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

[Sacrilegion]

So I have to wonder, "DRK is fine" why does it have to be mediocre? You didn't settle for fine with PLD, WAR, or GNB. Why couldn't you do a 4th? You had plenty of time and could of just copied the other 3 tank changes and made slight changes. When I look at the other 3, I had to ask, was he drunk the whole time writing it? Why was this not caught and had someone better do it. Instead you let them take the Bethesda approach to spellcrafting with dark arts, just remove it and put some bastardization in its place. I don't care if y'all can't handle harsh criticism, if you're going to be lazy, you're going to be called out on it. No one asked to be a terrible warrior, no one asked for Dark Arts to be removed, no one asked to have our skills ripped from us and given to other jobs as better version, and not a single person wanted backwards progress on animations.

[Garlan]

...no one asked for Dark Arts to be removed, no one asked to have our skills ripped from us and given to other jobs as better version, and not a single person wanted backwards progress on animations.

That isn't remotely true. For every bit of praise I shared about 4.0 DRK with others back in the day, I got an equal amount of dissenters lambasting Dark Arts and wishing for its deletion. Now that we actually lost Dark Arts, we seemingly forget the huge amount of feedback from actual players wishing that it was removed. Yes, some wanted it to get altered, but there were still a sizable portion that simply wanted it gone period.

Also, the animation bit is also a tad subjective. I won't pretend to say we lost a lot of cool animations over the years (RIP Scourge, Power Slash, and Sole Survivor), but Edge of Shadow, Flood of Shadow, Oblation, Stalwart Soul, and Shadowbringer are all incredibly awesome looking abilities. It is not fair in the slightest to say that all of the animations DRK has been given post 4.0 have been lackluster.

[ItsUrBoi]

That isn't remotely true. For every bit of praise I shared about 4.0 DRK with others back in the day, I got an equal amount of dissenters lambasting Dark Arts and wishing for its deletion. Now that we actually lost Dark Arts, we seemingly forget the huge amount of feedback from actual players wishing that it was removed. Yes, some wanted it to get altered, but there were still a sizable portion that simply wanted it gone period.

Also, the animation bit is also a tad subjective. I won't pretend to say we lost a lot of cool animations over the years (RIP Scourge, Power Slash, and Sole Survivor), but Edge of Shadow, Flood of Shadow, Oblation, Stalwart Soul, and Shadowbringer are all incredibly awesome looking abilities. It is not fair in the slightest to say that all of the animations DRK has been given post 4.0 have been lackluster.

That is true, I hope the best way they can improve the job is take things people liked from the 2 iterations ( HW + SB vs ShB + EW ) and combine them into one. It sucks to work on animations and job design and then scrap those concepts, but that doesn't have to happen. Work on Scourge, Shadowbringer, Darkarts, Edge/Flood , Bloodprice, Livingshadow is amazing, but it should be put together into one strong version. I don't think the 2 versions of Dark Knight are opposite, I think they could complement each other very nicely.

[Malthir]

Shameless repost.
Posted this on the Dark knight mega thread but got lost in the post storm. Personally I think something like this would give us back an original feel of the class, make us unique again and make us actually enjoy what we do.

Dark Knight Changes:

Remove the auto darkside and turn it into an OGCD toggle

When not in darkside all moves give mana back

When in darkside mana is constantly drained, the final move in the weaponskill combo and all OGCD all cost mana but all heal the Dark Knight.
Obviously numbers for this need balancing to not make it OP but ideally keep the cost of the abilities low but keep the constant mana drain moderate, allowing for at least one full darkside weaponskill combo with 2 OGCD weaved in which then leaves you zero mana and kicked from darkside. Realistically you would never want to use the whole of darkside and be zero on mana because you have no health regen moves outside of darkside, so the aim would be to balance the mana gain outside of darkside with mana cost of being in darkside, similar to the original design.

Take quietus and bloodspiller off the blood meter

Unlink C&S and Abysall drain

Remove the current delirium and bring back the old weaponskill

Remove Living Dead

New move Overwhelming Darkness to replace living dead so same cooldown time. Fills all darknight resources mana, blood and darkside meter, resources and health regen increased massively overtime for 15 seconds after 15seconds all meters are zero'd regardless of state when the ability ends and all gain for these meters are blocked for 5seconds.

