Should Dark Arts Come Back in 6.0? If so, What Should the Skill Do?

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

GunBreaker is not so bad. It irritates me that I play as GunBreaker more than Dark Knight, having had chosen GunBreaker over Warrior... I would like to say that I hope, but I do not feel much hope towards EndWalker... 6.0 Dark Knight rather gives me a not certain feeling, and a feeling of apprehension...
I want and would like to see improvement, but to bother to hope will just make the disappointment feel worse and hurt more.

It would also be great if these Dark Knight threads are actually read by the powers that be...
The various debates in other Dark Knight threads have had good points and fair ideas, that should be given heed and consideration, and we are even to debate old Dark Arts to death in here, but I am not certain towards that either... For all that we do not know, these threads could just be chat rooms that get ignored, our serious ideas for improvement gone to waste...

[Lyth]

I agree on the gap closer point, although this is a bigger problem on PLD/GNB given that they have FoF/NM windows to contend with. A dps neutral gap closer is always preferable in that you can actually afford to use it as a gap closer.

Dark Arts is an interesting idea in itself. There were two problems with it in Stormblood:
1) MP is potency.
2) It procs on pretty much every GCD, forcing a lot of unnecessary double weaves.

If you want Dark Arts as a concept back, then you'd need to keep it dps neutral, and remove the MP cost. Let me give you a couple of examples of how it could work.

Dark Mind: Reduces magical damage by 20%.
Dark Arts Dark Mind: Reduces physical damage by 20%.

Abyssal Drain: Deals unaspected damage with potency of 200 to target and all enemies nearby it. Cure Potency: 200.
Dark Arts Abyssal Drain: Deals unaspected damage with potency of 100 to target. Additional effect: Damage over time potency 50, Cure over time potency 50, Duration 15s.

Essentially, instead of packaging fifteen different effects into a single ability, you'd use Dark Arts to unpackage different parts of the same action, each of which is better under different circumstances.

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

I more or less came to the same conclusion, in the end, yeh... Dark Arts would make the most sense as a ability, and a cost not allowed.. just a CD, that alters or completely changes the effect/s of other actions, or perhaps adds a new effect to some other actions, albeit that said additional effect would need to be neither defensive nor offensive, just healing or utility; while the altered or changed effect/s should probably not(?) switch defense to offense or offence to defense.
one thought that I like, is that the self-healing from Abyssal Drain and SoulEater is fairly bad, so one half of Dark Arts could be adding additional self-healing effects to some other actions, while the other half of Dark Arts would be to alter or change the effect/s of some other actions...
I would also love if Carve and Spit was changed back to being a "actual" threefold attack again... it annoys me a lot that it still has the three-hit animation, but is a single hit these days. ...Carve and Spit used to be one of the best Dark Knight actions, and now.. It is... just a sort of nice side thing.

Abyssal Drain: Deals unaspected damage with potency of 200 to target and all enemies nearby it. Cure Potency: 200.
Dark Arts Abyssal Drain: Deals unaspected damage with potency of 100 to target. Additional effect: Damage over time potency 50, Cure over time potency 50, Duration 15s.

and I like that single-target Abyssal Drain idea.

[Colt47]

On gap closers, the design idea they went with was that they would add a second charge and that second charge is used in the tanks DPS rotation. Problem is that there's too many OGCDs with it's conclusion to manage and no one likes to have to splay so many abilities on multiple bars. I actually built an optimized action bar that lets me do everything from the keyboard, though it's a bit of a pain to set up and isn't compatible with the vehicle system they have.

- 1 2 3 4 5 6
- X X X X X X O
- X X X X X X O
A X X X X X X O
A X X X X X X O

I basically optimized it to use buttons 1-6 on the MMO mouse and ctrl, shift, and alt as the keys to reach each of the rows. The two "A" are for extra buttons likes invuln, and the "O" are for potions, dash, etc. Problem is, they got too many controls to properly organize on this kind of a layout so it turns into a mess. Visually someone would want to have all the defensive cooldowns together in the same general area of the grid of controls. The same with OGCDs that need to be used in single and AOE rotation and obviously the main GCD line of attack.

