Dark Knight Megathread

[Malthir]

Last time on a long winded tank tale, stormblood is being released and Drks and Paladins have lost their identity, will the Devs pull something cool out and fix the problems?

Stormblood released and tanking is so easy a chimp could do it. What about the Drk's and paladins? Well the Devs decided they should lean into the idea of block with paladin and built mechanics around it, but then when asked if Drk are going to focus more on parry, they replied LMAO WTF is parry lets just bolt warriors fell cleave onto them and give them a ton of self heal. So Darks became ridiculously op in stormblood their self sustain was insane, the devs rightly decided to balance this in the next expac by removing most of the self heal.

Along comes Shadowbringer and the self sustain was rightly reduced on the Drks, the DRK's all cried out, Does this mean we will get our own mechanic and identity again? and the devs replied LMAO Nah we're just gonna bolt on this new pet feature we coded for Mech and you can be happy with that. Paladins block building mechanic was a step in the right direction, warriors are still ungaing their bungas and the new kid on the block, gunbreaker, got an actual decent mechanic, although let's face it they are dps with slightly more self sustain.

And so we walk towards the end on my boring post. The devs thought, I know it was broken and dumb when we had all that self heal on the DRK and so we had to nuke it, but how about we add it all to warrior and this time it will be different and not OP because reasons. Paladins have cool mechanics and nice animations finally, but sadly hit like noodles. Gunbreaker are still trying to tell everyone that they totally aren't dps with more health and DRKs have no self sustain, parry is a long forgotten thing of the past, their mechanics are just bolt on's from other classes that don't work nicely without the supporting movement set, and their class story has been stolen by the new DPS.

10/10 SE tanks designs been great.

[Xrison]

Last time on a long winded tank tale, stormblood is being released and Drks and Paladins have lost their identity, will the Devs pull something cool out and fix the problems?

Stormblood released and tanking is so easy a chimp could do it. What about the Drk's and paladins? Well the Devs decided they should lean into the idea of block with paladin and built mechanics around it, but then when asked if Drk are going to focus more on parry, they replied LMAO WTF is parry lets just bolt warriors fell cleave onto them and give them a ton of self heal. So Darks became ridiculously op in stormblood their self sustain was insane, the devs rightly decided to balance this in the next expac by removing most of the self heal.

Along comes Shadowbringer and the self sustain was rightly reduced on the Drks, the DRK's all cried out, Does this mean we will get our own mechanic and identity again? and the devs replied LMAO Nah we're just gonna bolt on this new pet feature we coded for Mech and you can be happy with that. Paladins block building mechanic was a step in the right direction, warriors are still ungaing their bungas and the new kid on the block, gunbreaker, got an actual decent mechanic, although let's face it they are dps with slightly more self sustain.

And so we walk towards the end on my boring post. The devs thought, I know it was broken and dumb when we had all that self heal on the DRK and so we had to nuke it, but how about we add it all to warrior and this time it will be different and not OP because reasons. Paladins have cool mechanics and nice animations finally, but sadly hit like noodles. Gunbreaker are still trying to tell everyone that they totally aren't dps with more health and DRKs have no self sustain, parry is a long forgotten thing of the past, their mechanics are just bolt on's from other classes that don't work nicely without the supporting movement set, and their class story has been stolen by the new DPS.

10/10 SE tanks designs been great.

Reaper honestly feels like the devs were seriously working on a DRK rework, then said "You know what? Fuck 'em" and just made an entirely new class with that rework instead

[Casualty]

Nothing changed fundamentally though, Warriors massive health pool kept them as main tank and you basically took a Paladin or Drk depending on content.

If they just buffed some numbers making Paladins and Drks more competitive with warriors things would have been fine, however that's not what they did. Instead they scrapped the idea of having any unique features to the tanks and gave them pretty much the same buffs, they removed the tank stance/damage stance feature of the tanks but seemingly forgot that they literally designed Darks and slightly less so Paladins around this feature. Paladins lost a buff and their identity as the physical block tank, Drk lost it's entire class identity, most of the debuffs from DA, removed the parry increase buff and reprise was given to everyone, just cause. Warriors weren't affected because they never really had a class identity outside of unga bunga hit things with axe (totally cool if you like that just saying they have always been simple). To be continued........

