Dark Knight Megathread

[Crater]

If a character is receiving continuous damage spikes over a length of time (say, 10-12% of their health a second until mobs start dying)

Okay but this is a completely fictitious hypothetical that doesn't match any situation in the game. Because that simply doesn't happen - anywhere. The hardest-hitting pulls in any of the current endgame dungeons hit for, at most, roughly 6000 DPS on the tank, completely unmitigated. That's not "10-12% of max HP every second"; that's more like 7-8%, and you're not even taking it unmitigated - with DRK's standard mitigation suite you're almost never taking more than 4k DPS pre-TBN in any dungeon pull. OT damage in P3S during the phases where they take the boss's secondary autos? About 4k DPS unmitigated - only about 5% per second. The very brief windows in P4S where a tank takes more than three auto-attacks consecutively? Still only about 6k unmitigated.

It's all well and good to go "Well, say there's a situation where a tank is taking this amount of damage in this amount of time," but that has absolutely no relevancy if that situation never happens. If I came in here and said "Say there was a fight that hit both tanks with a tankbuster for 120% of their maximum HP every 15 seconds like clockwork..." you would, rightfully, immediately call me out for fabricating an unrealistic scenario to suit my own argument. Yet that's exactly what you're doing here.

[Archwizard]

Okay but this is a completely fictitious hypothetical

Guess we're nitpicking hypotheticals now. K.

-snip-

As the other guy said, you are clearly determined to die on this hill and I do not have the energy to invest in bickering.
I've made my point, you deny it flat out or miss the point, you called me insane, I'm bowing out.

Purely focusing on the feedback I want to give to the devs directly, without having other players gatekeep it: DRK is the worst tank to heal in dungeons.

[Shurrikhan]

As the other guy said, you are clearly determined to die on this hill.

The only "hill" I've made a hard stance on is that the only thing that matters to a defensive tool is its total healing+absorption (that there is no impact of a defensive's duration beyond what is already reflected in that total mitigation).

I've not called DRK's defensive kit fine. You alone are insisting that DRK's current kit must be seen as deserved by way of TBN alone rather that it could possibly be an oversight. Your reasoning relies on DRK, of all jobs, not facing an oversight.

Let's be clear, though, your hypothetical situation by which a single GCD of overhealing, as caused by having a shield rather than just percentile mitigation, would put a tank into a death spiral does not exist. If a shield skill and percentile DR skill both prevent the same amount of damage, that is the end of it; there is no more an inherent weakness to a shield over a percentile DR of the same total in-practice mitigation than an 800p direct heal as opposed to a 800p HoT. On the other hand, being able to keep a DRK up through double-pulls on oGCDs alone, same as any other tank, is normal practice for any competent DRK and healer (even Sage). Maybe actually level a DRK or find one who actually uses their defensives?

you called me insane

I called insane only your obsessive insistence on blaming for our lack of capacity in other areas a tool that has already proven itself not to be the reason for said problem (since it literally existed, unchanged, at no cost to those capacities before --those capacities even being increased upon DRK's being granted TBN). When you insist on saying "We can't have X because of Y" despite having previously had both X and Y and there having been no changes to Y, yeah, that reasoning is not sane.

"We can't have self-sustain because TBN." -> No, our highest self-healing was in the expansion that gave us TBN. They've clearly never been mutually exclusive.
"TBN covered up the problems with Living Dead." -> No, Living Dead complaint threads did not decrease between HW and Stormblood. They've clearly never been mutually exclusive.
"We can't have identity because of TBN." -> TBN coexisted with multiple combos, Dark Arts interactions, the greatest amount of vampiric healing we've ever had, a unique Delirium, Blood Price, and original Blood Weapon. It did not remove Low Blow, Reprisal, or Dark Dance; each was turned into a Role Action, as was a fourth of PLD's defensive kit and a sixth of Warrior's. TBN cannot be the limiting factor.

I don't get why it's so hard for you to believe that DRK might, just might, be suffering from a lack of attention, rather than solely because TBN is "so strong" that we're firmly not allowed anything more.

[Crater]

Guess we're nitpicking hypotheticals now. K.

It is absolutely not a "nitpick". We're making a comparison between mitigation via a flat-value shield that scales with your stats, and percentage-based mitigation that scales with incoming damage.

If you then go on to choose a hypothetical that just casually presumes incoming damage that is at least 150-200% the amount of incoming damage found anywhere in the game, you are being dishonest, whether you mean to be or not.

It matters that you do some basic research if you're going to participate in these discussions. This is simple arithmetic; there's a right answer and a wrong one.