Dark Knight Megathread

[Shurrikhan]

While this is intentional on my part, I should mention... TBN is already nigh pointless in AoE.

Wait, wait, wait. TBN is pretty great in AoE unless the DTPS is extremely high (like, beyond that of Expert Roulette unless you stripped off half your armor and hit no other miti, or "would kill in 5 seconds" levels of damage taken per second). It takes a ton of incoming damage over 8 seconds for Shelltron, let alone Heart of Corundum, to produce more mitigation+healing than TBN. It doesn't matter that TBN provides no benefit for the rest of the duration if, over what duration it had, it already put out more value than most competing on-demand CDs.

And even then, because it's guaranteed to break, it will still greatly outperform anything but Bloodwhetting over time because it has only ~3/5s the cooldown of its competitors. In dungeon runs, I typically have higher mitigation+healing on DRK than on any other tank save for Warrior.

I was hoping to phrase it in a way where the MP restored is based on the percentage of your health you would have lost

Heh. This was also a suggestion back in HW for Blood Price, to increase its single-target value beyond the pittance it'd give from its flat MP restore per hit taken. As you've doubtless guessed from my comments on Bloodwhetting, I'm all for better scaling procedures. This sounds cool. And I would take that over a return to the flat MP gen on hit received (which was utterly useless against single, slow-hitting targets but potentially stupidly overpowered against the likes of large Brayflox HM pulls where enemies would rapidly 4x strike in flurries).

I did what I could to clarify it using the phrasing of similar abilities, but the intent of what I wrote is for TBN to take a role more like Intervention or (current) Nascent Flash: it's usable only on an ally, though you continue to reap the benefits of Dark Arts as a consolation for not receiving the MP.

That makes sense, I suppose. I can't say I'm a fan, though, just because it's taking the meatier, more interesting ability and shelving into OT situations alone. (Granted, I also wanted Shelltron and Intervention to be consolidated into a throwback to Aegis Boon, and was glad to see Heart of Stone not get the same button waste.) Just for context, my preference would probably be somewhere along the lines of TBN being a bit less finnicky, Blood Price upgrading into Dread Spikes, and TBN doubling the effect of either while up (such that you'd want to fortify it, so long as that wouldn't be stepping too heavily on the toes of PLD, who, way back in the day, had interactions that'd cause one to want to stack/fortify their effects).

Which is why Blood Spikes is an upgrade to Dread Spikes (a la Raw Intuition->Bloodwhetting, Sheltron->Holy Sheltron, Heart of Stone->Heart of Corundum), rather than just a contribution to bloat.

Whoops. My bad.

...Is it just me, though, or does Dread Spikes sound like the less basic / more intimidating, between the two? (Much like the present upgrades from Darkness to Shadow being kinda... weird.)

TBN is just a overglorified single target Shield on low CD and high MP cost. And TBN is not a excuse for DRK to be as bas as it is currently from a design perspective.

It's a pretty huge shield (if used on a tank) on an kind of absurdly low CD for its role and at variable MP cost (3k or 0). It's also not what has crushed DRK's gameplay. It has never had any impact on Dark Arts, its addition did not require the removal of our old combos or Scourge, and removing it wouldn't give anything back, nor would regaining old features of enjoyable complexity require TBN's removal. You may as well say that Atonement put a gauge cost on Cover or that Nascent Chaos removed Warrior's higher passive HP. That something popped up after something else was removed (and for TBN, that was only the removal of Scourge and Delirium combo) does not mean it was responsible for, nor given as an excuse for, those removals.