Weaponskills:
Weaponskills to reflect what stance you're in. When in none darkside you're effectively just using a greatsword, once in darkside you start using some of the more darkness themed moves.

None Darkside weaponskill combo
1 Hard slash
2 Syphon strike
3 Delirum

In Darkside weaponskill combo
1 Powerslash (our old combo finisher where we shot the blast from the hand)
2 Soul eater
3 BloodSpiller

OGCD non darkside
1. Unmend is now a OGCD
2. Scourge (bring it back)
3. Spinning slash (now aoe and a OCGD)
4: Carve and slice reduce cooldown to 18 seconds reduce damage
5: Plunge no change

OGCD darkside
1. Unmend becomes Abyssal drain
2. Scouge becomes Quietus
3. Spinning slash becomes Flood of Shadow
4. Carve and slice becomes Edge of Shadow
5. Plunge no change
6. Shadow bringer unchanged

Current UI elements

The counter for darkside is now the darkest night counter, instead of counting down it counts up while you're in darkside for however long you were in darkside. This is the resource pool for darkest knight and living shadow, at 50 is used to cast darkest night at living shadow can be triggered any point over 50 but last longer the more you use. Add in a second press to living shadow allowing the DRK to destroy the shadow early to return a portion of the cost to the counter.

Keep the blood gauge but give us a move that lets you absorb a portion of the blood gauge to either give a chunk of mana or heal depending on whether you're in darkside or not you could use the old dark arts animation for it.
(In a later change I would like to see this as a modifier with old dark arts. So give us dark arts as a button and bring back status effects either buffs or de-buffs on our some moves, have this bar the resource that is used for dark arts. As I said this would require substantial dev time so it is not needed right now unlike the rest of the changes listed above.)

[ItsUrBoi]

I think the overall ideas here are great however a few things worth mentioning:
1. An invulnerability shouldn't be anything else other than an invulnerability. Regaining health fast to full and then going to 0 after 10 seconds is ok, but the other resources no. People can use it offensively. Instead I have another idea. ( 2 )
2. Instead of Living Shadow at level 90 , add a trait which makes Fray fuse with you, and grant you a massive regen on ( blood and MP while granting access to 10 Darkarts empowered actions or perhaps a new combo )
3. C&S frequency should be 30 seconds, instead of 18. To align with raid buffs.
4. The combos you mentioned could be tweaked a bit to look like one ability flows into the other. ( using Powerslash -> Souleater doesn't seem to flow well, does it? )
5. Darkarts could be an off GCD with a CD of 5 seconds to augment 1 action ( GCD / OGCD ) changing not only its potencies but also the animation.

One suggestion of mine without scrapping the kit would be to make DRK Living Shadow grant SkS and a new combo ( that combo granting you access to Darkarts as well ). Kind of inspiring from Reaper's idea of you gathering resources and using them on a big spender which makes YOU go crazy - not a shadow that you can forget about.

[Malthir]

I think the overall ideas here are great however a few things worth mentioning:
1. An invulnerability shouldn't be anything else other than an invulnerability. Regaining health fast to full and then going to 0 after 10 seconds is ok, but the other resources no. People can use it offensively. Instead I have another idea. ( 2 )
2. Instead of Living Shadow at level 90 , add a trait which makes Frey fuse with you, and grant you a massive regen on ( blood and MP while granting access to 10 Darkarts empowered actions or perhaps a new combo )
3. C&S frequency should be 30 seconds, instead of 18. To align with raid buffs.
4. The combos you mentioned could be tweaked a bit to look like one ability flows into the other. ( using Powerslash -> Souleater doesn't seem to flow well, does it? )
5. Darkarts could be an off GCD with a CD of 5 seconds to augment 1 action ( GCD / OGCD ) changing not only its potencies but also the animation.

One suggestion of mine without scrapping the kit would be to make DRK Living Shadow grant SkS and a new combo ( that combo granting you access to Darkarts as well ). Kind of inspiring from Reaper's idea of you gathe resources and use them on a bit spender which makes YOU go crazy - not a shadow that you can forget about.

