Dark Knights are an absolute joke and I'm tired of pretending they're not

[Archwizard]

I'm a sage and my partner is a DRK. We haven't had any issues whatsoever. He can pull as large as he likes and I keep him up better than most other random tanks I have to heal. Combo that with the much higher dps and it's wonderful.
The problem is either your management of cooldowns, your gear, or those of your healer.

The issue around wiping is the player not the class.
There is no heart and soul to the class anymore, but they aren't broken, if you're constantly wiping on dungeon pulls I suggest you practice your rotations more.

I'm just kinda tired of all these DRK threads acting like its completely unplayable and you cannot even fight 1 trash mob on your own, when that really isn't the case.

I definitely think it's becoming a popular sentiment that DRK is unplayable and one mob will wipe you. Seriously one read at the forums and you think DRK is the most broken class ever that you'll die at Sastasha

... Anybody is saying you'd die to 1 trash mob?
This is a clear exaggeration of what the DRK critics are actually saying, but that that's tossed around more than once is making me wonder if I missed something.

Obviously all jobs depend on the player. Obviously DRK is capable of tanking current content or it wouldn't have even shipped.
By the "Is it playable?" metric alone, every job is perfect.
And yes, it's popular in Savage and Extreme content because of its high damage (though I'm fairly certain that's an argument about its single-target burst and not its AoE). That's not the issue.
Y'all talk about DRK's damage like it has a nuke in its back pocket, when it's just slightly better than GNB, but we're exaggerating about how fragile it feels?

The issue is that DRK is far and away the hardest tank to heal and keep up in dungeons. Not that you can't possibly keep them up on a wall-to-wall.
But how well you actually manage is extremely dependent both on your tank and healer's gearing and using all of their cooldowns liberally and no small amount of GCD healing, whereas PLD or GNB can manage largely on healer oGCDs and a steady rotation of their own mitigation.
People think we're just jumping on "wanting to be like WAR" like there's no middle ground, I swear...

There is a HUGE gap in the survivability between DRK and other tanks after level 82, and level 84 just cements that. Even ignoring the ridiculousness of WAR, PLD can self-heal almost constantly just by doing their rotation, and GNB gets an Excog every 25 sec and an extra Aurora in the bank.
All that and DRK gets... Oblation. That's it. The only self-heal it has shares a CD with another attack now.
(Well, okay, there's always Souleater which has marginally better healing than Storm's Path, but why would anyone argue that being the one tank who sticks to a single-target rotation for a crumb of self-healing during an AoE pull is well-designed? Especially after all the talk about its overhyped damage...?)

Now on the one hand, some can argue that TBN was borderline OP for the last couple expansions -- but enemy damage has gone up to compensate for the increases in survivability all tanks aside from DRK get.
And on the other hand, Living Dead, Dark Mind and Oblation are indefensibly awful CDs marginally better than nothing at all, so your DRK tank has to burn through his big ones way faster than any other tank.

[Falar]

I have no problems pulling wall to wall as DRK; I do it in every dungeon.

Is it much easier to do so as a Warrior? Yes.

Do I get healers occasionally with a bad attitude because they're used to healing warriors? Yes.

But to say you can't pull more than one pack is patently untrue.

[Erik501]

snip

Yes I understand and I agree with most of what you said there, but if you read the first post of this thread you get the impression that the OP is saying that DRK is pretty much unplayable, and then you see a bunch of people jumping to that very same bandwagon, and I truly believe that gross over exaggeration resulting in loud whinning will take us nowhere. I believe that's why so many people jump in to say it is not that bad, myself included.

The one thing I think that needs a sort of emergency fix right now is the living dead. Maybe if they make it reset the CD on Abyssal Drain when the walking dead effect is triggered and double its cure potency while such effect is active would be enough to offset the danger of using it in dungeons big pulls without shifting too much the current balance of the game and without needing a complete overhaul of the job which SE might be reluctant to do at this point. It would be very useful in dungeons but mostly the same in single target.

[Malthir]

Yes I understand and I agree with most of what you said there, but if you read the first post of this thread you get the impression that the OP is saying that DRK is pretty much unplayable, and then you see a bunch of people jumping to that very same bandwagon, and I truly believe that gross over exaggeration resulting in loud whinning will take us nowhere. I believe that's why so many people jump in to say it is not that bad, myself included.

The one thing I think that needs a sort of emergency fix right now is the living dead. Maybe if they make it reset the CD on Abyssal Drain when the walking dead effect is triggered and double its cure potency while such effect is active would be enough to offset the danger of using it in dungeons big pulls without shifting too much the current balance of the game and without needing a complete overhaul of the job which SE might be reluctant to do at this point. It would be very useful in dungeons but mostly the same in single target.

Living dead doesn't need an emergency fix. It's been broken since it was in the game, it's always been crap, that's not an emergency it's just an annoyance.

Drk's are realistically asking for an entire rework of the class. The company will not waste dev hours on patching a class they are going to rework unless it is actually broken e.g cannot preform it's function. So actually having no patch info or changes for Drk might be a good sign as it could signify they are spending time on reworking the boring class as opposed to wasting time changing quick changing moves that we don't like anyway.

