Dark Knight Megathread

[OdinelStarrei]

I feel like I'm the only one that likes Endwalker DRK. It makes me a bit of a hypocrite because I said no one should level it, tried it at 80 and hey it's not actually that bad.

Same really. I'm so tired.

I had a huge, huge post talking about how I thought Oblation is actually much more interesting as a cooldown compared to the others because of it's incredible flexibility and versatility as the person who writes cooldown timelines. How Enhanced Unmend is essentially better and more situationally useful than the 3rd Onslaught charge after opener if you're putting all oGCDs into raidbuffs. How the Delirium change has made the 1 minute so crowded, I spend a lot of the 123 spam after burst in thought, setting up for it by dumping resources so BW doesn't overcap, or at the very least, looking for defensive mitigation opportunities with Oblation, and TBN, especially now with a total absence of 60s/90s raid buffs, leading to off minute downtimes filled with more TBN support for defensive purposes rather than offensive DA proc manipulation.

How I've never had any problems with sustain the entire expansion, even in randoms. How those same dungeons have me at obscene levels of damage because of how jam-packed the kit is with AoE. Why the Abyssal change didn't really matter to me, because 200p heal is effectively worthless, and made the opener/re-opener ever so slightly less busy. I feel like I'm in SB all over again in terms of my sentiment.

But like, what is the point of breaking this job down like that with charts, and graphs, and reasonable arguments, and proper discourse? None of it has worked! Because anything and everything will just be drowned out by outrage.

Blood Weapon is still broken.
Living Dead is still awful.
And being top DPS by a noticeable margin will not fix the malaise that's been inundated in this job for years now.

I'm feeling ambivalent towards DRK. I'm having more fun now than I had last expansion.
I'm feeling bitter towards SE for allowing the job and the people who play it to devolve into this hyperbolic, outlandish state. They did it, by not listening and ignoring the common complaints. Again and again.

These "DRK cannot do dungeons and has NO sustain, please delete it" complaints that everyone keep parroting. It's the same feeling I'm getting about Dark Arts back during 4.X. It's the same thing. When it takes more effort to do the same thing, once more, we will see the aberrations in DRK's kit be hammered down and homogenized. Just use Rampart in the first pull, delay your abyssal drains, save Shadow Wall for the second pull, and TBN/Reprisal on cooldown. Spread out your mitigation! What's a real issue is that if your DPS is bad, or your healer is bad, YOU are going to blamed for it because you can't have instant benedictions every twenty-five seconds.

I'm so frustrated.

[ThorneDynasty]

The thing that's glaring in every argument defending the state of DRK though is the ever present caveats. When you use all your cooldowns properly, when the DPS is decent, when the healer knows what they are doing, etc. All the other tanks are bringing a ton of adaptability not only to their own survival but the entire party. DRK being perfectly viable when things go right isn't as strong of an argument as you think, that's just less than the bare minimum for the role.

[Duskane]

not even fact we can't do it because we definitely can
it just other 3 had way more of an upgrade to there defensive kit
DRK defensive kit hasn't had any major upgrades since Stormblood outside of TBN extra 10% it got in ShB

oblation is ok but its basically a gutted version PLD intervention so DRK can use it on themself
it's fine but it should have replaced Dark mind not be a lvl 82 skill

[OdinelStarrei]

Yeah, I'm not even focused on the specifics anymore. I could talk about what I like or dislike or what I want changed until I'm blue in the face, and I actually am by this point.

I used to be really angry about the state of DRK, but now I'm just firmly neutral, with more specific feelings in regards to certain aspects of the kit, and all my ire is towards SE specifically for essentially griefing the entire DRK playerbase into this miserable state.

We don't have any developer insight, we don't have any two way communication, we don't have any design docs, we don't even truly know the intent of where they want to go with this iteration of the job. It doesn't make any sense, because we've been through this like three times already.

It's not even that they don't learn the lesson, it's like they are deliberately ignoring how every expansion they screw with something in a way that they MUST realize is going to cause discontent. Who cares that the advantages of DRK are mostly numbers (that we can't talk about) and flexibility in raid encounters (that do not matter to a casual player), when on a surface level, the things that people are excised about, the things people are really asking for the job, go unanswered for so long? A small, dedicated minority of complete masochists. Too small to matter.