The issue with the tanks is that they share a key set of base abilities and those base abilities you'd ideally want to have in the same positions (makes it easier to swap between tanks for specific fights), but given how they designed the abilities this isn't truly possible without taking them off the easy to hit keys or move them around. I think warrior is the only job where it was possible to organize all necessary attacks on the bottom (aka default) rows 1 and 2 in a six button configuration, while still having room for the class specific quick shield in the form of Raw Intuition.

Dark knight goes right into the third row, which invades the space originally saved for defense cooldowns or what not due to the inclusion of more attacks and burst phase tools. It basically is Warrior+ with a more complicated rotation including multiple OGCD attacks. Some people seen to like to argue against this point, but the main line of attack is the same between both tanks. The main difference is warrior keeps up their damage boost through a GCD in Storms Eye, while Dark Knight keeps it up with Edge of Shadow as an OGCD.

Between the two I'd say dark knight has far more "must use" abilities due to the overall DPS meta vs a warrior, which is a problem largely attributed to the shift in Shadowbringers that made the game far more like a WoW clone DPS system. The one big rule in a DPS meta is that any attack that is OGCD and does damage, ultimately becomes something you must weave. That's what really is bogging down tanks since even though you do not manage tank stance anymore, you still have to manage mitigations + all the OGCDs. And since every tank except warrior seems to have a glut of OGCD instant attacks to manage, it makes them all incredibly busy and not so fun to play long term compared to warrior.

[Absurdity]

Yeah...not seeing how warrior's 1-2-4-1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-4 with the occasional 5&6 gameplay is in any way "more fun" than paladin or gunbreaker.

There also has been no shift towards a dps meta or a "WoW clone" with Shadowbringers, that has always existed and you have always used your oGCDs for dps if they had potency attached to them, if you didn't before then you were simply playing wrong.

The only "WoW clone" aspect in this game has funnily enough been the ability pruning, only difference being that WoW made up for the ability pruning and essentially the removal of aggro by having a more reactionary proc-based system instead of static rotations and a heavier focus on active mitigation.

[Colt47]

Yeah...not seeing how warrior's 1-2-4-1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-4 with the occasional 5&6 gameplay is in any way "more fun" than paladin or gunbreaker.

There also has been no shift towards a dps meta or a "WoW clone" with Shadowbringers, that has always existed and you have always used your oGCDs for dps if they had potency attached to them, if you didn't before then you were simply playing wrong.

The only "WoW clone" aspect in this game has funnily enough been the ability pruning, only difference being that WoW made up for the ability pruning and essentially the removal of aggro by having a more reactionary proc-based system instead of static rotations and a heavier focus on active mitigation.

Honestly, it probably started at Heavensward since that is when I recall they started to get rid of the cross class abilities you could get if you leveled multiple jobs. The whole reason it became important to stance dance was to make sure damage was maxed out.

I like warrior because it is easy to pick up and play at any time compared to the more complicated rotations. It isn't fun to try and pick up a job at level 80 again when there are abilities just splayed across a screen that are all non-sequential in nature. Machinist is probably my favorite in terms of where it is at, but they don't have to deal with tank cooldowns on top of doing damage (they have one mit and that's it). Also, warrior isn't tiring to play like the others.

[AC9Breaker]

I agree on the gap closer point, although this is a bigger problem on PLD/GNB given that they have FoF/NM windows to contend with. A dps neutral gap closer is always preferable in that you can actually afford to use it as a gap closer.

Dark Arts is an interesting idea in itself. There were two problems with it in Stormblood:
1) MP is potency.
2) It procs on pretty much every GCD, forcing a lot of unnecessary double weaves.

