Dark Knight Megathread

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

I have mixed feelings about Dark Mind and Dark Missionary. I think Dark Missionary and Heart of Light should be on a shorter recast than Shake and Veil, given that they're less powerful effects on top of being conditional to damage type. This is especially true after the buffs to both Shake and Veil this expansion which add in additional healing effects. I also feel that HoL/Missionary should have something to differentiate them from each other, even if its minor. I'd less inclined to do anything with Dark Mind, especially if the above issues are addressed. I understand that it's situational, but I wouldn't trade it for the likes of Camo, for example.

While I agree HoL/Missionary could have very minor extra effects to give them a bit of flavor, Shake & veil only got those healing buffs because of how weak & useless they were compared to HoL/Missionary when it came to multi-hit attacks, where across their entirety, the multi-hit attacks would deal well over 200-400% of the party's total max HP and DM/HoL were seeing crazy returns on their effective mitigation value and shields were basically useless in terms of effective HP saved, but also didn't effect how the healers planned for those moments. Tumult spam, Ahk Morn -> morn Afah spams, Quietus -> Shockwave pulsar spam, J-wave & Splash -> Cascade spam are just but some of the many examples that shields fell flat on their face.

This is doubly so when unless you were sinking a ton of mit into feeding it, shake was barely shielding more than DM/HoL would mitigate on any given single hit, given that most raidwides are designed to do around 90-100%+ of a player's max HP, meaning DM/HoL were effective shields of 5-10% of a person's max HP (factoring diminishing returns on other % mitigators) and shake at base is only 15%. DM/HoL also scale much better against incoming damage than shield do. Terminal Relativity for example, did somewhere around 200k damage before mits (needed 3x 10% mits + shields, and even then it'd still wipe out 80-90% of your HP bar) making DM/HoL stronger than Shake on that single hit before even factoring in the quietus/pulsars after it.

Magic only is pretty much irrelevant as well, since 95% of damage you'd want to mitigate with them is magic. Them being omni damage wouldn't change much beyond making them useful dungeon pull cooldowns and have basically zero effect on their usefulness in raids. (Which I think is the reason they're magic only - prevents DRK/GNB from having even more personal mit for dungeons than PLD while not interfering with their usefulness in raids. WAR is just an oddball since they benefit from shake itself, but WAR also has a lot of 'interesting' design decisions regarding dungeons)

The healing buff was just to shore them up so they aren't completely dead in the water on multi-hit attacks, though DM/HoL still reign supreme on those. The buffs just made is to the party mits are okay at one thing and amazing at the other:
-Shields: Amazing at single hits, okay at multi-hits. Niche use: Actually effect physical...whenever there's actually physical damage in a raid that isn't just on the tanks.
-DM/HoL: Okay at single hits, Amazing at multi-hits. Niche use: Also stronger than shields against attacks like Terminal Relativity where damage is so extremely high that 10% is blocking more damage than shake/veil is.

Giving DM/HoL a shorter recast would actually make them insanely busted in the current raid tier...and even more busted in previous ultimates.

[Shurrikhan]

....

There's no single/multi-hit distinction, only total damage. For a HoL/Missionary to mitigate as much as a SiO, the party would have to take damage equal to 150% of their HP and a further 400 cure potency's worth of HP.

[Lyth]

Shake & veil only got those healing buffs because of how weak & useless they were compared to HoL/Missionary when it came to multi-hit attacks

The differentiation between % damage reduction (%DR) and flat damage reduction (shields) is the total amount of incoming damage. As the total damage scales up, so does the amount mitigated by %DR, while flat damage reduction remains constant. There will always be some break even point where %DR overtakes flat DR. Whether the damage comes in the form of a single big hit or multiple hits over the duration of the cooldown doesn't matter mathematically because of the distributive law. It's the total damage summed over the duration of the cooldown.

The point as Shurrikhan has already mentioned is that SiO is a very beefy shield to start with, so that break even point is pretty high to begin with. I honestly can't say that I've heard anyone refer to Shake it Off as being weak and useless outside of its very original implementation. It's probably one of the most powerful tank abilities in the game.

While a lot of tankbuster damage and most raidwide damage tends to be magical, it seems like a strange design decision. You're just arbitrarily removing defensives from one tank if the fight isn't designed in a particular way. If it's not relevant to fight design, then there's no issue with removing the damage type restriction. I don't really think that dungeon balance factors into this, nor should it. It's just an archaic holdover from Heavensward era design.