How is this fair for DRK?

[Crater]

Other people are correct; TBN by itself is comparable in strength to the upgraded skills the other tanks get at 82; Oblation is functionally the companion skill that upgrades TBN, so it doesn't need to be (and really shouldn't be) as strong as the other upgrades.

That said, it's probably a touch too weak. If it got a slight bump in mitigation power, it'd be fine. If it got a slight reduction in cooldown but kept the same mitigation power, it'd be fine. There's no cosmic injustice being dealt to DRK here, but it just doesn't feel relevant in most fights.

Which is why Oblation should never have been the 82 move. It should have replaced Dark Mind completely (while being 15% mitigation instead of 10%) in order to remove a conditional cooldown for a usable one. 82 should have been an upgrade to TBN that gave it a burst heal should it break, and a small heal should it not. This would bring it in line with the other upgrades and make it so TBN can help keep you going even if it breaks quickly. Personally though, TBN really should just be 25s with no MP cost, and no free usage of Edge/Flood. Bring it in line with the other tank cooldowns.

These are all straight nerfs that objectively, literally make Dark Knight a worse class, on top of explicitly calling for further homogenization when the game already feels like grasping at straws to find any practical difference from one tank to another within the role. Absolutely no to all of this.

If this is what you want out of a tanking class, there are three out of four tanks in the game that are specifically catered to your tastes. Please stop trying to take away the one (1) single solitary tank that still has some vestiges of gameplay in it catered to people who do not share your tastes.

[RyuDragnier]

]These are all straight nerfs that objectively, literally make Dark Knight a worse class, on top of explicitly calling for further homogenization when the game already feels like grasping at straws to find any practical difference from one tank to another within the role. Absolutely no to all of this.

If this is what you want out of a tanking class, there are three out of four tanks in the game that are specifically catered to your tastes. Please stop trying to take away the one (1) single solitary tank that still has some vestiges of gameplay in it catered to people who do not share your tastes.

You are a fool if you think they're nerfs. Dark Mind is straight up useless against anything physical, and TBN cannot compete with Bloodwhetting, Holy Shelltron, or Heart of Corundum, which give SUSTAIN on top of the mitigation. TBN costs MP, meaning it will ALWAYS compete with damage and be a DPS loss if it doesn't break, making it so TBN hurts DRK's potential by merely existing like it does now.

So Dark Mind is better replaced by something that mitigates all damage, something Oblation does. Since 10% is too low and pathetic to replace it, bringing Oblation up to 15% would bring it up to par. By removing TBN from the MP pool and removing the "gives a free Edge/Flood upon breaking", it's no longer a DPS loss for using, and encourages using it. If a heal is added to it, it is brought up to par with Holy Shelltron, Bloodwhetting, and Heart of Corundum. Clearly you don't know what DRK needs right now if you foolishly believe TBN can compete with HS, BW, or HoC.

[Undeadfire]

If a heal is added to it, it is brought up to par with Holy Shelltron, Bloodwhetting, and Heart of Corundum. Clearly you don't know what DRK needs right now if you foolishly believe TBN can compete with HS, BW, or HoC.

That's not brought up to par, that makes it stronger in comparison being free. TBN does a huge no damage barrier, and having a heal on top would make it insane.

TBN being free comparisons, no drawbacks

Holy Sheltron/Intervention as I said isn't a whole free choice, it's restricted used. Reqs Holy is extremely restricted, Paladin don't get free choices when to use their healing, Clemency exist, but you would only kill the jobs DPS.

HoC only compares on TBN if it's below 50% HP kicks in, otherwise it's a short damage mitigation, Healers have O-GCDs needing use that do the job better.

BW is the focus problem, can pop anywhere anytime, gains in all cases.

TBN being free, plus no drawbacks, and 25% max HP barrier is very huge with more gear support. Oblation buff too? Bruh, you'll have to be crazy lucky to obtain these level of adjustments, we don't need tanks being more invincible. Instant 25% max HP barrier is incredibly strong, and it carried a lot in Eden Savage raids. I agree TBN drawbacks need to be removed, I got no problem with that, but it's over stretching the bar asking for more. We absolutely do not need another HW tank meta.

[Axxion]

That's not brought up to par, that makes it stronger in comparison being free. TBN does a huge no damage barrier, and having a heal on top would make it insane.

TBN being free comparisons, no drawbacks

Holy Sheltron/Intervention as I said isn't a whole free choice, it's restricted used. Reqs Holy is extremely restricted, Paladin don't get free choices when to use their healing, Clemency exist, but you would only kill the jobs DPS.

HoC only compares on TBN if it's below 50% HP kicks in, otherwise it's a short damage mitigation, Healers have O-GCDs needing use that do the job better.

BW is the focus problem, can pop anywhere anytime, gains in all cases.

TBN being free, plus no drawbacks, and 25% max HP barrier is very huge with more gear support. Oblation buff too? Bruh, you'll have to be crazy lucky to obtain these level of adjustments, we don't need tanks being more invincible. Instant 25% max HP barrier is incredibly strong, and it carried a lot in Eden Savage raids. I agree TBN drawbacks need to be removed, I got no problem with that, but it's over stretching the bar asking for more. We absolutely do not need another HW tank meta.

