Dark knight, the past, the present and the future of the job.

[bundythenoob]

you put together a nice outline of problems. I quite like your suggestion to make Edge/Flood 2000 mana each. Dark Arts would have cost 2k mana in the current build, so it makes sense for our spenders to be 2k mana with reduced potency. this would allow Square to make room for more mana generation and not have to worry so much about damage balance.

Your mention of Living Shadow being wasted potential really hurt me too. When the trailers showed it off, it seemed as if Fray was going to copy whatever moves you threw out, but reality is often disappointing. a friend of mine who just started in SHB was hyped to get it, but when he saw that Fray simply does his own rotation (slowly at that) he was disappointed. "even fray copying what we do, as if he was our shadow, would be better than this glorified dot"

as for Darkside, I don't think a 10% dmg buff is worth curtailing our mana generation kit. i'd rather see that 10% damage be spread throughout our toolkit in a way so that the mana we generate with our tools would add up to that 10% through our abilities, but i do like the suggestion above to make darkside stop mana generation so that we can let our tools do the work again, but if they don't want the fight cutscenes to affect our generation (a problem in STB) they can make cutscenes automatically remove darkside timer. this way we can regen mana while in cutscenes and then come back to use flood to immediately get darkside back again.

I'm guessing in order to consolidate the hotbars they ended up deleting tools they deemed "useless", but they ended up butchering the entire mana generation kit itself. If I were to make any suggestions, it would be to bring back a few older skills, but fuse them with current toolkit. for example:

- Dark mind + blood price = lv 45 since dark mind is currently a 10 sec buff on a 1 min cooldown (like current BW) why not make it so that you also regen mana/blood? that way its can get some value out of it while not in magic situations. this would also return some much needed mana generation to DRK at lv 50, which it sorely lacks.

- Salted Earth + Sole Survivor = lv 52 Since SS was a 15 sec mark on an enemy, and SE is now a 15 sec ground dot, why not combine both so that the skill would target an enemy and drop a bubble on area around it as a patch of "salted earth", dealing the current salted potency, but with the bonus that if the original enemy died u get 30% hp/mana, but if the timer runs out and the salted patch decays, you get 20% back instead. this helps to return that MP economy, while helping players out who have problems using the ground target system.

- Dark Arts I've made a suggestion in another thread i made, in which DA would affect more of our toolkit, such as making Souleater a guaranteed direct crit heal, making Abyss drain free (like edge/flood) and what not. I would also love to see the return of the animation, so like if your bubble pops, your character goes into the old animation to let you know that you have it available in case youre looking at the boss and not your hotbar/gauge.

Overall though a solid thread, and I'm hoping SOMETHING changes with DRK, cuz its current form is so grossly stripped of what made it the building and spending based tank we got back in heavensward.

[shao32]

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Any sugestion is welcome, in fact i been a bit reserved with blackblood and living shadow contribution changes bcs i didn't want to add my crazy ideas i have for them so ppl can discuss on who to make it unique.

For the living dead well yeah, i put it there bcs is a current debate right now and ppl are 50-50 about the skill so it was worthy to be mentioned, for the rest thanks ^^

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Yeah the purpose of reducing the MP cost for all MP related skills is to acomodate the increase of MP generation and his constant management, basically how it was in the past but with enough room to operate so is not so tight like it was on SB.

Darkside sugestions where made to use the already present UI and give the job some kind of easy but consistent interplay combined with the MP changes, the potency of the buff and the rest of the skills will obviously being acomodated so everything is worthy to keep up and run smoothly.

I wanna point that you sugestion of Dark mind + blood price would tie DRK in the MT spot for maximun DPS optimization and could be contraproductive, i will suggest to you idea change blood price by convalescence for example, will make dark mind more usefull universaly and that would be the help living dead needs without need to change the skill at all, 2x1 win win ^^

And yeah i miss dark arts a lot too, i wanna use this moment to say this thread is aiming to 6.0 since at this part of the movie SE aren't going to do the extensive rework of blackblood and despite my sugested changes on darkside and related skills are simple they are pretty worthless without increasing the MP generation and ajusting potency across the kit, it's going to be a lonng year until next expansion but lets hope they do something for us and get at least some kind of recognition before that.

[bundythenoob]

I wanna point that you sugestion of Dark mind + blood price would tie DRK in the MT spot for maximun DPS optimization and could be contraproductive, i will suggest to you idea change blood price by convalescence for example, will make dark mind more usefull universaly and that would be the help living dead needs without need to change the skill at all, 2x1 win win ^^

And yeah i miss dark arts a lot too, i wanna use this moment to say this thread is aiming to 6.0 since at this part of the movie SE aren't going to do the extensive rework of blackblood and despite my sugested changes on darkside and related skills are simple they are pretty worthless without increasing the MP generation and ajusting potency across the kit, it's going to be a lonng year until next expansion but lets hope they do something for us and get at least some kind of recognition before that.

fully agreed on waiting till 6.0. I doubt square is gonna do anything soon, besides telling us that tanks are balanced.

I didn't think about that MT thing you mentioned. maybe make Dark Mind so u can give it to other party members, that way it works for OT as well? it would be cool to allow teammates to mitigate magic dmg too? idk might be OP lol

I just wish Square would at least say they acknowledge the problems and that they are working on something. the silence makes me sad as a player and as a paying customer, not to mention sad as a fan of FFXIV in general.

[shao32]

fully agreed on waiting till 6.0. I doubt square is gonna do anything soon, besides telling us that tanks are balanced.

I didn't think about that MT thing you mentioned. maybe make Dark Mind so u can give it to other party members, that way it works for OT as well? it would be cool to allow teammates to mitigate magic dmg too? idk might be OP lol

I just wish Square would at least say they acknowledge the problems and that they are working on something. the silence makes me sad as a player and as a paying customer, not to mention sad as a fan of FFXIV in general.

Idk how that will work having the chad TBN around ^^

I wish it too but i lose hope on SE keeping proper comunication with us outside of the "we listen" and then spend months praying for them doing something and then feel awfully bad everytime they do nothing.