Dark Knight Megathread

[Fury_Wolf]

All aesthetic and design decisions aside, have you even seen the opener?

I've created a little picture to visualise it (order of oGCDs for optimal play might differ):


Your very first 9 GCDs are filled with oGCDs, there is no space to weave even 1 mitigation CD!... well, maybe 1 if you can use Delirium pre-pull, but that's it. If you thought GNB was loaded, that's a joke compared to this opener!

The problem of clogged oGCDs and too few GCDs really are the same problem, and can both be fixed by simply making the follow-up attacks GCD with a timer, like Blast Arrow.

Make Salt & Darkness a GCD, make Shadowbringer a follow up to Living Shadow and a GCD, with adjustments to potencies and maybe some mana or blood generation. Maybe Carve & Spit and Abyssal Drain could follow a similar pattern.

This would give us some new GCDs to break up Souleater and Bloodspiller, while also freeing up oGCD space for what we need as a tank: defensive skills. oGCD would still feel busy with Edge and Flood.

It would give DRK an identity as the "oGCD into GCD" tank, as others have mentioned. Especially if Delirium is changed to give 50 blood after each EoS or FoS, with 3 stacks.

[Ignimortis]

The problem of clogged oGCDs and too few GCDs really are the same problem, and can both be fixed by simply making the follow-up attacks GCD with a timer, like Blast Arrow.

Make Salt & Darkness a GCD, make Shadowbringer a follow up to Living Shadow and a GCD, with adjustments to potencies and maybe some mana or blood generation. Maybe Carve & Spit and Abyssal Drain could follow a similar pattern.

This would give us some new GCDs to break up Souleater and Bloodspiller, while also freeing up oGCD space for what we need as a tank: defensive skills. oGCD would still feel busy with Edge and Flood.

It would give DRK an identity as the "oGCD into GCD" tank, as others have mentioned. Especially if Delirium is changed to give 50 blood after each EoS or FoS, with 3 stacks.

That might fix the opener/burst issues, but will do absolutely nothing for the downtime issues, and downtime on DRK is 75% of playtime. Especially if S&D and ShBr stay the same potency-wise (i.e. better than any part of the 1-2-3 combo) — they will be a no-brainer button press when their CD is up (which will still be during burst). DRK would benefit a lot from having their oGCD usage spread around the general rotation, so that you don't spam five EoS+CnS+ShB x2 during opener only to use at best 1 EoS in the next 45 seconds.

It's especially glaring because of DRK's MP issues — PLD generates so much mana right now, they actually can afford some casts. Except they don't want to cast anything, because outside of RQ it's a DPS loss. Meanwhile DRK would be glad to not save up MP for burst, but generates what, 1k MP per 6-7 seconds on average, just enough to make it to another burst a minute later (with EW CDs)?

[Jandor]

It would give DRK an identity as the "oGCD into GCD" tank, as others have mentioned. Especially if Delirium is changed to give 50 blood after each EoS or FoS, with 3 stacks.

Press the oGCD first, and then press different GCDs, sort of like a reverse continuation.

We could even give this snazzy new reverse continuation a suitably edgy name, something like 'Dark Arts' for example.