Dark Knight Megathread

[TouchandFeel]

... That still seems largely a player issue? ... I in no way feel fragile on DRK compared to anything but WAR. ...

Don't get me wrong, I was not and am not saying that DRK is definitively worse overall defensively; at least not for the most part, I still really dislike Living Dead but that is a different topic altogether. What I was saying, and thought was very clear about, is that to many players it feels worse. It's the perception of the situation, not the objective actuality of it at play here.

Large damage shields as mitigation by their very nature result in the damage actually received, being visible by changes on your HP bar, as having more discernible and defined peaks and troughs when visualizing the pattern to damage you are actually taking. The shield will completely stop all damage until it breaks and then it mitigates none.

% based mitigation is by its nature less variable in the fluctuations of damage actually received because it only lessens the damage as it is being received, it never stops it entirely like a shield. There also isn't a predetermined upper limit to the damage mitigated/lessened and so it will always last its full duration. This inherently results in the damage being actually received as being more smooth when visualizing it as a pattern.

To phrase it as an analogy, shield mitigation is like a stop sign or traffic light, while % mitigation is like a speed limit.

The healing aspects of Holy Sheltron and Heart of Corundum provide an additional factor that helps smooth out the changes occurring on your HP bar.

Asides from the short recast defensive abilities, each tank (ignoring the outlier of WAR) has roughly the same extra defensives to leverage as extra defensive padding, and so has approximately the same capabilities to use them to smooth out through mitigation the pattern of damage reduced from the HP pool, leaving both in roughly the same spot as before in terms of overall tangible damage received with the shield based one (DRK) having more defined fluctuations to their HP pool compared to the % mitigation ones (PLD and GNB).

This is not a "player issue", it is just an objective reality of how the nature of the different types of mitigation result in different patterns to the damage being received and the observable affect visible on your HP pool.

How a player like you or I FEEL about these discernible patterns and how much we even notice them is of course a different matter and will vary to degrees by individual.
You say to you it is no big deal and you never felt in danger. I too didn't mind it and rarely felt truly in danger. In fact the more distinct fluctuations to my health actually made the defensive game-play of DRK more exciting for me compared to when I play a different tank like PLD. To me it actually made it feel better.
Our experiences and how we personally feel about it, while true to us, are not definitive for the playerbase at large. People overall tend to prefer things that are more predictably reliable, with less strong variation. We are creatures of comfort in many ways. Not everyone mind you, there will always be those that are thrill seekers or thrive in chaos, but objectively most.
So taking into account the patterns from the different types of mitigation and human natures' preference for predictability and comfort, it makes sense why many, if not most, players would feel that DRK is worse defensively even though it objectively may not be. It's seeking to understand the viewpoint of others and the reasoning behind it, even if you don't necessarily agree with it. I may not feel the same way myself, but I can use reasoning to see where they are coming from and why they may feel the way they do.

I will note how much the general viewpoint on this, especially the view of TBN, flipped with Endwalker. It's very interesting thinking about how the opinions of so many went from one end of the spectrum to the other. TBN used to be seen as making DRKs' defensive capabilities the superior and, funnily enough, the more comfortable one even though it was a shield, actually because it was a shield. The focus used to be very much on the period when the shield was up and no damage was taken, which felt comfortable since patternwise a flat-line is pretty smooth and comfortable. Now with the buffs to the short recast defensives of the other tanks and TBN becoming less impressive overall by comparison, people are no longer focused on that initial period where you are taking no damage but are instead very much noticing the other side of the coin where you no longer have the shield and are taking all the damage (any separate mitigation being used notwithstanding). Now that they are not so overly focused on the pros, they are now very much seeing the accompanying cons, probably to the point of over focusing on them, and they are suddenly feeling like "oh sh*t, what the hell is this crap". It's like that blemish or imperfection that was always there that people only just now noticed and now they can't stop looking at it and that level of focus makes it seem so all-encompassing.
Anyways, just a tangent, but it really is interesting how viewpoints can so readily shift and change, and how malleable perception can be.

... A nitpick, though, on the "Super TBN" idea: two-stage empowered abilities that quickly come to feel like the "normal" effect will often tend to seem more like 'clunk' than 'power' ...

