any how, I'm done arguing with you as you've not brought any counter argument or real counter evidence to prove your point - which is that Dark Knight is "tanky".