Dark Knight Megathread

[ForteNightshade]

Admire the furry but can someone quote me a nice list of all of DRK issues plz? In their own words. I could read every post but rather get cliff notes

Blood Weapon being 10 seconds makes timing extremely tight. Since I know you're, reluctantly, familiar with MCH, think Hypercharge and ping issues. Additionally, because Unleash and Stalwart Soul are classified as spells, they're unaffected by Skillspeed, and thus, will never allow you to get the full 50 Blood.

Living Dead is now strictly inferior in every way to the other tank invulns due to Holmgang and Superbolide being buffed to 10 second durations. The former is up a full minute faster, and neither require a full heal. For reference sake, it currently takes two Essential Dignities and an Excog/Lustrate to heal LD. Contrast that with Warrior whose ridiculous sustain allows it to completely heal itself through Holmgang. Which makes that minute difference between it and LD laughably imbalanced.

The Blackest Night is simply getting outshadowed by Holy Sheltron, Nascent/Bloodwhetting and Heart of Conrundum. That's not to imply TBN isn't strong, because it is. Just nowhere near enough to be an entire job's whole identity. Furthermore, none of the aforementioned abilities are tied to your damage. TBN is a loss after two uses in a minute due to misaligning Fade of Shadows under raid buffs. In heavily optimized settings, DRKs actually need to break a TBN, even if it means intentionally taking damage to avoid overcapping. All so they can spam Flood under buffs. All of this makes TBN a risk without any reward. You're only ever punished.

Delirium is essentially budget Inner Release. They do the exact same thing except Delirium doesn't DhCrit. Which, hilariously, makes it better in a way since it doesn't ignore buffs like Battle Litany or Chain Stratagem. From a gameplay perspective, it's incredibly boring and unimaginative.

Those are pretty much the core issues with DRK. Is it bad? No. It'll be just as competitive in terms of functionality. That doesn't make the kit cohesive or exciting.

[MagiusNecros]

I think when MT you'll have to rotate every Defensive CD you have with TBN. The sad part is Rampart is more effective then Oblation. I'd only give Oblation to someone else if you are an offtank. Probably something like...

TBN+OB
TBN+OB+Reprisal
TBN+Rampart
TBN+Shadow Wall

Dark Mind and Missionary will be in a funny place.

I dunno I hate it. Shit sucks.

[Mekhana]

Is Oblation at least off GCD?

[MagiusNecros]

It's an ability so yes.

Meanwhile in PvP(current) a plethora of Dark Knight actions restore HP and MP. And AoE attacks with those attacks give those effects per enemy hit.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/darkknight/#pvp

Stick to PvP I guess for the true Dark Knight experience.

[Lyth]

Reprisal is more effective than Oblation. That's a scary thought.

The problem with cooldown stacking is that %DR is multiplicative, not additive, resulting in diminishing returns. If you're pairing up Oblation with another %DR ability, you're probably only going to get 7-8% additional %DR out of it. I'm not really sure what problem this ability is designed to solve. Maybe it'll be used to save two party members from a physical raidwide when you can't use Dark Missionary.

On a side note, whichever dev attempted to come up with 'timed mitigation rewards' doesn't really get it. Tanks ideally aim to catch tankbusters at the tail end of a defensive move to reduce the effective recast, sometimes using a defensive move 18 seconds before the attack hits. Frontloading a defensive just rewards players who have no idea when the tankbuster happens and just react to the cast bar in a panic.

Of course, this is probably just a moot point and we'll continue to see fights designed for invuln-swap.

[WhyAmIHere]

The funny thing is that DRK actually has the second best (costless) self sustain of any tank. Souleater in particular really adds up over the course of a fight.

Then, come Endwalker, it's looking to get blown out of the water by the other two tanks.

DRK really can't catch a break.

DRK: When both the developers and players can only scratch their head at the mess, and with a sigh extol "well, what do we do with this mess?"

[Duskane]

Oblation if anything should have been a trait on TBN that it gives the 10% after it breaks
it would then be more inline with the design philosophy of Heart of concept,Blood whetting etc etc
extra mitigation skills like this are uneeded most the time
Dungeons are a joke anyway
we invuln everything we can
Damage just isn't consistent or hit hard enough to warrent another CD and it just makes Dark mind even more of niche CD

endwalker has so much mitigation
Feint and addle now give 5% to other types of damage
DNC has a shield
red mage has DR
healer kits are over saturated in mitigation and healing
WAR and SCH are gonna spread some fat shields
endwalker really has to pump out damage to make it not seem like a joke

[Marxam]

a side note, whichever dev attempted to come up with 'timed mitigation rewards' doesn't really get it. Tanks ideally aim to catch tankbusters at the tail end of a defensive move to reduce the effective recast, sometimes using a defensive move 18 seconds before the attack hits. Frontloading a defensive just rewards players who have no idea when the tankbuster happens and just react to the cast bar in a panic.

