Please stop making new Dark Knight threads.

[Lyth]

I get so bored of these complexity flexing matches. It's really easy to perceive the job that you invest most of your effort into as being so much more complex than the others, but that's just a reflection of your own personal areas of expertise and deficiency. If you're genuinely doing something that's high skill, people will let you know. You won't ever have to go looking for approval.

I also haven't taken the term 'Main Tank' at face value since circa 2013. There's always tank A and tank B. They're co-tanks. You always want to know how to do both parts comfortably if you're halfway decent, in the event that you get forced to pug into the opposite role. Why does any of this matter? People were hung up that PLD had to be MT for certain fights in ARR (that bit about WAR being the 'preferred MT' in ARR was complete rubbish revisionist history). In fairness, this mostly had to do with the fact that Hallowed was broken and let you reset vuln stack mechanics allowing you to solo fights that you shouldn't. But the real secret was knowing which tank part let you have more greedy uptime, and which tank part got the shaft. You can, er, stand over in the far corner and afk 'main tank' that flare marker. I'm going to stand here by the boss and 'off-tank' <snicker>.

But yeah, people are really upset about this, and it's really not your place to try to stifle or gatekeep this discussion.

[Undeadfire]

I get so bored of these complexity flexing matches. It's really easy to perceive the job that you invest most of your effort into as being so much more complex than the others, but that's just a reflection of your own personal areas of expertise and deficiency. If you're genuinely doing something that's high skill, people will let you know. You won't ever have to go looking for approval.

If you say so.

Drk: Push all the buttons in Delirium burst window.
War: Push all the buttons in Inner Release burst window.
Gnb: Push all the buttons in No Mercy burst window.
Pld: Keep FOF/Reqs under extreme alignment, or s*** gonna hit the fan.

Those 3 tanks can stall cooldowns to align them in fights, Paladin cannot.
Paladin/Healers lose potency simply letting it main tank.
Paladin almost has double the length burst window compared to GNB, and this can be very problematic in fights sticking long enough, or mess up the whole rotation completely. This means rotation would have to be customized each individual fight just to stay aligned at optimal potency. Some fights ignore this situation for what we call a dummy with mechanics fight.
Pop FOF/Reqs/Pot too early/late, whoopsie have fun recovering the large potency losses.

You always want to know how to do both parts comfortably if you're halfway decent, in the event that you get forced to pug into the opposite role.

I never needed to learn main tank side after deciding to main Pld in SHBs, it never gets to and it's a questionable move to do so, certain mechanic forcing is different. I never once ever gone Savage raids in pug groups except the one time Turn 5 clear in 2.1. "Forced" is an extreme term.

Why does any of this matter? People were hung up that PLD had to be MT for certain fights in ARR (that bit about WAR being the 'preferred MT' in ARR was complete rubbish revisionist history). In fairness, this mostly had to do with the fact that Hallowed was broken and let you reset vuln stack mechanics allowing you to solo fights that you shouldn't. But the real secret was knowing which tank part let you have more greedy uptime, and which tank part got the shaft. You can, er, stand over in the far corner and afk 'main tank' that flare marker. I'm going to stand here by the boss and 'off-tank' <snicker>.

Tell that to Turn 5 during it's prime, Warrior outclassed Paladin in 2.1 for having -20% reduction/Heal sustain on demand at any time. I am from 2.0, and none of the advanced tactics were abused we do now back in the day. It took over 2 months for Turn 5 to go down 1st kill, 18 days for Turn 9, 4 days for Turn 13. FCOB is incredibly easy. Hallowed is one time extension, would never uphold a 10 min fight.

But yeah, people are really upset about this, and it's really not your place to try to stifle or gatekeep this discussion.

Uh-huh, again not trying to deny, only suggesting to keep them in one place than thread spamming.

Edit: Mistake on Eden Verse, did semi-pug for E8S 1st clear.

[ItMe]

I get so bored of these complexity flexing matches. It's really easy to perceive the job that you invest most of your effort into as being so much more complex than the others, but that's just a reflection of your own personal areas of expertise and deficiency.

I see this happen a lot in fighting games too and it always makes me laaaaugh!
Of course you think your main is deeper, and the enemy is unga bunga, you've been labbing your main!

[Lyth]

Players are always reductionistic towards jobs that they don't fully understand or regularly play. By that token, playing 'Flight of the Bumblebee' on piano is really just about pressing all the buttons written on the music script. I think we've described this game in a nutshell: press all the buttons on the spreadsheet at the correct timestamps. Easy.

