Dark Knight Megathread

[KatsuraJun]

cont.

So what were the big additions to DRK in SB? TBN and Delirium. These things replaced some of the old timer/rotation gameplay in DRK's HW kit (keeping old delirium and scourge up) with one that was entirely focused on managing your resource bars - Blood and Mana. How did this work? Forgive me if you already know, but I need to describe it to set my point up.

-TBN: Was, and still is an incredibly powerful tool at the time. But it worked differently in SB in one critical way: the fact that it added 50 Blood, instead of adding an Edge cast, meant you wanted to use Bloodspiller to keep your Blood below 50 if you were going to shield. Of course, you still wanted to have mana so you could actually cast the thing.

-Delirium: Was a huge injection of mana. Such a big injection, actually, that you couldn't empty your MP bar faster than you could spend it even if you used Dark Arts on every single oGCD possible during its window. So ideally, you wanted to keep your MP bar low before a Delirium through Dark Arts. But it cost 50 blood, so you also wanted to keep 50 Blood.

You can see how these two abilities - the most powerful in SB DRK's arsenal - wanted the exact opposite gamestates for your Blood and MP. And what was the punishment for messing this balancing act up? Well, this ties into why Dark Arts is so "spammy" - if you didn't plan ahead before a Delirium window, you would be forced to mash Dark Arts on every oGCD window available to minimize the loss. It ran the very real risk of pushing your other oGCDs backwards, or making it difficult to cast defensives, especially with the faster GCD during Blood Weapon. It was the punishment for not playing properly. Of course, if you mashed Dark Arts too much trying to prepare for this, you'd end up at 0 mana without the ability to cast your other stuff.

Adjusting the MP and potency for less "spam" removes this penalty for messing up, because then you could easily dump your MP even in during Delirium fast enough that it's a non-issue. There becomes 0 risk to just holding enough MP to do whatever you might need it for without planning ahead, because if you even come close to the risk of capping, you can dump your entire bar with 3 Edge of Shadow casts windows easily. It would render the entire thing I described up above rather meaningless, which is why I think they pretty much deleted it all.

You stated that "enough people" were "happy" with the ShB changes for them to stay, I simply brought in an example to counter that argument.

I hate to say this - but outside of the OF, I've seen more people rejoice new DRK than revile it. That's why I say "I guess people are happy with it." Yeah, I hate it. But on Discord, Reddit, etc a lot of people are fine with it. Some even love it. I'm not gonna speculate on whether they're former WAR mains or whatever, but that's what i mean by - it is what it is. Unfortunately. All you or I can do is sit here and seethe about it, really. Up to now, I hoped they were in the minority - but we look here and DRK remains the same. So I can only assume the opposite is true, I suppose. SE is the one with the player stats, after all.

[Shin96]

I hate to say this - but outside of the OF, I've seen more people rejoice new DRK than revile it. That's why I say "I guess people are happy with it." Yeah, I hate it. But on Discord, Reddit, etc a lot of people are fine with it. Some even love it.

That's usually the hive mind mentality around these places. Say something else and you're shunned or might be confronted on something stupid like Inner Delirium. It's alright if people like the "new" DRK but it leaves you with a bitter aftertaste for what's to come in the future. All we can do is keep this thread alive with seemingly no hope for reconciliation on the developers part. Or, the more painful option; quitting the game or simply adjust.