I'm happy with pretty much any idea of an invuln change at this point, the reason I wrote the idea like that is basically give the DRK something slightly different and yes it could be used offensively but with 5secs of zero mana and resource gain, if the rest of those changes are done it means you're a sitting duck for 5 seconds, no self heal abilities. But ultimately yeah I like your idea too have Frey fuse with you and give you mega regen.

Pretty much all DRK weapon skill animations could be used one into the next. Due to the GCD, your character reverts to their in combat stance at the end of each weapon skill. Every weaponskill for DRK has an initial attack swing then a final swing before the reset to in combat stance, this is true for all moves, so it doesn't really matter which one you use after the other.

Returning Dark Arts in it's original incarnation, which was to modify certain moves, giving them additional damage and a status effect would be nice but would require some serious design work. The issue is that alot of the status effects didn't apply to bosses so made them moot, would be good to maybe change them into buff and debuffs. Instead of us being a budget warrior we could be the buff/debuff tank.

[Danelo]

Yes, a lot asked for it to be deleted but many also asked for it to just be tweaked. I said either or. The just needed to tweak the numbers so you didn’t have to da so much… like HW

[MerlinCross]

That isn't remotely true. For every bit of praise I shared about 4.0 DRK with others back in the day, I got an equal amount of dissenters lambasting Dark Arts and wishing for its deletion. Now that we actually lost Dark Arts, we seemingly forget the huge amount of feedback from actual players wishing that it was removed. Yes, some wanted it to get altered, but there were still a sizable portion that simply wanted it gone period.

Also, the animation bit is also a tad subjective. I won't pretend to say we lost a lot of cool animations over the years (RIP Scourge, Power Slash, and Sole Survivor), but Edge of Shadow, Flood of Shadow, Oblation, Stalwart Soul, and Shadowbringer are all incredibly awesome looking abilities. It is not fair in the slightest to say that all of the animations DRK has been given post 4.0 have been lackluster.

I recall a lot of people wanting the SPAM of it removed rather than Dark Arts itself, but I suppose that's maybe a moot point in the design space.

I do agree with the fact that animation is super subjective. I found Edge and Flood just to be so... bleh? In fact I think you can go too far. Looking at you Living Shadow you glorified DoT. But such talk between DRK is probably best left to the side. (COUGH Side note, WAR Storm Path, WHY you so limp?).

But it could have the best animations in the game and well.... don't care? I dropped it in Shadowbringers because of how badly it felt to play to the point I just didn't care to see what new abilities we WOULD get. And from what I've seen here, it doesn't seem like anything has really changed about the job.

[AziraSyuren]

I recall a lot of people wanting the SPAM of it removed rather than Dark Arts itself, but I suppose that's maybe a moot point in the design space.

I mean, if they took the coolest part of a job, broke it over their knee, and turned it into a thoughtless spamfest with no real nuance, I'd want it removed too. It's pretty clear they didn't know how to take Dark Arts and turn it into something actually interesting or evolve the concept after 3.0. Which sucks because, as much as some people hate to believe it, they've done just that with plenty of other jobs, including tank jobs (namely PLD).

[MerlinCross]

I mean, if they took the coolest part of a job, broke it over their knee, and turned it into a thoughtless spamfest with no real nuance, I'd want it removed too. It's pretty clear they didn't know how to take Dark Arts and turn it into something actually interesting or evolve the concept after 3.0. Which sucks because, as much as some people hate to believe it, they've done just that with plenty of other jobs, including tank jobs (namely PLD).

Which is why I said it was a rather moot point as the two were so meshed. Rather than go “oh they hate the implementation” it was “Oh they hate dark arts. Better kill it”. Though my own thought on Dark Arts was salvageable. More things or ways to spend it yeah okay, just scale it back to the pace of HW and make it more viable in the moment to moment choice. But it was just easier to ax it then walk it back or fix.

That said I did like the speed DRK felt in stormblood but we also still had speed on Blood Weapon so, column A column B.