Before we dive too deep into an explanation on how Fight or Flight is supposedly the pinnacle of mechanical skill, it's worth remembering that the 50%-ish uptime 20-25% buffs on PLD/GNB are designed to help offset the value of 100% uptime 10% buffs like Eye/Darkside. I think there comes a point where a buff is active for long enough in your rotation that it stops being 'burst' and just ends up being 'maintenance'. Granted, I'm sure if people complain enough, they'll just turn Fight or Flight into a trait, much like they're doing with Blood of the Dragon this coming expansion. It's a bit like saying 'uptime is extremely important for my job' which, while true, is a universal statement that applies to pretty much any job. Stalling a burst window is always a dps loss. The decision making comes in understanding when that loss is less than the loss of using it on recast. It's strange how people in this game think that, if they play perfectly, they should be entitled to 100% of a job's potential output. That's really not the point. It's about finding the maximum value that the fight allows you.

I believe that good tanks are flexible and versatile, and understanding what your counterpart does during their sections of a fight can help you salvage a run. I personally wouldn't feel that I understand a fight if I can only do it as tank A or tank B, but different players have different standards.

This bit about Turn 5 and ARR is completely out of left field and historically false. Turn 5 was cleared with double PLD when it was relevant. It's not that you couldn't run a 'WAR MT' on Twintania post-2.1 if you wanted to, but it certainly wasn't the norm. It's also worth noting that players were still learning how the game worked in early ARR. Death Sentence wasn't actually meant to be brute forced and healed through. It was meant to force a tank swap. It's the same way that Garuda Ex wasn't meant to be actually tanked with Garuda and Suprana on the same tank, resulting on double wicked wheels. That was a uniquely NA/EU issue, in part because Mr. Happy mistakenly thought the Ex tethers worked the same way that they did in Hard when his strat got popularized. The JP strat actually has the Garuda and Superna perform a tank swap for you, and allows you to tank the fight at a much lower ilvl. Again, there were a lot of things that were brute forced in less efficient ways because we didn't understand how things worked, and the devs didn't know how to foolproof their designs. Even a WAR MT for T9 was an anomaly. The first time that I remember seeing WAR start to gain a bit of acceptance as a 'main tank' was during 7-player clears for T13, late in the cycle. But it really wasn't until Gordias that the 'Shield Oath PLD MT' went into extinction amongst sensible company, dragging along with it the terms 'MT' and 'OT'. And good riddance. They weren't useful terminology to begin with.

[Undeadfire]

I think we've described this game in a nutshell: press all the buttons on the spreadsheet at the correct timestamps. Easy.

The timestamps pushes milliseconds level, not direct hard seconds, it's very dependant on skill speed. GCD stalling mistakes are not an option, perfectly clock timing FoF/Pot grants full potency, failing it you will lose Fof on final Goring/Atonement, lose Pot at Confiteor cast, failing accurately timed cooldowns punishes potency loss, both categories boss mechanic and/or rotation. Not saying it's hard, just more difficult than other tanks optimising.

Stalling a burst window is always a dps loss.

Wrong, E11S is a prime example to stall 60s cooldowns by 30 seconds, to align cooldowns on the bosses return, personal dps it's a loss, group raid DPS it's a massive gain syncing them. Will take me a while to find more cooldown stall to align in other fights. 2 Min cooldowns are stalled in a lot of fights because of boss mechanics preventing a full uptime burst window and syncing them to 90s CD users. Multitude of logs in fights all prove this.

I personally wouldn't feel that I understand a fight if I can only do it as tank A or tank B, but different players have different standards.

There aren't any standards, Warrior out classes all other tanks main category, stopping them from main tanking you're almost cutting half of their tool kit off, GNB has the most self cooldowns, DRK abuses TBN, PLD loses DPS simply losing health in SHBs, Spirits Within: Potency decreases as own HP decreases, Sheltron isn't a damage reduction and all it has is Rampart/Sentinel.

This bit about Turn 5 and ARR is completely out of left field and historically false. Turn 5 was cleared with double PLD when it was relevant.

Thanks for telling me stories in the past and of course I am aware of double Paladin, Twin was killed 26th October 2013, Patch 2.1 released 14th December 2013 (Warriors rework). It's only Bluegartr released a kill video 2 days later which inspired other raid groups working on beating Twintania, and Paladin was the main add holder, and stun locker for Dreadknight. Sorry this isn't false, it's fact.

It's not that you couldn't run a 'WAR MT' on Twintania post-2.1 if you wanted to, but it certainly wasn't the norm. It's also worth noting that players were still learning how the game worked in early ARR. Death Sentence wasn't actually meant to be brute forced and healed through. It was meant to force a tank swap. It's the same way that Garuda Ex wasn't meant to be actually tanked with Garuda and Suprana on the same tank, resulting on double wicked wheels. That was a uniquely NA/EU issue, in part because Mr. Happy mistakenly thought the Ex tethers worked the same way that they did in Hard when his strat got popularized.

