Your Dark Knight players are unhappy. あなたの暗闇騎士プレイヤーは不幸です

[Hazama999]

To add a small bit to the salt pile...

When I first laid eyes on the RPR trailer they showed us back in the second EW keynote, my first thought was "Goddamnit. I wish this mechanic had been employed on DRK." And I shook my head. Tbh I've never really been a fan of transplanting mechanics from one job to another, but even before RPR was announced, I envisioned DRK having a sort of "superpowered" form. Now, this ain't to say it'd have been the exact same thing as RPR, that is, super speedy attacks with a reduced GCD... But the idea of say, being possessed by our dark side just felt right for DRK.

You see, when they showed us the job action trailer for 5.0 and it ended with the DRK summoning Fray to fight alongside us, I was very excited! It wasn't long, however, before I started asking questions... Was there going to be some sort of interaction with Fray? Can we influence how he fights in any way? Do we just summon them and they just do their thing? When the embargo lifted on the media tour and the info came flooding in, I was disappointed. You just hit a button and Fray showed up and just kinda did their thing. I thought "this is a dope concept but it just kinda looks like a really pretty DoT." :/ Sure enough, I eventually took DRK to 80 and pretty much confirmed my suspicions. The ability just felt... really passive, which, Idk about you, but "passive" ain't part of the DRK identity to me. Having a capstone ability that was essentially "hit the button and then you continue on doing your own thing while your simulacrum does its thing in the background" doesn't sit right with me.

[Lyth]

When I first laid eyes on the RPR trailer they showed us back in the second EW keynote, my first thought was "Goddamnit. I wish this mechanic had been employed on DRK." And I shook my head. Tbh I've never really been a fan of transplanting mechanics from one job to another, but even before RPR was announced, I envisioned DRK having a sort of "superpowered" form. Now, this ain't to say it'd have been the exact same thing as RPR, that is, super speedy attacks with a reduced GCD... But the idea of say, being possessed by our dark side just felt right for DRK.

You see, when they showed us the job action trailer for 5.0 and it ended with the DRK summoning Fray to fight alongside us, I was very excited! It wasn't long, however, before I started asking questions... Was there going to be some sort of interaction with Fray? Can we influence how he fights in any way? Do we just summon them and they just do their thing?

This makes complete sense. Players have expectations around burst that relate to DRK's design as a resource management job, as well as the way greatswords have traditionally been portrayed in Final Fantasy games. Build up gauge. Unleash fast multi-hit sword attack with lots of 9999s. I think that if the assigned goal was 'build a melee DPS job around greatswords', nobody would bat an eyelid at this.

It's also worth mentioning that there are two competing greatsword aesthetics at work. The first is the traditional Monster Hunter/Dark Souls greatsword with a long wind-up and a big impact. That's a pretty fun approach to the weapon, but it's heavily dependent on effective use of hitstop, which DRK doesn't use in its animations. That's why Fell Cleave is viscerally satisfying while Bloodspiller is not.

The other aesthetic is Cloud Strife. They've been trying to move away from the latter towards the former, without an understanding of what visually makes each of these combat styles fun to use.

The one thing that's been consistent with every iteration of DRK is dissatisfaction with the burst window. In Stormblood, players complained about how Delirium felt ineffective. 8-15 extra seconds of resource generation? Exciting. But what are you going to spend that on? Dark Arts? Bloodspiller? In the past two expansions, the complaints have been about how Delirium and now Living Shadow are still fairly boring. And I think that people would be willing to accept Living Shadow if it felt like we were going somewhere with it. It still feels like there's a move missing that ties everything together.

I think that one thing that Reaper did extremely well was in making your burst window resource-gated rather than time-gated. Why am I building up resources? Ah yes, to spend them on this supermove. I think that's the first step in addressing DRK's burst window. Remove everything else from the Blood gauge. Put Delirium in at 50 blood, 15 second recast. Give it a fun dark flaming aura. You know, the one that Frey uses at Whitebrim. Or the one that Julyan uses in the Heavensward Hildebrand questline. Replace your existing combo actions with new ones that hit harder and faster. Replace your Edge/Flood actions as well.

The reason why we've avoided this sort of design previously is because of the issue of syncing up burst with buff windows. The answer to this is simple enough, you just need to make Living Shadow give you 50 blood when you activate it. That way, by intention, you enter your burst phase at the same time that that Frey shows up for a tag team. Just go the Kings of Lucis route with this. Let the moves you perform in this Delirium window give you stacks. When the window ends, all your stacks are consumed into a multi-hit finisher. One shadow for each of them.

I understand that at the end of the day this is a tank job and the actual gameplay itself ends up being an afterthought, but there really needs to be a central focus here rather than throwing new actions at random.