Dark Knight Megathread

[FoxCh40s]

I think the most frustrating thing about Dark Knight is that its 5.0 rework actually looked pretty cool and like they could do a lot of cool things with it. But then, not only did they not do anything cool with it, they did cool things with every other tank. And it's just like... why. I really love what they did with both WAR and PLD. And while I don't like what they did with GNB, I can at least see the appeal from a surface-level monkey brain PoV. All DRK got is big damage buttons (that other tanks got too, and they either feel more earned or more impactful) and a "sure, why not" cooldown that's about as impactful as Foresight was in 3.0.

And then they gave reaper an ersatz Sole Survivor, one of my favorite skills from the olden days. This would be throwing salt into the wound if I didn't drop the job as a main back in late 4.0.

I don't doubt for a moment that they actually play their own game, but it's clear that some jobs get played more than others.

They don't play Dark Knight, Ranged physical jobs, Monk, or Healers at all.

[AziraSyuren]

They don't play Dark Knight, Ranged physical jobs, Monk, or Healers at all.

I actually think they do play healers plenty, but only play them in the context of playtesting fights. Healing is quite a bit more engaging when you don't out-gear content and are in a more coordinated group, but much of that is lost when you're above the power level the fights are designed for and have no need or ability to plan out your healing cooldowns. Dancer also more or less plays the way its supposed to, and has never received any changes that indicated a lack of developer investment. It's just boring and weak- not really the same as being poorly and neglectfully designed.

The other two ranged, however, are quite clearly not favored by the devs as much.

No disagreements on Monk either. It's pretty much always been a disaster, even at its best.

[Kreyd]

I don't know if anyone already has pointed this out but...the itlv 570 tank gear looks like Cecils...

Don't know about you, but this doesn't feel like just beeing ignored anymore. This feels like beeing active trolled by now...

[Noctisnine]

This thread is getting bigger each day. They will not be able to ignore us if we keep being loud about it. That's how people got male viera in the first place.

[Danelo]

This thread is getting bigger each day. They will not be able to ignore us if we keep being loud about it. That's how people got male viera in the first place.

I’m hopeful but I also remember the last 6 years...

[Sacrilegion]

The sad part is, they didn't even bother to rework DRK. Instead they make a whole new job that functions how DRK should have and converted it to melee dps. SE went out of their way to kick us in the balls for even hoping for a decent DRK. I am not buying the "ran out of time" bullshit because they had 3 expansions now to do it right.

[HyperiusUltima]

This thread is getting bigger each day. They will not be able to ignore us if we keep being loud about it. That's how people got male viera in the first place.

I'm pretty sure the DRK community has been blasting out of an airhorn to SE about their problems with DRK since implementation and they have yet to get proper recourse. I'm not going to ramble on again about the issues since there are over 100 pages of thread for that argument alone if you want to read the entire book about DRK and its problems.

Maybe if the Developers took a moment to listen and not worry about the low end for once(because let's be honest, they did that with 5.X with playability) we could actually have even basic issues like LD and Dark Mind fixed.

[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.

[Agner]

Haha hey, another case of a person who totally said they weren't gonna level it to 90 but did anyways. I do need time to form a more concrete opinion on it, and while it's definitely improved from Shadowbringers (the bar was a bit on the floor there, though.), I still can't shake the feeling it's just too... incomplete. The changes were decent for the job it was, but it doesn't feel expansion worthy. It definitely feels a bit more consistently busy as well, which is a plus! It's just that none of it feels... meaningful? Yeah, that was kind of my big worry with it. The job just doesn't have much going for it mechanically to make it interesting past spitting out a ton of oGCD for burst.

The leveling experience was honestly fine. Having a not so great healer was a lot more noticeable than it was with other tanks, and I definitely wasn't soloing bosses down from 50%, but I also never got so close to dying in mass pulls that I felt any particular sort of anxiety. Anyways, some quick comments that definitely vary in meaningfulness:

1) It occurred to me that Oblation's animation doesn't "return you to GNB stance" as some have said. It's the pose at the end of the Shadowbringers trailer, down to the slight grin and head tilt. That said, I wouldn't be opposed to changes for this ability. It's not great, it's not terrible, it's "just okay". But this job in general is also "just okay" and we should be settling for more at this point, not less.

2) Getting Enhanced Unmend was the most depressing part of the leveling process next to only receiving a Living Shadow trait at 88.

3) Salt and Darkness has the limpest animation for a 500 potency ability I may have ever seen. Sometimes, I don't even notice I activate it.

4) Giving Living Shadow trait upgrades does not make it fun. Please give it some interactivity. It happens once every two minutes! You could even turn it into a sort of continuation with an alternative combo, I don't know. Do something with it, because it is a very sad ability to get, especially at level 80.

5) For the love of all that is holy, please change the limp Souleater combo animations. If you're going to give us only ONE combo, make them at least feel like they hit hard. Scourge -> Old Delirium -> Power Slash feels very hefty, and works pretty well with current animations. Literally just change the animations and change the Interject animation if Dark Knight is going to be stuck with it. Jumpyspinnyslash eater is not cool.

6) Shadowbringer is just... alright. It suffers from feeling the same to use as Flood, though. Despite tying Abyssal and Carve together, our heavy oGCD usage still make us feel like we're flopping around quite a bit. The job in general needs a lot more work in the animation and "heft" area, if you understand me.

Overall, I feel as much about DRK as I do about Oblation. Not great, not terrible, just okay, but we should settle for more. It's lacking in flavor and intrigue as far as actual job mechanics go.

[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.