Then you need to look at the pvp version of TBN. The draw back for that was your dark side lasted for 30 secs & the barrier is up to a 3k heal. Sadly to say the pvp version of drk is way better in the self healing in a mob pull then the standard version

Ill have to disagree with you with the bw. lets say that bw didn't exist it still shows that drk still does not have any ways of healing it self

[Baxcel]

That's not brought up to par, that makes it stronger in comparison being free. TBN does a huge no damage barrier, and having a heal on top would make it insane.

TBN being free comparisons, no drawbacks

Holy Sheltron/Intervention as I said isn't a whole free choice, it's restricted used. Reqs Holy is extremely restricted, Paladin don't get free choices when to use their healing, Clemency exist, but you would only kill the jobs DPS.

HoC only compares on TBN if it's below 50% HP kicks in, otherwise it's a short damage mitigation, Healers have O-GCDs needing use that do the job better.

BW is the focus problem, can pop anywhere anytime, gains in all cases.

TBN being free, plus no drawbacks, and 25% max HP barrier is very huge with more gear support. Oblation buff too? Bruh, you'll have to be crazy lucky to obtain these level of adjustments, we don't need tanks being more invincible. Instant 25% max HP barrier is incredibly strong, and it carried a lot in Eden Savage raids. I agree TBN drawbacks need to be removed, I got no problem with that, but it's over stretching the bar asking for more. We absolutely do not need another HW tank meta.

Apparently you don't know much about your tanks.. TBN is very much lacking compared to the other 3 tanks currently, the lack of self healing along with the death penalty on LD makes DRK the worse tank to play solo and the worse tank to heal.

Pally has clemency sure and yes you take a dps loss but you still have anytime access to it.. your holy spirit/circle also has healing.. not a dps loss to switch over to yout magic rotation even if reli is on cooldown.. your dps is 0 if your dead sweetie.

WAR bloodwhetting is just currently op.. nothing else needs said lol

And finally you keep spouting some BS about GNB needing to be at 50% hp for HoC? Wtf are you on? The healing shows up at the end of the timer too.. doing some healing tests with my WHT friend.. my lv87 in lv80 GNB was curing more then cure 1 with HoC and more then cure 2 with a crit on HoC, add in Aurua for even more healing..

It's shameful how much they screwed over DRK sustain an survivability this Expansion and ShB too.. and you guys who don't know what your talking about aren't helping get it fixed.

[Undeadfire]

Apparently you don't know much about your tanks.. TBN is very much lacking compared to the other 3 tanks currently, the lack of self healing along with the death penalty on LD makes DRK the worse tank to play solo and the worse tank to heal.

Adding more buffs to satisfy jealous will never happen, never, DPS is always the dominant system in every role and that's a fact. DRK is on top with GNB, the job needs adjustments with it's abilities, not buffs. Jobs do not receive more buffs if the job is already DPS dominant in the charts, it's always been this formula. If you cannot accept that, then I'm sorry, this is how FFXIV is built on since the day of ARR.

Pally has clemency sure and yes you take a dps loss but you still have anytime access to it.. your holy spirit/circle also has healing.. not a dps loss to switch over to yout magic rotation even if reli is on cooldown.. your dps is 0 if your dead sweetie.

Excuse me? You're asking to de-sync the job, Goring/Atonement > Unbuffed Holy Spirit, if you really got proof I would love to see it, uptime does exist. Unless unbuffed Circle hits 4+ mobs, Goring spams overpowers it over time.

And finally you keep spouting some BS about GNB needing to be at 50% hp for HoC? Wtf are you on? The healing shows up at the end of the timer too.. doing some healing tests with my WHT friend.. my lv87 in lv80 GNB was curing more then cure 1 with HoC and more then cure 2 with a crit on HoC, add in Aurua for even more healing..

Bro... 20s is a really long time and really useless if the purpose is already filled, Healers O-GCDs exist, it hardly makes differences in high tier content.

It's shameful how much they screwed over DRK sustain an survivability this Expansion and ShB too.. and you guys who don't know what your talking about aren't helping get it fixed.

At least I'm suggesting balancing in all content than a focused system, oh wow Dungeon is too hard, I can't survive it. You cannot cater to one system of content, you have to think in all paths.

[Undeadfire]

Pally has clemency sure and yes you take a dps loss but you still have anytime access to it.. your holy spirit/circle also has healing.. not a dps loss to switch over to yout magic rotation even if reli is on cooldown.. your dps is 0 if your dead sweetie.

Clemency is emergencies only.

7x unbuffed Holy Spirit (270) 1890, normal combo before starting FoF 3130 (+ Dot which isn't included), that's not a DPS loss?



If the battle would be taking too long and my healers dead, and no way to bring them back, best just to wipe than waste more time.

[Lyth]

Oblation is functionally the companion skill that upgrades TBN, so it doesn't need to be (and really shouldn't be) as strong as the other upgrades. That said, it's probably a touch too weak. If it got a slight bump in mitigation power, it'd be fine. If it got a slight reduction in cooldown but kept the same mitigation power, it'd be fine. There's no cosmic injustice being dealt to DRK here, but it just doesn't feel relevant in most fights.

