Dark Knight Megathread

[Monimonmonmon]

Here are my proposed changes to DRK:

Walking Dead now grants invulnerability status.
Walking Dead debuff is removed upon reaching full HP.
- With Living Dead now being an invuln, reaching full HP from 1 HP is essentially the same as being healed for 100% of your HP. The nice thing with this change is, from the moment Walking Dead triggers, healers have the full 10 seconds to heal you as opposed to waiting for let's say a multi-hit tankbuster to end and then rushing to heal you with 4 seconds remaining. It's basically similar to Superbolide with the condition of needing to be healed to full, but better than Holmgang in the sense that you can be healed immediately upon triggering of Walking Dead. This justifies the cooldown being longer than Holmgang but shorter than Superbolide.

Oblation now lasts 15 seconds.
- A little buff to Oblation wouldn't hurt as this allows Oblation to be used as the "uptime" mitigation while reserving TBN for the harder hits.

Bloodspiller/Quietus extends your Darkside duration by 30 seconds.
Darkside max duration is 300 seconds.
Upon reaching max duration, Darkside duration is reset to 30 seconds and a Dark Arts proc is granted.
You can now store up to 2 Dark Arts Proc.
- These changes make Dark Knight's job gauge more meaningful. You would use MP and Blood to extend your Darkside timer which in turn rewards you with a Dark Art Proc. 300 seconds as the max duration can be adjusted to sound more reasonable.

Abyssal Drain now gives 20 Blood Gauge.
Salted Earth grants you a buff that freezes the duration of Darkside.
- These changes make all DRK's oGCDs related to one of their resources, with Carve and Spit replenishing MP.

Shadowbringer does not require Darkside but consumes 1 Dark Arts instead.
- This requirement sounds more reasonable as Darkside is never dropped. Having Darkside as the ultimate resource to use DRK's strongest oGCD makes sense. With it still being tied to a cooldown, you can use any extra Dark Arts proc generated from TBN on Edge of Shadows. But the primary idea is to be able to generate 2 Dark Arts proc from reaching Darkside max duration and spend them on Shadowbringer every 2 minutes.

[Deathshiro]

Just throwing my 2 cents in here, and I know its been said a million times... But I may as well bump the thread and do my do diligence.

Give blood weapon 5 stacks and make it an 18 second buff. The fact that you cant get 5 gcds doing your SPELLS, which are a main part of your AOE is just lazy game design. Step it up Square, its hilarious how this falls through the cracks for nearly 3 years. If anything in DRK's kit needed a stacking gcd ability like Bushin, it was Blood weapon, not Delirium.

[Bhearil]

Just throwing my 2 cents in here, and I know its been said a million times... But I may as well bump the thread and do my do diligence.

Give blood weapon 5 stacks and make it an 18 second buff. The fact that you cant get 5 gcds doing your SPELLS, which are a main part of your AOE is just lazy game design. Step it up Square, its hilarious how this falls through the cracks for nearly 3 years. If anything in DRK's kit needed a stacking gcd ability like Bushin, it was Blood weapon, not Delirium.

Would be about time that on jobs that use both physical atacks and magic that the biggest of their skill/spellspeed stat would count for both. RDM have also that desync GCD issue on their melee combo. Considering they can make so MIND scale as damage on healers is not that HARD to code

[Deathshiro]

Would be about time that on jobs that use both physical attacks and magic that the biggest of their skill/spellspeed stat would count for both. RDM have also that desync GCD issue on their melee combo. Considering they can make so MIND scale as damage on healers is not that HARD to code

Fair, I'd just take the band-aid issue as I feel its more an issue with their spaghetti coded engine than anything really. Especially since abilities like Delirium (currently) are a 10.5s~ ability whilst Blood Weapon is an awkward 9.9s due to how the coding on it hasn't changed much since Heavensward. Any change to this abilities duration would be a net positive imo, and the same should happen for jobs like rdm.

[whiskeybravo]

Random idea:

Living Dead
Grants the effect of Living Dead. When HP is reduced to 0 while under Living Dead, instead of becoming KO'd, your status will change to Shadow of the Dead.
Duration: 10s

Shadow of the Dead
Conjures a magicked shadow barrier that absorbs damage totaling 100% of maximum HP. For the duration of this effect, most attacks will not lower your HP below 1. If, at the end of this duration, any shadow barrier remains, it will dissolve, restoring HP by an equivalent amount of the remaining barrier.
Duration: 10s

[OdinelStarrei]

Good morning team. Hope you're all suffering, as is our fate. I kid.

Have a video from Xeno here. I don't agree with everything he says typically, but it's humorous enough that I hope it provides some catharsis to those looking to be validated by someone with more exposure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HEMa26dhTo

We're a little under a month away from launch, and we can probably propel the thread to over 100 pages by then, with plenty of discussion about DRK in the fight design landscape surely to follow. Glad it's here, the myriad of rework threads were getting tiresome.

Hey, CMs. A community post or a sentence during the next live letter saying, "We see the feedback." would go a long way. But I'm content with waiting for something to happen. That's all I do on DRK anyway.

