Dark Knight Megathread

[Undeadfire]

Precisely why asking for more buffs is an issue for Dark Knight, is because of TBN. TBN maybe trash in Dungeons, as I repeat again, high content this ability is super powerful and strong barriers is a dominant force for mitigation, vs reduction mitigation. TBN alone can soak a tank buster by it's self, specially now Oblation exist. Removing TBN, Oblation obtaining buffs, Dark Mind changed to all reduction to counter part HoC/NF/Intervention would actually solve one of the problems in balancing.

No TBN
Oblation 15% Reduction, 250 Potency Regen, 2 charges, 8 seconds Duration, 12s Regen, 60 seconds cooldown, can use on anyone.
Dark Mind 15% Reduction (Physical/Magic), 15 seconds duration, 90s cooldown.

Can at least survive all content than specifics, maybe a clone sadly since I can't come up with much, Barriers are a dangerous game.

[Archwizard]

Removing TBN, Oblation obtaining buffs, Dark Mind changed to all reduction to counter part HoC/NF/Intervention would actually solve one of the problems in balancing.

Said like "removing TBN" doesn't also mean yet another rework to the Dark Arts mechanic, on top of Oblation having to be dropped in level to make up for the loss of TBN... and DRK being the only job without a 25s CD which would only exacerbate DRK's issues in dungeons. And that Oblation as you've described it would be a clone of Holy Sheltron.

Also, you're comparing Dark Mind - a skill that can only be used by and on the DRK - to Intervention and NF...?

[Crater]

TBN maybe trash in Dungeons,

It's not. It's really, really not. Setting Bloodwhetting aside, TBN's ability to mitigate sustained incoming damage in scenarios like dungeon pulls is better than the mitigation and healing of Holy Sheltron until you reach about 6000 incoming DPS, and better than the mitigation+healing of Heart of Corundum until you reach roughly 10000 incoming DPS.

This graph assumes stats that are close to current endgame, with TBN on a 77000 HP tank (roughly accurate in full gear in a party) and ~16.5 HP healed per point of potency on Sheltron/Corundum (which I believe is a highball estimate):



This is the damage taken after other mitigation like Rampart, Shadow Wall/Sentinel, your healer's Kerachole/Exaltation/Temperance/whatever, etc. The hardest-hitting pull in any current level 90 dungeon tops out at around 6-6.5k incoming DPS, unmitigated, which tends to get dropped to 3.5-4.5k after standard mitigation like Rampart/Sentinel/healer stuff.

There's a caveat here in that this assumes that Holy Sheltron is being used once every 22.4 seconds, which is how long it takes to generate 50 Oath Gauge, but on some dungeon pulls you can come in with 100 banked gauge to get an extra use - and in those cases, Holy Sheltron does overtake TBN by a small margin. But A) That's not exactly leaving TBN in the dust or anything anyway, and B) Heart of Corundum has no such advantage, and people are hardly crying out for big HoC buffs in dungeon pulls.
(It's also assuming a fight of arbitrary length where things work out to be continuous, that incoming damage is uniformly distributed over time, etc, but these don't really fundamentally change the relation.)

People always fixate on "TBN breaks in a couple seconds and then you have no mitigation!" but they forget that until it breaks, it's effectively acting as 2-4 seconds of Hallowed Ground, and that they should be getting a significantly higher number of uses out of TBN than the other skills (save Sheltron with pre-banked Gauge). That adds up in a very obvious way once you start looking at actual numbers on it.

If people subjectively don't like the skill for whatever reason, then that's one thing, but objectively, mathematically speaking, TBN is a very strong dungeon skill relative to the PLD and GNB equivalents.

[Kabooa]

If people subjectively don't like the skill for whatever reason, then that's one thing, but objectively, mathematically speaking, TBN is a very strong dungeon skill relative to the PLD and GNB equivalents.

I don't like the shortcomings, because the benefits of it require more of my party than the others do. Let me explain, because I don't think it's weak, I just don't think it's the fulcrum of the various trade offs Dark used to have that justified it.

1. %Max HP of the target is not as good as Healing Potency for party support. On other tanks, fine, on anyone else, significantly less valuable. It's a near 20k "Heal" on tanks. It's a little over half of that on everyone else, with no mitigation component unless you throw Oblation on them as well. It also cannot crit, and while we generally do not worry about criticals when looking at defensive utility, the fact remains that HoTs and direct heals can critical, gaining a significant increase, and TBN cannot. Further - You can only spare some pain. They will eventually die. That's the advantage of healing potency vs %shielding.

2. This goes for all of them, really, but TBN doesn't scale with targets. Prior, neither did Nascent. It scaled with damage done, which in turn has greater limitations than it does now. You had specific cases where TBN and Nascent equal out, where TBN was better, and where Nascent was better. This is no longer true.

3. Every other tank received significantly increased defenses, increased healing, and two of them received improved invulns. Dark received 100 more DPS that may not last the night.

To restore parity (and enforce it, frankly new Nascent shouldn't have made it past QA), at least the following needs to happen.

1. Remove the target scaling on Nascent

1 should not remain. BW/Nascent scaling with targets effectively means to ensure parity of tanks in higher end encounters, we cannot ever have a situation where two, let alone more, enemies are present during high damage intake periods. Two is a slight DPS loss, but three is a gain, while being a stupid amount of potential HP influx that quite simply the other tanks cannot match, and we should be moving away from the path Nascent blazes instead of moving the other tanks along it.

This is a polarizing quality that limits encounter design. It's something that must either be shared, or removed. I, personally, vote on the path of removal, because to vote to share it only exacerbates the situation with the healers.

2. Remove the penalty on Living dead.

The fact that Living Dead still has the death debuff looming over it despite every other invuln now being put on 10s is unacceptable, plain and simple. This will go a fair ways for Dungeon darks who have been conditioned to never use it without a White Mage, and sometimes even then. Oh, and maybe now you can save yourself out in the world for pretending to be a tank and not eat dirt for the effort.

3. Change TBN to be % of the Dark Knight health instead of % of the target's health.

TBN scaling with only your HP instead of the target is a slight nerf when helping higher geared tanks, but a boon to everyone else. A general improvement to protecting non-tanks.