Dark Knight - I Used To Love You

[MiraAlora]

And I still sort of do love Dark Knight. The aesthetic and lore of Dark Knight are probably my favorite thing in FFXIV next to the MSQ. I enjoyed the previous renditions of DRK, even for all their faults. I even sort of liked the new changes.

But after taking a break and coming back, I hopped into the newest dungeon to find that I didn't enjoy myself. DRK felt super clunky and not very engaging. Abilities didn't feel like they had much purpose outside of "do damage". After I swapped to Gun Breaker to do a few dungeons with (in the process of leveling still) I found myself enjoying the game by miles more. Everything felt connected and each button press felt like it was working towards the next big swirl of animations. It felt good and rewarding to play with my resources in mind. I feel like DRK has become a shadow of its former self, even with it's flaws.

I think back to HW when MP management was a thing and knowing when you could squeeze out an extra Dark Arts for just that little bit more damage before needing to pool your MP and not drop out of Darkside. It was really engaging. The job was easy enough to pick up, and enough depth for those who wanted to push their gameplay just that little further. I miss that.

Now I could be completely wrong about DRK, but when I went to hit my keybind for Dark Arts to use Carve and Spit, I felt a little moment of disappointment and longing. Here's to hoping that whatever SE has in store for DRK, if anything at all, that it'll be good.

PS: Shoutout to Monks who've been suffering since ARR.

[Falar]

HW was the best. We really got the shaft in SB.

[Lersayil]

You are welcome to your opinion. I will however respectfully disagree. I miss the aoe rotation from SB, but other than that I've found previous iterations to be way more clunky / not worth the effort.

I can also still feel the DA spam in my right thumb.

[Doozer]

Abilities didn't feel like they had much purpose outside of "do damage".

[...] knowing when you could squeeze out an extra Dark Arts for just that little bit more damage

Hm. So what's the ideal then? Do damage but you have to hit more buttons first?

[Saefinn]

3.0 DRK was my favourite, 4.0 was still good. 5.0 is...well, it feels like a different job with very little of what I loved about DRK there, so I don't like the change. But i am not bored, it just feels worse and not as satisfying.

[ReiMakoto]

My biggest complaint with 5.0 drk is that it feels like its a new job, which alienates the people who liked how it was in previous iterations, I like the SB version for example. Obviously theres gunbreaker now for a similar style to what drk was, but it feels bad when youve mained the job for however many years then have to swap now something else plays like how it used to.

[shao32]

I personally agree with you OP, DRK gameplay it's poorly designed, not only it's to basic to be consider interesting, his current mechanics are to generic and boring that make the job feel lame on every content, it's have the most basic of the combos rotation, have the most basic gauge usage, have the most basic burst rotation and literally lost everything that make it unique and engaging, it's a brainddead job and a insult to anyone to play older versions and have 2 braincells to rub.

DRK need a rework from the feet to the head, recover his complexity, recover his gameplay, recover everything that make it unique and stop ripping again and again his unique stuff to end being filled with generic copi pasted mechanics from other jobs and evolve like should be following his own path and stop making it baby proof, DRK was complex tactical job and thats was the fun with it, we don't need clone tanks, bring back Heavensward DRK SE.

[RadicalPesto]

Legitimately still confused about why, if the purpose of new Delirium was to give DRK a burst phase, they didn't just make it something like a 20s, 20% haste buff that would fit with the pre-existing flavour of the class instead of an inferior Inner Release for Bloodspiller, a skill that doesn't even look very nice when spammed. Maybe they didn't want DRK to ever get more than 5 gcds of the new Blood Weapon? But that skill could just work like Bunshin's stack system, and probably needs to for QoL reasons.

[TouchandFeel]

... Legitimately still confused about why, if the purpose of new Delirium was to give DRK a burst phase, they didn't just make it something like a 20s, 20% haste buff ...

There is a good reason why they don't use haste buffs as the foundation for burst periods.

They have designed burst periods on the the jobs to line up with raid buffs, meaning that they tend to occur at 60s and 90s intervals and last for about 10-15 seconds.

For a haste effect of, let's use the 20% that you proposed, you would get an extra GCD every 5 GCDs, with ~5 GCDs fitting within the ~10s-15s raid buff burst windows. That's not a lot of extra DPS and doesn't really make for much of a "burst" outside of what you are normally capable of. Now, if stretched over a longer period of time, like 20s or even a longer duration, you will see a bit of an uptick of overall DPS for the fight, but again you are falling outside of the constraints of the burst periods.

Burst periods need to concentrate a large amount of damage within a short amount of time, that is what makes them burst periods because well ... it's a burst of damage and activity. A little extra here and there, like what a haste effect would provide just doesn't do that.

Now let's say you increased the haste effect to something much higher, like 50% or even 100%. That could potentially create the necessary concentration of outgoing damage to work as a burst period but it is also likely to cause a lot of technical problems with the GCD time being so low, not to mention player-side issues such as trying to weave or double-weave oGCDs between those greatly compacted GCDs.

So basically you are left with haste effects just not working right to create a burst period, they are either too little stretched out over too long or they compact things too much and cause problems.

Haste effects are really better utilized as an additional effect for abilities or as something of a more passive effect to increase overall damage.
For example, probably the best place to reintroduce a haste effect to DRK would be to add it back to Blood Weapon, giving it a 15-20% haste effect to compensate for the now lower duration basically allowing you to squeeze one more GCD into it. The mini "burst" aspect of Blood Weapon would still be provided by the resource gain but the haste would add just a little something extra to it.

[HyoMinPark]

I don’t mind ShB DRK, but my favorite version of the job is still its HW iteration.