Dark Knight: 5.0x Feedback Thread

[Shurrikhan]

So, now that I've played DRK at level 80 for a little while, I think I have a grasp on why the job doesn't feel quite right. This is mostly about the feel of the class, rather than any hard numbers, but I have an idea on how to make things better without fundamentally altering anything.

Basically, the main problem is the total lack of any internal synergy. None of your skills affect each other, so you don't care when you press them. This leads to you just playing whack-a-mole with your cooldowns. I think the best place to add in some synergy isn't with the cooldowns, but with the Darkside buff. Currently it's just a flat 10% damage increase with 100% uptime, and you never have to care about it unless things have gone very wrong. I think it'd be better served as a more powerful buff with less uptime. Say (just throwing some numbers out here) every time you use Edge/Flood, you get +30% damage for 5 seconds. Then you have incentive to use your good stuff during your small Darkside windows. You can leave the duration stacking up to double so you can chain them effectively and use it for all of Delirium. This also has a small bonus effect of introducing MP management as a concept at level 30 rather than level 70. You don't wanna just spam them, because the duration only goes up to 10s max.

Now, the biggest problem with this kind of system that I see is that if your TBN doesn't break, it goes from being a moderate DPS loss to a devastating one. There are a couple ways you could address this. The easiest one would just be to make it really easy to break. Increase the duration so that it's almost certainly going to be broken just from auto-attacks. More interestingly, you could double down on the mechanic of timing the shield right, and have casting TBN give you a Darkside buff on its own, in addition to the current Dark Arts proc. This way, properly using the shield would actually be a DPS gain, rather than DPS neutral, and not breaking it would only be the same loss you currently have (relative to just casting Edge/Flood instead). You'd also be encouraged to toss it around while offtanking so you can get a nice boost out of it.

Interesting. I'm not sure I'd like the gameplay tightened to quite that extent, but it's compelling food for thought, at the very least.

I can easily imagine, for instance, that MP spent (or %barrier consumed in TBN's case) = some proportionate duration of Darkside, wherein your damage (and/or maybe even defense, if we ever wished to hazard unique mitigation again) is buffed, but at that point your every GCD would be scripted down to a tee, as you'd want to have a certain amount of combo progress and X Bloodspillers ready to go with every EoS and you'd be effectively barred from using any oGCD out of the DS window, often including chained EoS uses. We'd go from the loosest and subtlest tank design to the, if experienced negatively, the most oppressive.

I'm reiterating from a prior post at this point, but I feel that ShB's design issues fall very similarly to SB's coming from HW. When we went from HW to SB, we lost significant variety in our oGCD spenders, along with certain skills which sort of 'punctuated' our rotation (e.g. Scourge). Rather than retuning these skills a bit to make their varying options more frequently viable, those options were simply removed. There were, therefore, fewer of what we could call "DRK" decisions or "DRK" moments. SB at least offered us some new bits of ridiculous in turn, like Blood Weapon-Quietus, but for the most part the transition from HW to SB was felt as a noticeable loss because of the diminished count and variety of iconic actions. I think that is the same issue ShB now struggles with. Your Darkside window idea could be a huge boon, but I fear that if something like that were given as quite nearly the sole mechanic by which we give import to our other actions, most players would find it a change for the worse rather than an improvement.

[DRKoftheAzure]

I like the class, does not mean that there are no problems with it here and there. It's quite easy to play, which might be not a bad thing, but the more i play, the more i notice how scripted things are in general.

Fair point. Though I will say that it is too easy to play personally.


And currently the main problem for both Dark Knight and Warrior DPS rotation-wise is "playing whack-a-mole" with your damage dealing cooldowns.


Defensively speaking all tanks need a better identity which can be solved by taking what is own unique buff that gives them an edge over the other tank but has some synergy with the other tanks(Gunbreaker lacks this sort of thing defensivly speaking but that might be for another thread for someone else to point out and talk about if they end up beating me to the punch).


And as for buff management between fights Darkside and Storm's Eye are basically there to grief the tanks for not doing big pulls(Heavensward and Stormblood iterations of Darkside was not perfect and were probably overtuned on the drawback side of things, but Stormblood Darkside was more or less better, because it no longer passively drain MP to keep it active).

[DRKoftheAzure]

Bumping this to the front to see if there might be a 5.x Feedback thread from Chrono_Rising

[Zarkovitch]

They need to remove Salt of Earth & put the dot effect on Abyssal Drain

[shao32]

They need to remove Salt of Earth & put the dot effect on Abyssal Drain

Something much better, bring back scourge.

[DRKoftheAzure]

They need to remove Salt of Earth & put the dot effect on Abyssal Drain

Why not have another AoE GCD combo of Salted Earth followed up by Abyssal Drain? DRK really needs more combo paths, that's for sure....

[Cabalabob]

Bumping this to the front to see if there might be a 5.x Feedback thread from Chrono_Rising

Nothing has changed since Shadowbringers launch. They increased the sentinel equivalent duration across the board and made reprisal AoE. Nothing specific for DRK has happened so all the complaints still stand.

[Danelo]

Something much better, bring back scourge.

Do away with salted earth. Ground AoEs are a pain to me and the potency is pitiful at this point anyway.

Make scourge oGCD ~10-15 seconds.

Make AD a GCD again with a heal of 50-100 pot (obviously you can play with the numbers). Additional effect will spread scourge dot to surrounding enemies and refresh the dot.

Aoe combo:
Unleash>Stalwart soul (mp gain x amount)>AD (hp gain x amount, gain blood x amount (trait), spread/refresh scourge if on current target (trait)).