They removed it because for a vast majority of the game and the entirety of Dark Knight's existence, no one used tank stance outside of the first 4ish GCDs, barring weird exceptions like losing a healer and needing to stabilize until they were brought back up. The only tank who was reliably doing any "stance dancing" was Warrior, as DRK/PLD both lost a GCD and MP to turn it back on, and PLD lost that again to turn it off.

Grit had no interaction with your thesis of DRK being a magic tank. Speaking of which, they had only one ability that specifically mitigated magic damage, and three times as many that involved parry, but no one ever called them a "parry tank". Their defensive kit was not cohesive, but you definitely wanted them to tank over WAR back then, as WAR needed to spend their defensive abilities for their offensive rotation and DRK couldn't proc reprisal or low blow from an off-tank role.

I do not think anyone wants to go back to when there was a "magic tank" and a "physical tank". PLD was in a rough spot in savage back then, and part of it was due to a lot of the alexander raid tiers had unblockable magic busters.

[RyuDragnier]

Dark Missionary and Heart of Light really should be different. Have Heart of Light giving 400 cure potency HP shields when people with the buff are hit, and Dark Missionary giving stacks of a buff that allows the player's next attack to heal for 300 cure potency. Both would have similar effects, yet different. DRK's would heal while on the offense, while GNB's would be shielding as you take damage.

[Kalaam]

I feel like Dark Missionary should increase healing received 'cause...well a missionary is also a healer... I know that's a very, very weak reasoning xD

[Malthir]

They removed it because for a vast majority of the game and the entirety of Dark Knight's existence, no one used tank stance outside of the first 4ish GCDs, barring weird exceptions like losing a healer and needing to stabilize until they were brought back up. The only tank who was reliably doing any "stance dancing" was Warrior, as DRK/PLD both lost a GCD and MP to turn it back on, and PLD lost that again to turn it off.

Grit had no interaction with your thesis of DRK being a magic tank. Speaking of which, they had only one ability that specifically mitigated magic damage, and three times as many that involved parry, but no one ever called them a "parry tank". Their defensive kit was not cohesive, but you definitely wanted them to tank over WAR back then, as WAR needed to spend their defensive abilities for their offensive rotation and DRK couldn't proc reprisal or low blow from an off-tank role.

I do not think anyone wants to go back to when there was a "magic tank" and a "physical tank". PLD was in a rough spot in savage back then, and part of it was due to a lot of the alexander raid tiers had unblockable magic busters.

From what I remember Tanks stance never cost you mana but i could be wrong, it did fire the GCD which was a pain. The point I was labouring at was, they act with a hammer when what they need is a scalpel, they remove things that didn't need removing, and replaced them with uniformity and boredom. for example make tank stance OGDC, add modifiers that change how your moves function based on stance. Literally anything other than turning Tanks into braindead DPS with more health roles. How about not making every boss fight a game of Dance Dance and have some environmental mechanics?

Don't get me wrong DRk was a mess in heavensward, however it was FUN. playing the class for every expac and each time it's become less and less enjoyable.

Also believe it was 2 or three moves were anti magic, they had dark mind. I can't remember the name but I'm fairly certain there was another magic resist buff and then delirium which used to debuff the opponents MIND.

Also not expecting them to go back to being a parry tank or anti magic tank, but at least back then you weren't just a Warrior with a sword and a worse kit.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

snip

Just for clarification's sake, Dark mind was IIRC the only anti magic cooldown. Delirium slightly lowered the opponent's INT stat, which affected magic damage.

Shadowskin - Omni
Shadow wall - Omni
Dark Mind - Magic
Delirium - INT down (magic)
Dark Dance - Parry (physical), Evasion (DA power up)
Reprisal - Omni (required a parry to proc)
Low blow - stun (parry procs reset CD)
Dark passenger - Evasion (DA power up)

DRK's HW kit synergized more with physical autos & attacks than it did with magic, iirc. It just had a slightly better way of dealing with magic than PLD as a tradeoff for most of its physical kit being based around RNG procs. Grit also did cost MP to activate, but not to turn off (it also didnt trigger the GCD when you turned it off as well), which is what you might be thinking of.