I'm burned out. Maybe people getting this mad will finally get a meaningful change, because I've screamed myself hoarse in this way during ShB, during SB, about what should be obvious issues to anyone who spends more than 2 hours on this job. And for none of those long-term cancers excised from the job, outside of maybe me hating Delirium a bit less, I remain unfulfilled.

I'm sick of talking about DRK, because a brick wall listens better than Square Enix does. At least the wall has the decency to not to fall on me every two years.

Just fix Blood Weapon and Living Dead already. Little steps. Give us something, if only for appearances rather than any actual willingness to change.

[Zordrage]

The thing that's glaring in every argument defending the state of DRK though is the ever present caveats. When you use all your cooldowns properly, when the DPS is decent, when the healer knows what they are doing, etc. All the other tanks are bringing a ton of adaptability not only to their own survival but the entire party. DRK being perfectly viable when things go right isn't as strong of an argument as you think, that's just less than the bare minimum for the role.

THIS A MILION TIMES !

[shao32]

What is a Dark knight? Just like the community around it a disjointed mess, no cohesion, full of random ideas, no identity, no gameplay to care about.
I don't think Dark knight will see a solution, there is no person more blind that the one who don't wanna see and the dev team don't wanna see at all, they own vision, or more like the lack of it, matters more than what the community wants, that's why Dark knights and our Healer brothers are condemned to a choice, play another thing or leave.

[Shin96]

These "DRK cannot do dungeons and has NO sustain, please delete it" complaints that everyone keep parroting. It's the same feeling I'm getting about Dark Arts back during 4.X. It's the same thing. When it takes more effort to do the same thing, once more, we will see the aberrations in DRK's kit be hammered down and homogenized. Just use Rampart in the first pull, delay your abyssal drains, save Shadow Wall for the second pull, and TBN/Reprisal on cooldown. Spread out your mitigation! What's a real issue is that if your DPS is bad, or your healer is bad, YOU are going to blamed for it because you can't have instant benedictions every twenty-five seconds.

Exactly. That's probably the reason why this job got screwed over time and time again. I've leveled DRK all the way to 90 and haven't whiped a single time. Except one occasion but that was on the healer not me.

Don't need self-sustain, at least for me. I try to defeat trash mobs and the like as fast as I can, however, it can be problematic when the fight lasts longer than 40 seconds. But why have we gotten to this point in time? That tanks need so much HP options integrated into their kit at all times? What are healers for anyway? Thought we're tanks.

DRK is in a good place. If they fix LD and enhance Abyssal Drain to be actually viable in most scenarios, you'll see that DRK is far ahead of its ShB iteration and people are just jaded for no reason.

Enhanced Unmend etc. was definitely a kick in the gut but guess what? I'll take that if it means they'll stop ruining this job every expansion. Nor does my opinion invalidate the existence of this thread.

[ThorneDynasty]

Yeah I highly doubt you only wiped a single time if you actually mained DRK throughout EW, or you just didn't play with randoms. Even PLD can't save a party that won't help themselves indefinitely (at least without practicing how to adjust your rotation to maximize MP recovery), and I lost count just how many times I either solo-healed the entire back half of a fight or brought the everyone back up so rez mages could do their thing. I just can't see how DRK could come to even close to similar clutches. This sounds like another "no wipes except circumstances out of my control" anecdote, which entirely misses the point that for other tanks those circumstances are within control.

[Shin96]

I suppose you also have been recording me while playing? Believe me or not that's your problem; not mine.

If you actually couple your CD's and have a capable healer, it'll be just fine. Unlike many on these forums, I don't mind wiping here and there it's part of how games are.

You guys are literally making this job out to be unplayable which it isn't.

Yeah and I also dislike this self-sustain crap. In 5.0 we were blue DPS and now we're a mixture of green, blue, and red. I'd rather go back to being a blue DPS.

[Shurrikhan]

Yeah and I also dislike this self-sustain crap. In 5.0 we were blue DPS and now we're a mixture of green, blue, and red. I'd rather go back to being a blue DPS.

I wouldn't mind something the likes of "At the end of 8 seconds, heal for 50% of all damage you mitigated" or "Heal for 40% of the damage you took in the last 3 seconds" (if requiring a bankable resource and/or saving a CD), but all these HoTs (now on Equilibrium, Intervention, Shelltron, etc.) and auto-timed self-saves like Corundum's Excog effect really just feel like the blandest form of capacity over time, more so than player agency.

Much like on a healer, I don't mind (having) healing (capacity), but... could it please at least feel fun and skillful?