That should probably be their queue to update the Novice Hall and maybe introduce game mechanic styled trials, ex;

-Survive the next enemy attacks (5/5) Reward: Jet Black Dye x1

This trial has an enemy hit you five times and one of them you need to invul to survive. It's a simple test that says a lot without saying much. It also teaches tanks the importance rotating cds and also knowing when to use them at the appropriate time. Different timed cast bars will also teach them the timing of how to use them.

While DRK will obviously function in 6.0 this is further proof that TBN is too strong for its own good and that it's hard carrying the rest of its toolkit which is why you get skills like Oblation. While not a bad skill per se, you're right Reprisal does the same thing but affects the whole party instead of just two ppl and if co-ordinated with the other tank makes Oblation slightly under-whelming. I am assuming the intended purpose is to use TBN with it Oblation but that's two buttons while other jobs only have to press one to achieve, more or less, the same thing.

[Shurrikhan]

On a side note, whichever dev attempted to come up with 'timed mitigation rewards' doesn't really get it. Tanks ideally aim to catch tankbusters at the tail end of a defensive move to reduce the effective recast, sometimes using a defensive move 18 seconds before the attack hits. Frontloading a defensive just rewards players who have no idea when the tankbuster happens and just react to the cast bar in a panic.

I could have sworn there was a Sentinel skill in FFXIII that actually would have matched that reward system somewhat... Steelguard, I think it was. It'd have a base resistance/defense increase, and then increase that further with each attacks (or damage?) mitigated, so you'd want the biggest attack to hit just before its channel ended.

But even just generally speaking, if that was the direction they wanted to push us towards, I'd have expected to see defensives with effects that were neither flat percentage nor easily capped flat absorption values, such as by decaying or ramping rapidly with time or attacks absorbed.

[Ignimortis]

As a casual player (who still spends hundreds of hours doing almost all the content that isn't Savage and up), I seriously don't care all that much about numbers. I try to optimize and play properly, because I like to know I did my best, but not to the extent of hardcore players, I think. I have also mained DRK since I got to HW in early 2017.

However, the issues with DRK are not really about "is it gonna be good or bad numbers-wise". If anything, all the attempts SE made at homogenizing the tanks were for their numbers (both clear rates and DPS) to be very similar, i.e. "bring any job, it'll work".

The issues with DRK are that it's a very unimaginative job gameplay-wise, with very few interactions between its' abilities and a lack of mechanical identity other than "I have TBN".

Now, I've heard that SE won't be returning any job to its' HW complexity level. That's fine by me. However, I would like to get some HW back — a cohesive design that feels distinct from all the other tanks. What I can't understand is, why not just make DRK the fast tank again? It's very easy to achieve, too, and would fix its' issues with downtime being very slow and unengaging.

• Reduce EoS/FoS costs (maybe to 1k, something almost spammable), reduce potencies appropriately.
• Shift Darkside from +10% damage to +10% skill/spell haste. Add a trait that makes your SpS equal to SkS, or just merge the two stats already, it's not like you can abuse it.
• Make TBN just refund MP on break instead of rather meaningless "Dark Arts", maybe a bit more to incentivize proper use.
• Change Blood Weapon to 5 stacks anyway.
• Drop Stalwart Soul to level 40. Better to have an empty level in ShB than to wait until 72 for your only AoE combo.

Now, if we want to go deeper and promote interaction between abilities, I do think EoS/FoS could serve the same function Dark Arts did previously, and you can repurpose the Dark Arts UI element for that.
Damage is already built into those abilities, so you'd need to make non-damage interactions.

• Make EoS->Souleater restore a chunk more HP or apply a HoT, or a shield equal to Souleater cure potency. Something similar with EoS->Stalwart. Both should also increase Blood gain by 10 to encourage the MP->Blood->MP cycle and make it a thing again.
• Make EoS->CnS also generate Blood. Change CnS cooldown to 30 seconds (not charges). If you really need to, reduce potency somewhat.
• EoS->AD might increase the heal significantly (say, 1000 pot? Equilibrium is still better), so it's worth something in single-target situations (which are the majority of even remotely challenging endgame content, as you know).
• EoS->Bloodspiller/Quietus...I got nothing. Those actions should restore MP by default, to play into the MP->Blood->MP cycle that has to be going on, so you can't add an effect that rewards spending MP on them, I think.

Ran out of space, Delirium/new stuff in the next post.