Dark Knight where is my Identiy

[Siimodo]

PLD and GNB both have a single dot in their rotation. The core the PLD build is a combo of direct damage and magic damage. The core of the GNB is fast paced direct damage. The core of WAR is intervals of burst damage with no pure sustain support in the downtime window. DRK mimics that setup, and its single DOT does not offer overall sustain support. SMN is primarily a DOT DPS class with Direct damage support skills and burst windows built around summoning monster. My suggestion would be a structure along those lines but for tanking. The build would be based around maintaining DOT stacks. Reapplying the DOT refreshes that entire stack. Having a summons that can produce the dots as well and then have its own burst window of consuming the DOTS or giving the player the right to choose when to explode the DOTS would make the shadow more interactive.

[WhyAmIHere]

PLD and GNB both have a single dot in their rotation. The core the PLD build is a combo of direct damage and magic damage. The core of the GNB is fast paced direct damage. The core of WAR is intervals of burst damage with no pure sustain support in the downtime window. DRK mimics that setup, and its single DOT does not offer overall sustain support. SMN is primarily a DOT DPS class with Direct damage support skills and burst windows built around summoning monster. My suggestion would be a structure along those lines but for tanking. The build would be based around maintaining DOT stacks. Reapplying the DOT refreshes that entire stack. Having a summons that can produce the dots as well and then have its own burst window of consuming the DOTS or giving the player the right to choose when to explode the DOTS would make the shadow more interactive.

inaccurate.
PLD: Goring Blade and Circle of Scorn
GNB: Bow Shock and Sonic Break
DRK: Salted Earth and Living Shadow if you wanna get uber technical.
WAR: nada.

[Siimodo]

I am not trying to nitpick. I am like a vast majority of the community that is reflecting on how much the job was gutted. The design was for a more advance style of tanking and required more skill to play. It has become a water down version of the original design and a near carbon copy of War. Dot management works and is a system that can be fitted in the tank design. There are no tips on what the new changes to the job will be. SE has a history of gutting skills to add new ones as the level cap increases. Most games this design reaches a plateau and fails. So, a secondary system is added that supports the primary skill system and allows the game to continue to develop. The trait system can be used to advance already exiting skills as we move up in levels, increasing game dynamics.
PLD has a set physical and magic design for its kit, and it all works together well. GNB has the continuation system that the job is designed around and flows well. WAR has the fell cleave system and while it is smooth, there can be a bit more added to really give the job back its flair. DRK has? Parts from some of them smashed together that just gives us another option. There is no self-identity to the job nor any true skill interaction with the current skill set. It is for these reasons the community is voicing what is on there minds.

[Lyth]

Accessibility cannot come at the expense of high-skilled play.

Every role needs to be accessible. If the skill barrier to entry is too high, nobody plays it. But game developers tend to forget that players of all skill levels want to see a skill differential. That's why people like watching streams and videos of skilled players performing mechanically complex tasks. It gives you something to aspire to. If there's no skill differential and no performance differential, that kind of content pretty much dies. Not every job needs to be accessible.

HW DRK wasn't particularly accessible, but it didn't have to be. Even now, the job is locked behind Ishgard, making it one of the last three jobs that you'll have access to. There were more straightforward options available, if you wanted to just focus on tanking. The main selling point was that it was unquestionably the tank with the highest skill ceiling. So when when you performed well on DRK, players on all roles knew that you were good.

You also need to have reward for effort. People are lazy. Skill differentials have to translate into a performance differences. Stormblood DRK was more accessible, but it significantly lagged behind PLD and WAR in performance, especially after the early WAR buffs. So suddenly, it went from being perceived as high skill, high reward, it was suddenly low skill, and even lower reward. And when you could achieve better performance on simpler tanks for less effort, why bother? It's not surprising that its design turned off a lot of previous fans of the job.

How should DRK be designed?
- Baseline GCD needs to be shorter.
- Target APM should be significantly higher than other tanks when played well (i.e. 50-60). This comes out of having a shorter GCD and more oGCDs. Procs are helpful here.
- The focus should be on sustained dps and maintaining uptime, rather than demonstrating your ability to type out the lyrics to 'Mary had a little lamb' with a 42 step rotation that you could do whilst intoxicated and asleep. The goal should be to glue yourself to the boss.
- Sustained dps should continue to beat burst, as has been the case this expansion.
- Positional tools should be available to maximize uptime, preferably without needing to sacrifice dps to do so. Gap closer to boss. Backstep out of AoE. Swap places with your shadow and start tanking an add. Creativity and risk-taking should be rewarded.
- Do something interesting with Living Shadow, and integrate it into more of our toolkit. I normally dislike pet-based jobs, but this doesn't really feel like a pet. It provides more job definition than adding on more Fell Cleaves to our burst window.
- Don't give a better version of the shadow pet out to every other tank now that you've experimented with it on DRK and know how it works. We don't expect much of the job design team given your track record, but try not to predictably disappoint everyone.
- Living Dead should die and stay dead. Either limit/remove invulns next expansion, or redesign this ability from scratch. It's going to be absolutely awful with healers now separated into 'healing-focused' and 'shield-focused'.
- Omnislash. Multi-hit attacks. 99-hit combos. These are aesthetic alternatives to big Fell Cleave style hits. Experiment with these.