If Oblation is irrelevant, then why isn't it being changed?

Shake it Off was deemed to be irrelevant at the start of Stormblood. The dev team tripped over themselves to put a rework out to quell the WAR playerbase. Why should we wait two years before flipping a coin to see whether the dev team could be bothered to do something about it at the next Media Tour? Have you any reason to believe that they'd address this issue, given their track record with abilities like Living Dead, and the fact that the dev team just refuses to publicly talk about issues that they couldn't be bothered to fix? Oh what was that? Does Blood Weapon have a latency issue? We haven't heard about that.

[Crater]

You are a fool if you think they're nerfs. Dark Mind is straight up useless against anything physical

I suggest you take a look at the distribution of damage types across tank-threatening enemy attacks in the current selection of high-end content (or the selection of high-end content from the previous expansion, even). This is not the trump card argument you think it is.

Dark Knight currently has the ability, through Dark Mind and Oblation, to throw 28% in combined percentage-based mitigation at almost every instance of relevant tank damage in the game, on a 60-second cooldown, without even touching Rampart, its 30%/10s/120s cooldown, or its short-mitigation.

You're asking for that to be reduced to 15% - and you don't think you're asking for a huge nerf to the class.

And for... What, exactly? Dungeon performance? Get real.

Re: "TBN can't compete with the others", getting into detail on that a post and a half. Suffice to say, I don't agree; there are four basic use-cases for short mitigation skills (against Low, Threatening, Lethal, and Sustained damage) and the one everybody seems to be fixated on TBN being bad for - Low incoming damage, like dungeon bosses - is almost completely irrelevant. In every other case, TBN acquits itself just fine - largely due to its low cooldown, which you are campaigning to have nerfed.

If Oblation is irrelevant, then why isn't it being changed?

Shake it Off was deemed to be irrelevant at the start of Stormblood. The dev team tripped over themselves to put a rework out to quell the WAR playerbase.

You won't catch me defending any of the travesties of tank design and balance that SE committed during Stormblood, but two things here: A) They weren't exactly tripping over themselves to change Shake at launch; that didn't come about until 4.1. The panic changes for 4.05 were just to get rid of the gauge consumption on stance-swapping, give a self-heal to Steel Cyclone, and eliminate gauge costs for Unchained/Inner Release. And B) My own misgivings about what happened with Shake it Off aside, the complaints there weren't "This skill is a too-weak version of what we want it to be" but rather "This skill does something that we view as useless". The basic functionality of Oblation isn't a problem at all; people just want it to do the same job a little bit harder than it does right now.

Also, I admit this is a little pedantic, but: I didn't say it wasn't relevant. I said it didn't feel relevant. When the only content to use it on is two overgeared Extremes and a Normal mode raid, Rampart barely feels relevant. I expect its value will become more apparent in Savage (and I expect that value to be small enough that I'll still think it needs a small buff).

[Lyth]

...

Shake it Off's changes were unprecedented for the time. Prior to that point, you usually lived with what you got for the expansion, with a few minor adjustments at best along the way. Shake was the first time that part of the playerbase went back to the devs with an expansion ability and said 'No, give us a better one' and the dev team complied. And they made a point of announcing that they were working on changes nearly immediately, even if they weren't implemented instantaneously due to design and animation considerations.

I know that a few streamers like Xeno were pushing the idea just after the Media Tour that Oblation might actually be lowkey powerful because 'oh, it has charges', but I've never really bought into that (and Sheltron/Intervention has been on a 2 charge system since Stormblood). The standard approach to single target mitigation in harder content usually operates around supercooldown/invuln/swap. It allows for brainless mitigation, because you don't really need to know anything about incoming damage totals. But you can usually get away with it because of how each expansion further inflates the amount of mitigation we have (and because tankbusters don't happen nearly often enough). Oblation doesn't really work well with this sort of design because %DR is multiplicative.

Bottom line is, Oblation does something that more and more people are slowly starting to recognize as useless. There's less outrage because DRK players have a longer history of accepting useless abilities that look aesthetically cool. The kneejerk response is to want to say 'Akshully, there is this niche case...' but Shake established the philosophy where every action has to earn its place on our hotbar. And when you feel that a Level 8 Role Action is marginally more relevant than a Level 82 Tank Action, that's a serious problem. I'm primarily on melee dps now, and most of the jobs have more powerful mitigation moves than this at baseline (Riddle of Earth is 3 charges of 20% DR on a 30 second recast, like what). I know that you want to keep to the high ground, but if this was a new PLD or WAR action, you can be sure that the dev team wouldn't be allowed to get away with this.

I don't think that DRK needs massive reworks. But it's obvious that there's a problem when even dps numbers aren't enough to keep people on the job and it's the least played tank by a wide margin. If they at least say that they're looking at doing something about Blood Weapon, Living Dead, and Oblation as a basic show of good faith, then maybe we might have ourselves a starting point. Otherwise, everyone is better off finding themselves a job that actually works from the outset instead of trying to fix this one.