Yes, that can occur. I made very similar arguments against some of the implementations for the original Dark Arts where it just felt like you had to do two actions just to get the payout of effectively one, particularly in regards to the Dark Arts effect for most offensive actions being just a bit of extra potency which was really dull.

However, this too all hinges on perception and there are many factors that can steer that one way or another. Whenever you design anything that is meant to be complimentary or synergistic, you always run the risk of the lone parts of it feeling diminished when not paired. Does that mean that you completely avoid any such potential designs? I would say no and I am sure many, if not most players would say the same.

So the trick is figuring how to implement game-play mechanics like this that avoid the obvious presented pitfall.
The first step I would say is to try to identify elements that would likely reinforce such a negative perception.

One big thing that I can think of is to have the initial ability in the two-step combination have no tangible effect by itself, it is solely there to empower the second ability. This lack of positive feedback on the initial part of the combo makes it feel in the moment rather extraneous and places all the emphasis on the second ability, the "empowered" one. The extraneous feel of the initial button press can lead to it feeling "clunky" and the extra emphasis on the "empowered" ability makes the divide between it and the normal version more discernible.
The potential solution to this that I used was to have the initial action of the two-step combo actually be the one that people would normally think of as the "empowered" ability, essentially flipping the order and guaranteeing that the initial action has an immediate and tangible positive effect since whatever mitigation it would normally provide is still exactly what it provides. Arranging it in this way also puts less emphasis on it feeling like the "empowered" ability since it basically stays the same, which in turn lessens the divide felt between the normal version and the comboed version of the ability, and instead puts more emphasis on the second ability in the combo as being the "empowered" one.

The second big thing that I can think of that would reinforce the potential problem is making the additional, or "empowered", effect from the combo be a straight forward, direct increase to exactly what the defining ability was already primarily doing, for example making the additional effect an extra 10% magic damage resistance when comboed with Dark Mind. This obviously strongly emphasizes the divide between the comboed one and the normal one by directly providing a stronger version of the effect of the comboed ability.
The solution for this is to provide different but preferably complementary effects instead of direct boosts to what effects already exist. For example what I suggested as the potential combo additional effect for Dark Mind was to provide a small amount of additional physical damage only mitigation. The primary effect of Dark Mind doesn't change at all and isn't made stronger, it just allows it to potentially be used differently and in different situations.

The last thing that I can think of off the top of my head that would contribute to the problem is making the bonus effect too strong. The stronger the bonus effect, the bigger the objective difference between the comboed/"empowered" version and the normal version which will obviously greatly increase the feeling of the divide.
The solution to this is also obvious, just make the bonus additional effects relatively small but just big enough to feel worthwhile. The best part of getting something for virtually nothing is that what you get really doesn't have to be much since few would scoff at freebies. This changes the additional bonus effects from "must haves", which will feel bad if you don't get it, to "nice to haves" which you will be happy to get but not necessarily feel overly beholden to.

By implementing things in this way, I aimed to shift the emphasis away from making it feel like the establishing ability is being "empowered" but instead to make Oblation feel like a more flexible ability that shifts and adjusts in a way to compliment what it is paired with.

The idea for how Oblation would work with TBN is however a bit more unique since the mechanics built around it make the ability itself fairly unique, so the challenge was to work around those constraints and how to potentially play off them and maybe address some other player complaints along the way.
You can't really just layer on more stacking mitigation because it would interfere with the TBN shield breaking which you probably wouldn't want as a player. Then the way that Oblation looks mirrors the TBN animation so much that it just felt natural to try to make it also a shield when comboing off of TBN, but putting a shield on top of a shield just felt weird so that is where I arrived with simply breaking TBN and replacing it with another shield.

