DRK QOL changes for 5.4

[ADVSS]

I believe that it fits quite well conceptually to the "Dead Man Walking" idea. You take enough damage to kill you but refuse to die, basically becoming someone who is "already dead", or should be dead, but through sheer force of will is waylaying that fate and still walking around, i.e. a "Dead Man Walking". The "dead" part of that doesn't literally mean that they are in fact actually dead, it means that they should be or are as good as dead and that your inevitable fate will catch up with you. It's pretty straight forward.
As for the healing part, if the thing that has determined that you are to die was taking lethal damage and someone then heals that damage before you give in to death, they would then be undoing the cause of death and therefore you would not end up dying , so it makes sense. Sure the amount required being the total of your health pool is arbitrary, but the concept makes sense.

I also at no point defended the ability itself and how it works in this game, especially when compared to the other tank invuln abilities. I simply pointed out my belief that Living/Walking Dead has nothing to do with zombies or the undead, what I believe the concept behind it actually is and my reasoning why I believe such. I even ended with clearly stating that I don't like the ability and that it should be changed.
You of all people, who has engaged in DRK discussions quite extensively for a while now, should know that I am not a fan of the way this ability works, as I have been saying such over and over since the job was released.

I love berserk, but if we're going to compare the berserker armor to living dead, i want DRK to be able to swing harder than his body can handle, to move faster consciously or unconsciously, or get some advantage to having sacrificed his life for a 'final stand' your interpretation may be "spot on" to how the developers thought of it, but the comparison is rather luke warm, in the context imo. It does sort of sound like a self destruct, but if you heal me enough i guess ill change my mind. In theory, stalling death for a mere ten seconds sounds like a cool idea, in practice its not really anything you'd want to do, with no benefit at all to why you would even bother. Thematically, it could be put in like was mentioned earlier, Fray stayed alive to get the retribution, that is fine and all, but one would think theyd put all their resolve in that final blow.
Now lets go back to nit picking the difference between shadow and darkness. How does a darkness knight go about using its bipolar shadow clone to dot up the enemies any different from a shadow knight who pulls out his shadow clone to dot up enemies? The differences in verbage may be huge in japanese, but in english it really is about the same thing regardless of whether it was "twilight knight, Night Knight, Void knight, Abyss Knight, or my favorite AF set still, the Chaos Knight. What it really translates to, and what it actually does is two different things, which was my original point. In english shadows and darkness are pretty synonomous as being antithetical to light, or the paralell opposing it. Regardless of what you call the job, the skill does what it does, and can only be explained lore wise as your character having a delusion. How it interacts and looks to other players, is that you summon a shadow clone(skill verbiage a "simulacrum" or your inner self (why its called Esteem and not Fray) So to me...a shadow clone....using shadow powers.

[TouchandFeel]

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The Berserker Armor allowing the wearer to surpass their physical limits and hit harder is different than it holding the wearer together to help keep them in the fight and not die. Although it accomplishes those things through similar means, they are not the same thing. The armor strengthens Guts AND allows him to keep going despite taking lethal damage, not the armor strengthens Guts when or because he took lethal damage. So it isn't a matter of doing more damage because you are taking your "final stand", that has nothing to do with it.
Besides, you say you want something that allows you to hit harder than you should normally be able to, the Darkside buff does that for you.

As for the whole "it's a self-destruct" argument, that makes no sense to me. If you do not take lethal damage under Living Dead you do not enter the Walking Dead state. The death mechanic is only under the Walking Dead state. If it were a self-destruct, you would be killing yourself regardless, which is not the case with the ability. Yes, you can die because of the ability, but it is not by any means a "self-destruct".
Also what are you even supposedly "changing your mind" on? You haven't resigned yourself to death, you are doing the exact opposite and defying death for a long as you can, which for the purpose of game-play balance just happens to be a measly 10 seconds. You are essentially taking damage that should kill you and saying "no, I won't die, not yet".
As for the healing part, as I already stated, if the cause of death, the lethal damage, is negated through healing before actual death occurs, then why would the DRK still die? That doesn't make logical sense at all.