Single target:
Hard slash>siphon strike (mp and hp gain here)>soul eater (blood gain).

AoE and single target combo can be used interchangeable (example: if you wanted a slightly higher dose of HP you could do Hard Slash>Siphon Strike>AD)

TBN goes back to accumulation of blood gauge.

Add consequential blood gauge spender to prevent over-capping (example: blood shield ~10k shield to swap those resources back to mp, low blow, who knows, I'm just spit balling here).

Automatically, once blood gauge reaches 100% the darkness overtakes you for x seconds ~15 seconds. Your 1-2-3 (single target and AoE) combos are replaced with “darkness” combos (to save space on the Hotbar). Add blood spiller and quietus in their respective combos (somewhere in the 1 2 3) in addition 4 new grandiose attacks (2 for aoe, 2 for single target). Darkness combos would be higher potency in damage but no mp, hp, or blood will be generated. While in your darkness combo phase Mp will drain. If you run out of mp you will automatically be knocked out of your darkness combo burst phase regardless of if you have more time left (example: In this example darkness phase is 15 seconds long. If you run out of mp at 10 seconds into the darkness phase you automatically locked out of you darkness combos and back to the regular ones).

Delirium will extend the duration of darkness combo duration in addition to grant x amount of mp.

BW gives haste for x amount of time and increases blood by ~50 and some mp.

EoS/Fos can remain as is to keep darkside buff in place. EoS/FoS will not get procs from TBN.

CnS could be a scaling ability that will grant ehh ~1500 mp, but damage scales with the amount of mp you have. The less the mp you have the more damage it does. Going into darkness burst phase resets CnS.

Darkside still retains it's 10%(? I think) damage buff. In addition when darkside is active CnS has a ~25% chance to proc on critical hits.

Shadow clone can stay but needs to feed off MP for DRK to have two burst windows and one they can open up with at the beginning of the fight. (Don't give me another WAR hand me down with infuriate to go straight into darkness combo).

LD, ugh. If I had it my way I would flip things around. Instead of doing the healing on the back end where no one really knows exactly where they are at on the way to max HP. I would give the DRK an empowered shadow of inner darkness (would be an easy graphic to pick up on for healers) which we already have a taste of with the current shadow. I have in mind a black and reddish/purplish shadow growing out for the players body to x2 their size. The inner darkness would empower the dark knights HP pool to double or triple its normal value (hard for me to say since I don't know what the current numbers are for the heaviest tank busters in current content and no one does for the future). Healers would have the first 10 seconds before the TB to throw up heals/regens/bene to bump that pool up as high as they can get it before the hits. The real fun would be adding TBN on top of that fully extended HP bar for a massive shield. The downside would be if you die then you die - no safety net at 1 hp. It would retain identity and allow healers to see what they are up against. (might be difficult to get the math right when you throw in all the variables but it could work out and man that would be cool).

The above might be ungodly OP in a dungeon with bene but, its just an idea after all.

If SE wants to keep LD as is then just give bene as a role action. I know some will hate me for saying it but LD is a healer CD clearly meant to go alongside with Bene. LD is designed around that 10 sec invul window so give ALL the healers some control to make that full invul window happen reliably.

I know I probably missed an ability somewhere in there but its a framework. There is room to tweak CD timers and potencies but I feel like that is a DRK design that pays some homage to versions that came before it and is unique as well. Thanks!

[Hasrat]

So I don't really tank much, but still level all the jobs for funsies. But, of the three (sans GNB), DRK is feeling the least intuitive. Already had everything at 60 by 5.0, and I've only just rotated around to working DRK up to 70, obviously some big changes to adjust to.
I'm not really looking for advice on the tanking side. Use CDs, don't get hit, whatever, I'm not tanking anything important. I'm just not sure I totally understand the damage side of things.
One basic combo (and one AoE). Standard damage boost CD. Simple enough. C&S, Salted Earth, Abyssal Drain, just use on cooldown I guess? What's the usage of these Flood/Edge of Darkness abilities? One single, one group, sure. Do I just use them as long as I've got the MP for it? Try to weave them in during combo? Is there any reason I would hold back on them?

Hopefully going forward with leveling, I can at least better understand things as they come.

[shao32]

So I don't really tank much, but still level all the jobs for funsies. But, of the three (sans GNB), DRK is feeling the least intuitive. Already had everything at 60 by 5.0, and I've only just rotated around to working DRK up to 70, obviously some big changes to adjust to.
I'm not really looking for advice on the tanking side. Use CDs, don't get hit, whatever, I'm not tanking anything important. I'm just not sure I totally understand the damage side of things.
One basic combo (and one AoE). Standard damage boost CD. Simple enough. C&S, Salted Earth, Abyssal Drain, just use on cooldown I guess? What's the usage of these Flood/Edge of Darkness abilities? One single, one group, sure. Do I just use them as long as I've got the MP for it? Try to weave them in during combo? Is there any reason I would hold back on them?

Hopefully going forward with leveling, I can at least better understand things as they come.

DRK kit have zero sense bcs is designed to have none, it's simple at it looks and works like you think it works, the only part you missing edge/flood is edge are spamed (saving 3k of mp for TBN) under blood weapon under raid buffs every 60s, the MP economy of DRK is so slow you get all the MP back for the next blood weapon, when that happen you spend the rest of the time doing nothing until next blood weapon, for flood since TBN have priority under aoes situations you use the first for the damage buff and the rest from TBN procs so you don't run out of MP to fast and thats it