This approach provided the added game-play element of giving DRK a way to break TBN themselves to refund the MP into a Dark Arts, something that has been asked for by players.
Additionally, it also created a sort of mini-game with how to maximize it's effect depending on the situation. In a situation with prolonged high damage, you could try to ride out TBN a bit to have that soak damage before dropping that shield and putting up the other one; whereas in a situation of extreme spike damage like a tankbuster, it wouldn't really matter so you could just break TBN and have the Oblation shield go up. You may think that this game-play is "convoluted" or "finnicky", but I personally see it as being fun. Carefully curated risk/reward scenarios can feel really good and I even went so far as to nullify the inherent risk/reward aspect of TBN, the MP/DPS loss of it not breaking, as part of the this combo so that you aren't doubling up on them and even if you don't perfectly maximize the payout in the combo scenario, you are still guaranteeing yourself a win in the base TBN one. Serendipitously this game-play mechanic also reflects the very lesson taught in the DRK job quests of "don't push too far or you'll be sorry", an unintentional coincidence but amusing none the less.

The last challenge that I saw to tackle with this idea was to reign in the power from maximizing your TBN shield and then getting your second shield, while making sure that in instances where you immediately go into your second shield to soak a buster it still felt like enough of an upgrade. The best way to achieve this that I could think of was to have the second shield be slightly stronger (maybe 30% as opposed to TBNs' 25%) but with a shorter duration (5s?).





Anyways, I am not overly stuck on any of my ideas or suggestions, and I certainly don't feel that any of them are the only way to address or change things. I'm constantly changing and evolving my ideas based on the state of the game and what feedback I am seeing from other players, even stuff that I may not agree with gets factored in. I present ideas here on the forums more to grease the wheels of inspiration amongst the players and hopefully the dev team, although the level of such influence is of course questionable.
I want to see more game-play centric, interesting solutions to problems as opposed to the easy low hanging fruit that tends to be so easily and often repeated because it is low effort to bandwagon on; and so that is what I try to put out there. It's the very reason that I go into such exhausting detail with walls of text describing all the nuances of my decisions and thought process, hoping that those who actually care will in turn be influenced to put more thought into their opinions and ideas, even if only a little bit.

[Ryaduera]

-snip-

When it comes to barriers over percentages something else you have to consider is that the more damage something does the less effective a barrier actually is next to flat reduction. I showed my work on math based around the idea of tankbusters, but the same can be said for large pulls in dungeons as well (the math on things like HoC gets a little djanky because of the 15% bonus falling off after 4 seconds, but the logic stands) so in longer fights where percentages can be kept up for more time it will overall reduce damage by more, but, as you said, have the tanks HP in a steady decline instead of a flatline before the barrier breaks. I think this is why several people have suggested a regen if the shield breaks, since it not only provides DRK with the healing it's lacking, but also applying a regen after the barrier breaks means subsequent damage can be mitigated without overcompensating since overheal would mean it doesn't mitigate more every time, it only has additional mitigation when it is needed. It comes down to the simple fact that shields can only mitigate that exact amount in an HP value, whereas a percentage will always have mitigated more damage as more damage is taken. It would just be nice if DRK had some way of dealing with those heavy damage moments that was properly comparable to the other tanks currently.

[Shurrikhan]

When it comes to barriers over percentages something else you have to consider is that the more damage something does the less effective a barrier actually is next to flat reduction.

True, but that's more a simple matter of scaling. Percentile mitigation's throughput scales with the content. Healing and barriers scale solely with your own gear. If you're undergeared for said content, it's better to scale off it than off yourself. If you're overgeared, it's better to scale solely off oneself. (Of course, DRK does eventually offer the catch-22 of being too outgeared for content making it harder to pop TBN.)

It's much the same idea as 2.0 Warrior, had they ever bothered to balance it against Paladin for even the likes of dungeons. (Warrior didn't even have as much eHP as Paladin--as taking 20% less damage increases eHP by 25%, but Warrior only got a 20% health increase--let alone enough self-healing to make up for the additional healing required by having only one mitigation skill, Foresight, worth about 5% mitigation at the time.)

[Ryaduera]

True, but that's more a simple matter of scaling. Percentile mitigation's throughput scales with the content. Healing and barriers scale solely with your own gear. If you're undergeared for said content, it's better to scale off it than off yourself. If you're overgeared, it's better to scale solely off oneself. (Of course, DRK does eventually offer the catch-22 of being too outgeared for content making it harder to pop TBN.)[/SIZE]

But therein really lies another problem, because healing from other tanks also scales off of gear. All of the benefits with none of the drawbacks, and DRK sits there making sad edgy noises. The only reason DRK was part of the world first was because it was a DPS that could handle tank swap mechanics. More damage is good and all but damn... can't DRK be fun instead? It's getting to a point where it's exclusively a clearing tool.