As for the whole shadow versus darkness thing, you said and I quote "Though iirc the proper Japanese title for the job is "Shadow Knight" so...". You are putting forth the assertion that the "proper title in Japanese" is "Shadow Knight" as opposed to Dark Knight. I pointed out that based on what the actual Japanese title is for the job, that is not correct and Dark Knight is correct. Also, the argument you present about the how in English there is a level of interchangeability between words such as shadow or darkness , while relatively true depending on the context, is a complete tangent from your statement that I spoke to. You didn't say "proper English title", you said "proper Japanese title". Your second argument regarding English verbiage is completely different than your first argument regarding what the proper title in Japanese is, and the second argument in no way proves or makes the first one correct.
Besides if we were to approach the first argument under the context of accepting the second argument as true, then the first argument would actually be made false by the second argument simply because if, as the second argument posits, all such words are contextually interchangeable, then none of them could be the "proper" one because they would all carry equal weighting due to being interchangeable, and so "Shadow Knight" being the "proper title" would be a false statement. So, you actually kind of argued against yourself with that.
If you want to conceptualize the powers that a Dark Knight wields, such as Living Shadow, as shadows, fine with me. You are free to conceptualize such things however you wish if it makes you happy. Hell, conceptualize it all as chocolate for all I care, more power to you (and that sounds pretty deliciously awesome). That still has nothing to do with "Shadow Knight being the proper title in Japanese" not being correct.

[ADVSS]

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Well you are right, i still feel like current DRK is a thematic nightmare, regardless of the inspiration they used(very loosely beyond the original HW AF design, and the Great sword).

[TouchandFeel]

Well you are right, i still feel like current DRK is a thematic nightmare, regardless of the inspiration they used(very loosely beyond the original HW AF design, and the Great sword).

Feeling that way is perfectly viable and justifiable, and on the general topic I both disagree and agree.

I disagree in that I feel that from a story-level and general theme viewpoint, it has a pretty good and well defined theme revolving around the ideas good vs evil/light vs dark and where we see ourselves on that spectrum vs where others see us, the idea of necessary darkness vs guarding against and fighting against darkness, the inherent darkness inside us and where it comes from and how to control it. There is a lot of philosophical introspection and contemplation there on some pretty heavy stuff presented within the Dark Knight job quests that I found to be a level of storytelling well above many if not all of the other job quests for really developing an emotional core towards not only what the job is but also what that means to you. So I absolutely must give kudos to the writer who did the Dark Knight job quests as they did an amazing job there.

Where I agree with you and others expressing a lack of a proper theme in the job, and to which I feel most of you are speaking, is in the game-play department. I feel that between trying to adhere to elements of the identity of the Dark Knight in previous games in the series, trying to mold their own version for this game and trying to make it fit within the structure of what they had developed for the tank role; things got a bit jumbled and lost along the way.
I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs of what went wrong, how it went wrong and all that, as that has been talked about by myself and others for years now. I think that really the take away from all of that is there seems to be a general consensus, at least among DRK players that post here on the English portion of the official forums, that something is currently wrong.
Though for the sake of honest clarity, I do feel that DRK does now have a more solid foundation to build and expand from compared to previous iterations in this game; but, to use a cooking metaphor, while the base of the dish is good, it is missing the spices and seasoning to provide it its own unique flavor.
I also understand that some players feel that the current version is a big step back from previous versions, particularly the initial HW version, which had a lot more bells and whistles that made the job feel more unique. I get that sentiment and even agree with it to a point. The problem that I had with these previous versions of DRK is that they always felt like all those bells and whistles and flashy bits were just sort of slapped on top of a fairly weak foundation that would likely collapse when you tried to build on it.

So now we basically have a relatively bland job that we can build on, which leads to the question that I think most of us reading this thread are thinking; where do we go from here with DRK?

This topic of course has many differing and at time opposing positions on what should be done and I have a lot of thoughts on this topic which are frankly a bit too much to try to cover in this response. Maybe I'll make a thread to cover those when I have the time.