Dark Knight where is my Identiy

[Saefinn]

To be fair, y'all were asking for it. You all had it coming when countless tear-stained threads were made in the name of denouncing SB DRK despite hindsight revealing it's genius and uniqueness.

"Wah, it's too fast,"
"Wah, it has no burst,"
"Waaaah somebody call the waaambulance because it's too hard"

You all kept wishing it was WAR, and you get what you deserve.

I didn't complain once about DRK on the forums until now. Much like my main, SCH, which has also been gutted, I was contented and thus did not come here to complain about it. I guess I took for granted they'd keep job design consistent as they made changes each expansion.

[Aluja89]

To be fair, y'all were asking for it. You all had it coming when countless tear-stained threads were made in the name of denouncing SB DRK despite hindsight revealing it's genius and uniqueness.

"Wah, it's too fast,"
"Wah, it has no burst,"
"Waaaah somebody call the waaambulance because it's too hard"

You all kept wishing it was WAR, and you get what you deserve.

I like how you think that SE genuinely listens to people on the forums lol. They were gonna screw it up regardless because none of the tanks actually feel like tanks.

The class designers are simply just bad when it comes to tanks and healers, 4.2 WAR was just a fluke.

[Claire_Pendragon]

This idea really accomplished nothing unfortunately, nothing in their playstyle changes, and even the "theme" wont feel any different, due to the fact you would still use the skills in the same way.
Essentially this is more akin to what an expansion should add in passive traits, which dont change the job too much, nor add too much button bloat.
Unfortunately DRK is still just going to be WAR with this coat of paint.

[shao32]

To be fair, y'all were asking for it. You all had it coming when countless tear-stained threads were made in the name of denouncing SB DRK despite hindsight revealing it's genius and uniqueness.

"Wah, it's too fast,"
"Wah, it has no burst,"
"Waaaah somebody call the waaambulance because it's too hard"

You all kept wishing it was WAR, and you get what you deserve.

that's not entirely true, while yes we complained a lot most of the expansion was asking for buffs like WAR ones who get twice of them to get as good as PLD and end being competitive with the other tanks aka dps, mitigations buffs the ones DRK need it the most.
Dark arts spam and other stuff never sugested rip our MP management gameplay, turn Delirium in to inner release and the whole blackblood system in to a simplified version of WAR rage system in consequence, basically SE complety ignored or totally missunderstand the desire of the DRK sugestions was to make it more like HW not totally rip that posibility and turn it in to a WAR clone.

[HyoMinPark]

To be fair, y'all were asking for it. You all had it coming when countless tear-stained threads were made in the name of denouncing SB DRK despite hindsight revealing it's genius and uniqueness.

"Wah, it's too fast,"
"Wah, it has no burst,"
"Waaaah somebody call the waaambulance because it's too hard"

You all kept wishing it was WAR, and you get what you deserve.

I’m not a tank main and only really follow tanking threads in passing on here—but I do know that NONE...literally NONE...of the SB DRK mains were saying, “Please make my job into a cheap WAR clone”. People in SB complained about the needless Dark Arts spam and Living Dead continuing to suck as an immunity. Not that job didn’t feel like a carbon copy of another job.

[Hierro]

I’m not a tank main-

stopped reading right there.

[AC9Breaker]

Its not that big a deal.

[Saefinn]

Its not that big a deal.

Would it be a big deal if they changed it back to how it was? And follow its original design philosophy.

[HyoMinPark]

stopped reading right there.

You don’t need to main a job to be able to read and understand criticism threads. I understand enough about tanks to understand their gameplay, and I actually played DRK a lot in HW despite not “maining” it, which is widely considered the best iteration of the job. I stopped playing it in SB because the Dark Arts spam was stupid, and I didn’t like the changes to Darkside management. I preferred actively managing my mana to upkeep it—not it becoming a button you press upon job change and then literally don’t think about. I leveled it in ShB to see how I felt about the changes, and I still dislike the gameplay. It’s a boring WAR wannabe that doesn’t require much thought when it comes to resource management. Which, again, is what I enjoyed about HW DRK.

No one wanted DRK to be a WAR clone. No one asked for that. People wanted to not spam DA so much and for SE to do something about DRK’s immunity. And still do because it is still the worst tank immunity in the game. Your post is inaccurate, and I think misconstrues SB DRK complaints completely.

[FallenWings]

"War Clone"

This is something that is thoughtlessly parroted ad nauseum.

Apparently what constitutes to a class being a straight up copy of another class is their weakest burst CD being the same mechanically to another class' strongest burst CD and identity.

Ignoring that DRK is still fundamentally a resource based/ogcd class that has *always* had the simplest GCD decisions since its inception; Souleater or Bloodspiller. Ignoring that DRK has it's true primary button being Edge/Flood of Shadow(Or simply Dark Artsv2) being the largest chunk of it's damage as well as it being the most flexible damage kit of all classes to date.

But yeah, lets strip down and ignore every other more note worthy aspects of DRK so we can continue to mindlessly yell "WAR CLONE" because a single skill had an unfortunate and uninspired design change in a game where 2 other classes also suffer from this "press buff, press butan 5 times" design but aren't parroted as WAR CLONE.

I can sympathesize with people who miss certain aspects of the old designs such as; Dark Arts having more varied usage, the mechanic of an oGCD buffing GCD, or the pure alchemy of SB DRK AoE gameplay with Blood and MP interplay. DRK has undergone the most changes of all classes and is the only victim to having skills constantly be butchered into role action skills with no substitutes. It even suffers the most from having lost so many animations.

There are certain aspects like the GCD speed boost from Blood Weapon which I miss but don't mind it being gone because we're instead substituted with a quad double weave window that feels much better as a power phase than pressing 1-2-3 10% faster.

The primary complaint of Dark Arts spam was definitely addressed and instead of a weak piddly 140 potency oGCD that makes our character have a seizure every few GCDS with no strategic usage due to constant threat of overcap, we instead now have a, in my opinion, much better form of it in the vein of an actual 500 potency heavy swing that hits harder than every GCD save for Spiller, looks fantastic when woven in with our general strikes and has the flexibility to be used leisurely whenever our tactically within burst windows the best.

But at the end of the day, I frankly enjoy ShB DRK the most of all its past iterations because it is the only tank design with such a heavy and fast burst phase that actually utilizies properly built up resources to explode into any and all party buffs that I elect to, the best of all classes even.

Side note idea: The only reason I'm generally against Blood Weapon regaining its speed boost is really just the cooldown of it conflicting with DRKs double weave burst window. If it were say to serve it's primary function of giving DRK a burst in resource gain with a cooldown of 50 seconds, I'd be all for it. Blood Weapon facilitates DRKs identity of stealing resources from enemies and should definitely be designed around that. Perhaps to make it more interesting it could even be like Embolden where it would start at a 50% speed boost that decays over the duration, thematic in that the DRK activates an unholy berserking state to desperatly devour more mana/blood and tires over time from swinging such a massive weapon.

TLDR Delirium still sucks. Delirium has never been more important than Edge/Flood and should've either given 4/5/6 free Dark Arts to be used for Edge/Flood(the real Fell Cleave equivalent and power buttons of DRK).