[Arohk]

If you can't tank more than one group there are multiple reasons why:

#You're bad because you are using your cooldowns wrong.
#The healer is bad because he only spams Vita.
#The dps is bad and doesn't kill he packs fast enough before you run out of mitigation.
or a combination of the three things.

i always pull wall to wall, doesn't matter which tank job, but i have to agree that DRK is trash compared to other tank jobs, and warrior is a dungeon god.

[Erik501]

Well, call it long needed fix if you don't like my words... since a complete rework mid expansion seems highly unlikely to me I thought that maybe a little tweak for living dead to make it less annoying might have a better chance to be implemented. I might be wrong, though...

[Malthir]

since a complete rework mid expansion seems highly unlikely to me

Why not they've done it several times before. They completely changed Monk in I like 3.2 or was is 2.2? or something to that effect. They've completely reworked classes like 4 times mid expac, no reason to think they wouldn't do it again.

Another thing to think about is that we got really lack lustre abilities in this expac, like nothing new. Oblation is a watered down rampart with 2 stacks, salt and tears is nothing really just a pop for damage, and shadowbringer is dark passenger without the blind and 2 uses.
Again could be an indicator that they are working on changes to the functionality of the class but needed something for the expac as they wouldn't be ready yet. No guarantee but again they've completely revamped classes before no reason to believe they wouldn't again.

With Living dead, there's really no point fixing it by itself. The complaints of the Drk players all boil down to requiring a complete rework of the class. If they spent like 1-2 weeks and that's being generous as it could easily take a month or more from Design to Develop to QA then any reworks and retests. All to making a better living dead, would the myriad of complaints disappear overnight? Most Drk's just don't bother pressing Living Dead, we've done so for what like 5 years now, so it's not something that would drastically change any situation.

[NightHour]

Its hard being the highest dps tank I'm sure.

If no healer can keep you up on pulls, maybe the problem isn't the class. Its your gear and or skill with the class.

If that's your thought process then your perception of what a tank is meant to be is lacking.


The point of a Tank is to take the brunt of a boss/mobs damage so your party doesn't need to.



Regardless of whether DRK MARGINALLY does the most damage out of all tanks is not what people are complaining about.




DRK's biggest problems are



Lack of agency over their own health pool.

Considering that Dark Knight is the only tank who has a "You must be healed for x% of your health or die" mechanic in their kit, having ZERO agency over whether they live or die is unacceptable.

Gunbreaker presses Super? Oh no they dropped to 1 hp, Anyway! Heart of Corundum + Aurora and the GNB is at least 50-60% health before needing healer intervention.

Warrior low and presses Holmgang? XD Equilibrium + Bloodwhetting oh the Warrior's full HP again!

Hallowed Ground preserves current HP values so healers have 10 seconds of Freedom.





Living Dead is poorly designed compared to other Invulns.

Invulns are meant to protect the tank from lethal damage as well as protect healer resources.

Living Dead completely goes against that.


Without writing an essay about this, I'm going to link a youtube video EliasXIV made explaining why Living Dead sucks ass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NINmkcvo3Gk





Unleash, Stalwart Soul and Dark Missionary.

In my opinion these spells are gained too late.

Dark Missionary should be level 70 similar to Heart of Light.

AoE combo should be level 70 and be weaponskills not spell.





Blood Weapon.

Blood Weapon needs to go on the stack system similar to Delirium.



The Blackest Night.

Now, before all the copium overdosers come and say "TBN is the strongest low cd mitigation in the game" let me ask you this -

Have you seen Heart of Corundum? Bloodwhetting? Holy Sheltron?


The Blackest Night is the ONLY low CD tank mitigation ability in the game that is directly tied to your damage resource.

The Blackest Night is the ONLY low CD tank mitigation ability that requires you get 100% value out of every single use.


TBN needs to go to a 25 second cooldown and not cost MP to use.

[Danelo]

This feels a little like the community response to DRK in SB before buffs. I was told by another tank at the time… why take DRK, etc., and he was right to a certain degree when compared side by side to the other tanks. At the time DRK was fun although spammy. Now it doesn’t seem fun. It wasn’t necessarily fun in shb either but tbn was outstanding comparatively so negative player sentiment was swept under the rug.

It’s got great DPS. That’s great but that’s a secondary job of a tank. Buffing a secondary task and then to make up for it by nerfing self-sustain and mitigation into the ground is difficult to understand. I get it - DPS is king. DPS checks, skipping mechanics is great, pushing phase changes… all that is good stuff. But DRK is a tank and it’s primary function looks subpar. Is it playable, sure, but it doesn’t feel good.

[NightHour]

This feels a little like the community response to DRK in SB before buffs. I was told by another tank at the time… why take DRK, etc., and he was right to a certain degree when compared side by side to the other tanks. At the time DRK was fun although spammy. Now it doesn’t seem fun. It wasn’t necessarily fun in shb either but tbn was outstanding comparatively so negative player sentiment was swept under the rug.

It’s got great DPS. That’s great but that’s a secondary job of a tank. Buffing a secondary task and then to make up for it by nerfing self-sustain and mitigation into the ground is difficult to understand. I get it - DPS is king. DPS checks, skipping mechanics is great, pushing phase changes… all that is good stuff. But DRK is a tank and it’s primary function looks subpar. Is it playable, sure, but it doesn’t feel good.

Exactly, DPS is a secondary job of a Tank.

Survival is the main job.