[Shurrikhan]

But therein really lies another problem, because healing from other tanks also scales off of gear. All of the benefits with none of the drawbacks.

...No. That's not how mitigation types work. Having a bit of something else and less of the first thing does not give you the full benefits of both.

How much damage does the percentile mitigation component of Holy Shelltron, Bloodwhetting, or Heart of Corundum absorb? That whole portion, which far exceeds the healing value in any 8-second span that'd require mitigation, does not scale with gear. I.e., the majority of Holy Shelltron, Heart of Corundom, and Bloodwhetting unless holding Primal and 1 or 2 Infuriates, does not scale with gear.

The entirety of TBN, on the other hand, scales with gear.

Again, that's not always a good thing --i.e., if one is undergeared for the given piece of content, in which case content-based scaling would be preferable-- but being a hybrid, under the same (well, less, typically) total throughput, does not give the full benefit of both types.

[Ryaduera]

...No. That's not how mitigation types work. Having a bit of something else and less of the first thing does not give you the full benefits of both.

How much damage does the percentile mitigation component of Holy Shelltron, Bloodwhetting, or Heart of Corundum absorb? That whole portion, which far exceeds the healing value in any 8-second span that'd require mitigation, does not scale with gear. I.e., the majority of Holy Shelltron, Heart of Corundom, and Bloodwhetting unless holding Primal and 1 or 2 Infuriates, does not scale with gear.

The entirety of TBN, on the other hand, scales with gear.

Again, that's not always a good thing --i.e., if one is undergeared for the given piece of content, in which case content-based scaling would be preferable-- but being a hybrid, under the same (well, less, typically) total throughput, does not give the full benefit of both types.

Healing is a form of damage mitigation. Getting health back is very important and if it can be stacked with mitigations the health returned is also more valuable, so the flat percentage is frequently applied to the HP regained as well, meaning yes, the mitigation does scale off gear as well as long as there is a heal attached to the mitigation. It only does not scale with gear if the mitigation either doesn't provide damage reduction after the fact or doesn't provide an HP return during the damage reduction duration. Anyone who says healing is not a form of damage mitigation needs their tank que times revoked.

To be clear, a heal that doesn't overheal and a shield that protect before damage are only distinguishable from eachother in terms of mitigation when the shield provided actually prevents death. Otherwise they are, in effect, the same value if the heal is the same. Heals are only weaker because they happen after damage is taken rather than before, but there's not a single mechanic where a shield is necessary to survive it in the first place, so it's redundant, and even if it was necessary, we have SCH and SGE for it anyway. This means in any sutuation that brought, as an example, Heart of Corrundum to the point the heal activates during the mitigation period and didn't outright kill the tank, then there is no situation where HoC alone didn't mitigate more than TBN even if you stacked it with Oblation. This is especially apparent on tank busters.

[Shurrikhan]

Healing is a form of damage mitigation. Getting health back is very important and if it can be stacked with mitigations the health returned is also more valuable

I never said healing can't... heal, but no, healing is not mitigation. It does not mitigate anything. Healing increases HP until it hits its maximum. It therefore cannot increase maximum eHP against a single strike. If a boss tankbusters you for what would, prior to active mitigation, be 130% of your health, no amount amount of healing will save you. To survive it you must increase your maximum eHP, effective Health Points, e.g., by using mitigation, that which decreases the damage you take, effectively, increase your HP, or by increasing your maximum (and current) HP. Barriers can be equally considered as either a maximum and current HP increase (exempting old interactions like Stormblood Upheaval) or damage reduction. Healing, however, does not increase maximum eHP, unlike the likes of barriers, percentile mitigation, or max and current HP increases (Thrill of Battle). Healing heals; nothing more. You do not "stack" healing with mitigation (be they barriers, percentile mitigation, or ToB). You survive via mitigation and then you or your healers can decrease the gap between current and maximum HP as needed.

so the flat percentage is frequently applied to the HP regained as well

Percentile mitigation increases the eHP of your existing HP. It does not uniquely further increase the value of healing received over that time. It merely increases the length of time, because your existing HP takes longer to deplete, for which you are alive in which to be healed, including by your own healing. But so does a barrier.