If any identity for DRK was correct, it was the 'needs to MT or it loses mitigation & dps' tank, due to low blow, reprisal, blood price all requiring to get struck in order to proc their effects. Whether it was fun or not, even the HW version of DRK had a lot of anti-synergy between its abilities going on (Several abilities giving evasion as a DA bonus for one thing, when dodging hits prevents you from getting procs for reprisal & low blow, as a key one) and by end of HW's life, the defensive applications of Dark Arts were completely ignored in raid outside of niche use with DM due to the emergence of dps > all raid design.

Also as a side tangent, WAR was basically never the actual community standard MT anytime through its life until SB. PLD remained the defacto MT throughout ARR due to the stigma WAR had from 2.0, along with passive block & wanting block procs for shield swipe to slow their horrendous TP burn. DRK lost too much to not MT in HW, so the ideal tank setup was DRK tanking as long and as much as it could, with WAR only tanking when it needed to. WAR only started seeing MT usage around SB when it had the absolutely easiest time pulling and maintaining early fight aggro, before a brevity of shirks & vokes would prevent anyone else in the party from ever catching up again. But SB is also the expansion when they started dipping more mechanics & fight designs that blurred MT & OT lines.

As far as your point about the lack of care about tanks:

It's not that they don't care, it's that the devs have a very specific design vision for this game, and ARR/HW/SB style tanking isn't it. The devs have clearly stated with words & actions that they want jobs to be accessible, that every job will have a high skill floor and a low skill ceiling. The devs want tanking to be easy, they know exactly what they've been doing making it easier over the years; you just don't agree with it, it's not that they don't care. They want every tank to have the tools to handle any fight regardless of design, there'll never be tank niches, only slight variations on extra tools.

[Casualty]

... by end of HW's life, the defensive applications of Dark Arts were completely ignored in raid outside of niche use with DM due to the emergence of dps > all raid design.

And that's why we aren't likely to see a mixture of defensive/offensive applications for Dark Arts. There were a lot of sub-optimal choices. Now that a lot of people want to untie TBN from having a potential DPS cost, and no other tanks have to actually choose between a DPS resource and a mitigation resource, I can't fathom trying to put that toothpaste back in the tube.

Now, if they were to give us say 3 charges (SE likes 3 charges of things, right?) of Dark Arts that we can use to empower various defensive cooldowns? I could get behind that.

[Malthir]

J Delirium slightly lowered the opponent's INT stat, which affected magic damage.

I mean that's pretty much the same as mitigation, you're reducing their damage output, this is functionally the same as increasing your own resistance.
With the rest It's been along time so I'll take your word for it.

However when it comes to making tanks have the same capabilities, this has been done in the laziest way, they wanted tanks to all be able to get from point A to point B and just decided make the journey the same instead of giving them different ways to reach the same destination. As you pointed out the Dark relied on parry more than magic resistance, paladin relied on block and warrior from memory relied on high health pool and I believe they had some self sustain moves but I was never a huge warrior fan so I wouldn't quote me on that. So remove the magic resist and physical resist and lean into other aspects for example. More block functions for Paladin, more parry mechanics for Drk and fix up the abilities to go with this, or if they love TBN so much give them more barriers, make them a barrier tank where they give them a series of small barriers instead of self heal, Warrior high health self sustain (albeit not as much as currently present.).

This gives each class their own feel, their own way of doing the same thing. Currently those three tanks are pretty similar and I know personally I find the reduction that's been happening with this game is making it less fun not more.

It's not just the classes, they are reducing alot of the game in the name of "streamlining" Adding Role quests instead of individual class story, for 2 expacs now. Removing adds from normals and turning them into essentially trials, I know this is heavily personally I'm sure some people like just going straight into boss fights, but imo part of the joy of FF14 was the world and this idea with normals is a step in the wrong direction. Look at alexander, part of the enjoyment comes from running through Alexander itself, it gives you that sense of grandeur.

Maybe I'm just being picky but I'm getting the early warning signs of what WOW did, where they sacrificed the joy and spectacle of a world for streamlined clinical content. Clearly I'm getting off topic now so I'll just stop.

[Undeadfire]

Delirium it was on rotation, permanently active, same for Rage of Halone.

The problem with Healing vs Barrier, Barrier negates death, Healing will not, and content will continue shaving off damage from Healing, while Barrier removed any sort of danger throughout content, and higher i-level equipment pushes mechanic cheesing not intently designed to be taken, meaning TBN/Barriers will support more cheesing if pushed.