[ArthurATDayne]

If SquareEnix does Improve on the current Dark Knight 80-90 traits and skills, I will especially look forward to the naysayers "no issues", "ya'll salty", "no problems at all" go quiet back to the woodworks.

I remember a good number of Warrior players complaining about how tedious it was to initially apply Storm's Eye 10% damage buff from the Single Target 1,2,3/1,2,4 combo because the two AOE combo moves only extend the duration but going into Endwalker, Mythril Tempest (the 1st move of the two AOE combo) applies the 10% damage buff AND will continue to extend duration

Where you naysayers go on Storm's Eye? It got quiet heh.

Anyway I think eventually Dark Knight will get something improved. I just hope for the DRK playerbase it occurs while they are still playing the game and the class instead of some time in the far future.

[ItMe]

Our thread is growing faster sure, but I'd be more interested to see how many posts in their topics are filled with non-useful posts like 'delete DRK' without giving any sort of constructive criticism vs ours. Not that our thread doesn't have good constructive criticism, but if they employ word scraping programs, there's quite a fair share of dead posts in this thread as far as information gathering.

Yeah, that's one of the big unfortunate differences between us.
I went back and did some more skimming (which is why I'm responding a few days later haha). I've gone through about a 8th of the thread, skipping about and sampling posts from all across it/ And I think I saw 1 posts that looked off topic (but maybe I just didn't understand it) and only 2 posts where people were just venting, saying they were sad, and contributing nothing else.


I also noticed that people don't randomly swing in out of nowhere and go

"I'm just gonna post this and hope the devs take notice."

or

"Here are my adjustments and additions."

And then drop a mountain of text, sometimes pages long, about their homebrew kit for DRK and ask for people for feedback instead of discussing the job as it is / could be in game. I don't think I saw a single post like that. The closest it got to that was something more akin to how we try and sum things up by saying "let's list the items I think could be improved" or "I have a few requests." But the "what do you think of my [job]" kind of stuff (for better or worse) seem to get their own threads.


You're right Daeriion, they've def got us beat in that department : (
And after actually spending time looking through their threads... yeah... they are def much cleaner than ours. I can totally see both that SQEX is getting feedback from the forums and how someone would use them to best gather feedback in the first place.




Also, if I may go on a tangent for a sec, the weirdest thing about it all is how differently they communicate to each other. I'm struggling to put it clearly, but maybe this will convey the difference:

Here on the English forums we do a lot of quoting each other. Person A says something, and Person B clips their quote and directly responds to something they've said. And the way we format discussions is directly responding to things people have said to get a kind of back and forth going that people drop in and out of.

But over there, someone will say they should bring Scourge back, and the conversation about Scourge will largely be people is largely people posting about Scourge in a way that loosely directs the conversation without people needing to respond specifically to each other.
Like, they still quote each other, and respond directly to each other's ideas. But that's not the primary way the discussion is... hosted? Even when Person A directly responds to Person B, A won't quote B if B's post was the previous one, and a lot of small things like that.
Writing that way is def facilitated by most of their posts being literal hours apart, as opposed to here where I've seen hot threads get 3 pages in an afternoon.

Not that either is a better or worse way of doing things. But man I am not used to reading discussions like that and it made it kinda weird to follow but also really... natural(?) because each post works off of previous ones more generally in a way that's kind of more reflective of spoken language than written communication.





Also, someone there says they wished TBN made a noise when it broke and that's a great idea and now I really want that too!

[shao32]

I saw Xeno video too and despite im not always agree with him either i wont deny i enjoyed how much he ranted about DRK. Despite all of this comunity support and such awesome call for a change on the job in basically his entire kit and gameplay flow im gonna play the devil avocate and bet that SE will only ajust Blood weapon to the stack system and call it a day, i know im pessimist but i don't think they are going to do the rework the job desperately needs.

[Grimfaust_BLM]

Just a quickie to try and add up some of the things I'm seeing the most consistently/what there seems to be the largest consensus towards:

- Blood Weapon normalized to stacks and extended duration, this opinion is virtually unanimous and this change is mandatory as far as I see it
- TBN Duration increased, MP cost and Dark Arts components removed with increased cooldown to compensate or some equivalent quality of life update to this skill to bring it in line with Holy Sheltron/Bloodwhetting/Heart of Corundum
- Dark Mind traited to have more flexibility in use either by adding a physical/all damage reduction or a healing component
- Dark Arts baked into another skill, Abyssal Drain is a strong contender
- Abyssal Drain reworked reduce ogcd bloat and improve kit interactivity
- Living Dead talked to death, simply needs to be made easier to cleanse the failstate, there is no excuse for this skill having been neglected for 3 expansions now

DRK has 15-16 ogcds that need to be weaved in roughly a 20s window every two minutes. This means that you are very likely going to be unable to mitigate anything that occurs in the middle of that window.
This compared to DRK's 40ish seconds of 123 spam and nothing else is too harsh of a dichotomy.
Its not the worst of DRK's issues but at this point it requires address.