The only issue with the latter would be is if the barrier makes some (i.e., early) part of that healing excessive since it'd then do nothing. In practice, that does not happen unless you run into a fight with both incoming heals (Regen, AB, etc.) and a barrier pre-applied. That is far smaller vulnerability than the fact that the remainder of percentile mitigation can be wasted by death since the damage reduction is not as front-loaded (and therefore as immediate or sharply timeable) as on a barrier.

To be clear, a heal that doesn't overheal and a shield that protect before damage are only distinguishable from eachother in terms of mitigation when the shield provided actually prevents death.

By that token, all defensives are useless unless they prevent death. No. The difference between a heal and a shield is that the barrier margin of a shield can extend maximum HP. If one has some 600 potency worth of healing until maximum HP, a 600-potency heal and a 300-potency-heal-300-potency-barrier will have the exact same effect (unless the 300p barrier can prevent a damage-dealing, directly or otherwise, debuff), but if there's only 300 potency of healing left to be done, the latter's eHP increase will be double that of the heal because the barrier can also increase the target's maximum eHP.

Heals are only weaker because they happen after damage is taken rather than before, but there's not a single mechanic where a shield is necessary to survive it in the first place, so it's redundant, and even if it was necessary, we have SCH and SGE for it anyway.

Redundant =/= weaker. TBN stacks with Galvanize and Eukrasian Diagnosis and unless taking extreme amounts of (pre-mitigation) damage over time, it is quite simply stronger than the combined mitigation and healing of Holy Shelltron or Heart of Corundum. Outside of your stat-buffs from job diversity, you do not need variety just for the sake of variety. TBN is stronger, stacks, and then has Oblation available atop that; the mere fact that other shields exist does not somehow make TBN defunct.

This means in any sutuation that brought, as an example, Heart of Corrundum to the point the heal activates during the mitigation period and didn't outright kill the tank, then there is no situation where HoC alone didn't mitigate more than TBN even if you stacked it with Oblation.

It's not that complicated. For HoC to mitigate as much as TBN, it must absorb as much damage over its duration as 25% of the tank's HP minus what would be produced by 900 potency of self-healing under the tank's stats. Simple as that.

Let's put it this way. Let's grab... the highest GNB parse we can, which happens to be on Zodiark. That tanks has 80008 HP, so let's just say 80k. If they were a DRK, their TBN would be 20k. On a top-parse GNB, Heart of Catharsis hits for around 8k. To equal TBN, then, he must absorb 12k damage within your 4-second 30% and/or 8-second 15% window.

That could be from mitigating half your HP (40k) damage (after other mitigation but prior to HoC) over the opening 4 seconds, or your entire health pool (80k) over the later 4 seconds, or some combination of the two (30k in the first 4 seconds + 20k in the later 4 seconds). Whatever.

Now, let's look at the actual outgoing damage from Zodiark Ex. Only once over his 9-minute fight, and despite never pairing it with anything more than Rampart, does his HoC absorb enough damage to make up for that missing 12k stat-based throughput. Once. (And that's not even accounting for TBN being able to pull off two-thirds more casts over time (in practice, around 55% more casts per minute, going by leading parses).)

Again, across a 10-minute fight, there was only one situation where HoC plus its heal absorbed as much as TBN, let alone TBN+Oblation. That's not exactly indicating a majority of contexts by which HoC blows TBN out of the water, despite HoC having a 67% longer CD than TBN and its trait being included in the same skill.



Unless undergeared, TBN is not particularly weak relative to competing skills, especially for its trait-equivalent being a separate ability. And it's certainly not weak just because "other barriers exist anyways."

Nor does any of that change that fact that, yes, TBN wholly scales with gear while HoC, Bloodwhetting, and Holy Shelltron instead scale largely with content (HoC primarily with content, the other two roughly equal under current damage intake). And no, you cannot just scale fully with both gear and content. The percent on percentile mitigation does not increase with your gear. (The only example we've ever had of that is the now long-defunct Foresight action from Marauder.)