Huh? Mrhappy never was a brilliant player and his strategies are terrible. Turn 5 Twintania didn't debuff Death Sentences till the 1st neurolink and MT abused Conflags for invincibility and another reason tank swap was avoided was to keep Eye for an Eye triggered keeping the boss on a permanent damage down. Conflags made the player currently still targetable for Twin, couldn't do anything but like I said invincible. Turn 1-2 forced tank swaps due to vun build ups, Hallowed Ground only bought more time not permanently. Extreme trio primals built up being killed 7 man, hell could push 6 man possibly.

But it really wasn't until Gordias that the 'Shield Oath PLD MT' went into extinction amongst sensible company, dragging along with it the terms 'MT' and 'OT'. And good riddance. They weren't useful terminology to begin with.

Only used in Gordias till it became common knowledge how broken Dark Knight was. Alexander was a utter mess of a Savage raid, poorly built. I'll admit the A7S part Paladin being relevant, but still hard to beat DRK.

[Necrogen]

This thread does exist for all Dark Knight talk

We don't need more threads with the same predictable posts, "My thoughts for Dark Knight", "Dark Knight rework", "Dark Knight problems", "A way to fix Dark Knight".

We get it, Dark Knight is in a bad state at the moment and getting trashed in Endwalker, we don't need Drk thread flooding, the mega thread exists ^^^^^^^^^^.

Did you just make a new topic telling players to stop making new topics about Darknight? You know you have users talking about DKN here?

Why didnt you just go to each spam post and just copy pasta the message or alert the mods to merge the topics or something?

[Lyth]

I'm not a big fan of quote-by-quote responses. The formatting is terrible and they're written entirely for the benefit of the writer and not the reader.

I had forgotten about alternate-universe PLD, the job famed for its incredibly high mechanical skill ceiling, requiring button presses down to the millisecond. So unfortunate that latency and human reaction time are one to two orders of magnitude off from that. Again, if you have to sell to others why what you're doing is high skill, it isn't. It's particularly unfortunate that you're playing the vanilla tank in an MMO, so we're pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to mechanical skill ceiling in any game genre outside of say, turn-based farming simulators. I'm sure that your spreadsheet took a lot of time to design and you are very very proud of it. Good work.

I can't hazard a guess as to why historical events panned out the way that they did, but they did. The default NA Garuda strat was awful, but that is the reason why. The devs actually came out in a later interview to explain how they had intended it to actually work, in contrast to what most English-speaking players were doing. I think that's part of the charm of ARR, though, when you look back. There wasn't really a clear-cut formula back then, whether it be dungeons or raid encounters. It's only in later expansions that everything starts to fall into a very predictable paint-by-numbers design approach.

[Jandor]

I don't mind new DRK threads, potentially interesting ideas tend to get lost in the maelstrom of the 120+ page mega.

If they were pushing discussion related to other tanks out of sight maybe I'd have a different opinion, but it's not like there are that many DRK threads and it's not like the tank forum is particularly busy right now anyway.

[Vatom]

There aren't any standards, Warrior out classes all other tanks main category, stopping them from main tanking you're almost cutting half of their tool kit off, GNB has the most self cooldowns, DRK abuses TBN, PLD loses DPS simply losing health in SHBs, Spirits Within: Potency decreases as own HP decreases, Sheltron isn't a damage reduction and all it has is Rampart/Sentinel.

Though I agree with the spirits within... We really going to say sheltron doesn't mit any dmg
Dang I mean its a rampart for free and you have it almost all the time granted rng with block but
I mean next expansion it gets a regen can you really complain about WAR at that point with heal on dmg spells
...PLDs can't satisfy them if you gave them a two hand sword and a shield with a cannon attached... that sounds pretty cool though

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

Though I agree with the spirits within... We really going to say sheltron doesn't mit any dmg
Dang I mean its a rampart for free and you have it almost all the time granted rng with block but
I mean next expansion it gets a regen can you really complain about WAR at that point with heal on dmg spells
...PLDs can't satisfy them if you gave them a two hand sword and a shield with a cannon attached... that sounds pretty cool though

Sheltron doesn't mitigate damage, it removes the RNG element of blocking, it's not actually giving any additional mitigation. For the next 4-6 seconds after using Sheltron depending on level, you have guaranteed block, but the game could possibly roll blocks regardless of Sheltron for said time without the use of Sheltron, but you'll never know after using Sheltron. Holy Sheltron will have actual mitigation in the form of Knight's Resolve.

Also Blocking is not a free Rampart, it's a scaling stat, with it's peak at 20% and, lowest is at 10%. So levelling, and certain Ultimates you're not getting the full potential from blocking, and also in older content a crit bypasses blockibg invalidating Sheltron.

I mean Warrior is gonna still have some insane amount of healing as usual, nice that Paladin is finally getting some passive healing, it won't be as on demand as Warrior's, but that's not an issue.