Dark Knight Megathread

[TouchandFeel]

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is the most insane shit I've ever read. Have you not been using TBN in conjunction with other mitigation in big dungeon pulls where you're taking easily 3-5x as much damage as it takes to break one? Did we just solve the mystery of why a bunch of you guys think Dark Knight is bad in dungeons?

Just quoting this as reference to what I am generally talking to and not a direct response to the quoted bit itself.

I honestly think that DRK for the most part feels bad defensively because the incoming damage pattern is very "spikey", at least from my experience leveling DRK via dungeon runs and doing wall to wall pulls.
While TBN+other mitigation is up, you of course take no damage for up to 7 seconds, then suddenly you are taking all the damage virtually unmitigated and your HP starts to drop very quickly. With the other short defensives, like Holy Sheltron and Heart of Corundum, the main mitigation portion lasts approximately the same duration at 8s, as long as TBN is popping close to the max 7s, but the extra heal aspect of both those abilities that extend beyond that and the fact that you are still taking some damage during the main mitigation period results in a smoother incoming damage pattern.
Now why does "smooth" vs "spikey" matter and how could it make DRK defensively feel worse in large dungeon pulls where there is prolonged high incoming damage?
Simple, the more the damage taken is concentrated into shorter periods of time, the less time that the healer has to react and counter the damage. This inherently feels more frantic and stressful. For the tank it feels more stressful because they are seeing their HP drop and fluctuate more quickly once TBN has broken and many tanks freak out a bit when they see their HP drop below 50%, especially if they are running with people they don't know in a duty roulette run. So even if in both situations the amount of damage mitigated is approximately the same, the smoother incoming damage pattern will always feel better and be more comfortable to react to. Additionally, the more a person is put under stress and is forced to react quickly, the more likely they are to make a mistake which in this case would be messing up healing and ending up with a dead tank and a potential wipe.
So while the objective potential is the same, one discernibly feels worse for many people and is more prone to mistakes.

Me personally, I still really like TBN and still find it probably the most fun defensive ability in the game because it requires a bit more thought to it than the other short defensive. Before I use TBN I always have to consider how best to leverage my other defensives with or around it to get the best results for the situation and I love that. I even like that I can screw it up burning too much MP and then not having one available when I need it or mistiming it and the shield not breaking, although I do still think that the duration should be increased a bit to 10s to provide a slightly more generous cushion to not screw it up.
I would hate to have TBN changed to just another 25s short defensive that you pretty much fire off when available with little to no thought, talk about boring.

However, despite liking TBN and not wanting it to change, I do feel overall changes to DRKs' defensive capabilities should happen, just that the changes should happen elsewhere.

Preferably I want to see Oblation better utilized to do interesting and fun things by giving it conditional effects depending on what other defensive abilities it is paired with.
I had previously suggested having Oblation pop TBNs' shield, giving a Dark Arts when that happens, and then throwing up another potentially slightly stronger shield in addition to the base % mitigation basically turning the combo of TBN and then Oblation into a sort of "Super TBN". I mean the Oblation animation basically looks like that already. This same idea could be extended to pairing Oblation with other defensive abilities and providing additional defensive only effects. For example, pair it with Dark Mind and it gives the bonus additional effect of some physical damage mitigation (10%?), making Dark Mind more flexible at the cost of a use of Oblation.
It would also be awesome if the recast was shorter, like 45s, so that this kind of strategic layered approach to defenses could be leveraged more frequently.

Asides from that adding a bit of additional self-sustain somewhere is all DRK would really need. I would prefer this to be integrated somehow into Blood Weapon for thematic and homage purposes, but I am not overly picky on the subject of where to do it.

P.S. Man, a lot of these back and forths in the DRK threads have gotten antagonistic in the way people are speaking to each other, moreso than usual.