Dark Knight Megathread

[Lyth]

I'm not sure how well the burst/sustain dichotomy will hold up in Endwalker with every tank operating on 60s burst windows. What made HW DRK different was not so much a lack of burst but the fact that you had to situationally respond based on whatever procs or resources were available at the time. The current problem that tanks face is that all tanks, including ones which are supposed to be based around resource-management, operate on fixed rotations and timers, just some are more blatantly obvious (PLD/GNB) than others (WAR/DRK). Your resource gains happen every time at fixed points on your combo. The end result is that every pull ends up playing out the same when things go correctly. I personally find that to be extremely boring.

What I would like to see is more variable resource gains on DRK. Even something simple like 'every time one of your barriers absorbs damage, you gain a small amount of resources' leads to variable resource totals, which can make a difference over a ten minute fight. I know that this will make the job less accessible for players who can't make decisions on the fly, but there's three other tanks for them to choose from if they want to cling to their spreadsheets. Really, all I want this game to do is start mixing up pulls so that they don't always happen the same way.

[Crater]

I'm not sure how well the burst/sustain dichotomy will hold up in Endwalker with every tank operating on 60s burst windows.

PLD operates on a 60s cycle, but I wouldn't say it operates on a 60s burst cycle. Its damage peak is considerably lower than the other tanks, and its damage in between peaks is considerably higher than the other tanks. It isn't uniform - neither was 3.x DRK - but it is a lot more continuous and sustained than the others. And, looking at the changes it's receiving in Endwalker, Square-Enix is doubling down on that damage profile: PLD's main offensive upgrade is effectively a buff to the lowest-DPS point in its rotation, rather than giving it another big hit in the burst window as they've done for WAR, GNB, and DRK. I think that's absolutely a dichotomy that they're aware of and are actively trying to maintain; they're just (erroneously, in my opinion) doing a 1/3 split instead of the 2/2 that I think would be more healthy for the game.

I'm in full agreement that things would be much better if we had variability in resource generation back. I liked that your decisions could be very different from pull-to-pull based on relatively slight changes in how the pull goes, and even that you occasionally ran into slight differences even when you were essentially playing identically. I'd enjoy it if they not only brought that stuff back, but expanded on it and made it more central to DRK's kit - and I definitely feel you on "There are three other tanks for people who like the current level of complexity and predictability - those people don't need to have all four." (Same applies to healers.) But I'm not optimistic that SE would really lean into that kind of design any time in the foreseeable future, and if they did, I think it would have to be a gradual process that starts from something a little more baseline and fundamental.

There are some good reasons why that approach wouldn't work for the current tank designs: PLD is based around the predictability of some fairly long strings of GCD sequences and you wouldn't want to introduce chaos into that system (which I think fits the class fantasy of being a traditional, disclipined knight). WAR is intentionally designed to be incredibly straightforward, because that seems to overwhelmingly be what the Warrior playerbase wants (I think we all remember the reaction to having to manage gauge in early Stormblood). GNB doesn't have enough granularity in its resource system to really introduce any chaos in a way that isn't frustrating. And the current version of DRK is so married to the burst window that a little bit of resource variability wouldn't move the needle (or at least, wouldn't move the needle in an interesting way - it would just solidify the cursed "2/6 rotation" type stuff). DRK and GNB aren't fundamentally incompatible with a little bit of chaos/RNG, but neither of their current designs is well-suited to having it bolted on. A hypothetical rework of DRK that moved it more into a sustained-damage model, though, would open up some opportunity for SE to experiment with some of those mechanics in the future.

I don't think we can expect SE to completely leave their comfort zone on class design any time soon, especially considering how much the current success of the game must be encouraging an "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude. But if EW rolls around and it does turn out that "DRK is broke, needs fixing", I think there's at least a small chance that they could be persuaded to change it into something with a more distinct gameplay identity that also still fits fairly neatly within the job design parameters that they've set for themselves.