If you want Dark Arts as a concept back, then you'd need to keep it dps neutral, and remove the MP cost. Let me give you a couple of examples of how it could work.

Dark Mind: Reduces magical damage by 20%.
Dark Arts Dark Mind: Reduces physical damage by 20%.

Abyssal Drain: Deals unaspected damage with potency of 200 to target and all enemies nearby it. Cure Potency: 200.
Dark Arts Abyssal Drain: Deals unaspected damage with potency of 100 to target. Additional effect: Damage over time potency 50, Cure over time potency 50, Duration 15s.

Essentially, instead of packaging fifteen different effects into a single ability, you'd use Dark Arts to unpackage different parts of the same action, each of which is better under different circumstances.

These ideas sound really good and I can see them being easily implemented. I think it would give the class a bit of freshness in 6.0 too.

[Colt47]

What I think this is coming down to is that unlike with warrior, dark knight has some unintuitive portions to the rotation that take time to fully grasp, because it has to manage blood gauge and MP at the same time. Paladin doesn't really have the same maintenance level since the oath gauge is mostly for non-damaging defense abilities, and the MP usage is largely linked to Requiscat burst phases. It's very controlled and intuitive by comparison.

So when you throw in the burst like thing with delirium that now adds a third layer to the OGCDs, blood gauge, and MP, that make it even more complicated to run. It's probably the most complicated tank outside of gunbreaker.

I mostly play warrior and did some running around with dark knight after an extended break, so most of these observations are related to the challenges of learning how to play dark knight. In general, I've found any job that has a weird looseness in the rotation due to lacking a strait usage indication, such as being off cooldown on an ability, to be more challenging to play than something that does.

This is also where the observation on the gap closer came into play, as it's obvious it should be a utility ability, but SE play design team decided to combo the gap closer with another OGCD to make things "interesting", hence two charges. Warrior doesn't have this and it's also made the class much easier to play on extended periods compared to all the other jobs.

[Marxam]

Yeah...not seeing how warrior's 1-2-4-1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-4 with the occasional 5&6 gameplay is in any way "more fun" than paladin or gunbreaker.

It isn't. In fact PLD is worse because it has two single button spams, Sword Oath and Requiescat. SO is a 3 button spam after RA and Requiescat is every minute and its a fixed rotation with little to no leeway. At least WAR is IR is 90 secs and FC's is flexible in that you can either spend it after 2 combos or hold it for an upcoming burst or NF heal window. Upheaval and Onslaught also help as gauge dumps and knockback cancels but regardless PLD, WAR and DRK are mostly single button spammers akin to what happened to the healers. Tanks are all flash but no substance in 5.0, with exception of GNB which is ironically popular because everyone says it plays like a DPS. Really says something about their design philosophy going forward.

[Colt47]

It isn't. In fact PLD is worse because it has two single button spams, Sword Oath and Requiescat. SO is a 3 button spam after RA and Requiescat is every minute and its a fixed rotation with little to no leeway. At least WAR is IR is 90 secs and FC's is flexible in that you can either spend it after 2 combos or hold it for an upcoming burst or NF heal window. Upheaval and Onslaught also help as gauge dumps and knockback cancels but regardless PLD, WAR and DRK are mostly single button spammers akin to what happened to the healers. Tanks are all flash but no substance in 5.0, with exception of GNB which is ironically popular because everyone says it plays like a DPS. Really says something about their design philosophy going forward.

Also, warrior has the advantage that it can play reactively to what enemies do thanks to self heals. This is what makes warriors easier to play and use for most people because a player can't just get hit and then use a defense cooldown, they have to predict the hit is coming and use a defense cooldown. A warrior does not need to predict the tank buster since he can equilibrium and self heal what would have been mitigated (Savage being the exception).

But on the subject of dark arts itself... honestly just make it a damage boost like flight or fight. Delirium and blood gauge just doesn't feel right on the job.