Dark Knight Megathread

[Colt47]

(snip for space)

This sounds more like a conversation about the energy gauge than delirium, since delirium is just a component of the energy system. If they were to do away with delirium, it would likewise mean doing away with the energy gauge and going fully back into MP with cooldowns, which is what most people would probably want with dark knight as we don't have a tank like that. Gunbreaker builds strict charges and uses those to perform attacks in a pattern, where Dark Knight without Delirium is more like a dragoon that cycles between the main combo and OGCDs. I'd actually introduce Obilation earlier in their progression and have TBN come later, since TBN is not going to be as useful as another mitigation during the leveling experience.

Personally, I wouldn't even care if we lost quietus, blood spiller, and delirium since they are just there to act as a damage boost on the main skills. They could easily be replaced with a skill that makes your main combo grant a free flood of shadow on each hit, so you'd use it and then start using flood of shadow between each GCD.

[baklava151]

1) Dark Mind's effect would never be used, even if it wasn't a dps loss due to your soul eater generating extra MP, which translates to more Edges. An extra 5% is completely & utterly laughable. Even when Dark Mind doubled its % from 15 -> 30 in HW/SB, the dps meta basically made that DA effect dead in the mud (hence the change in 4.3 that stripped almost every single defensive application of DA out in favor of pure offense, since the devs knew the reality of how flawed DA's design was in their game). Which brings me to my next point:

2) If DA is to ever be brought back, it can only effect Defensives, or offensives, never both. Time eternal in this game's life have tank players showed the devs that anytime you mix offensive & defensive resources/actions/etc together, the defensive side is completely ignored because the name of the game is dps > all. DA as it was in HW (and to a lesser extent, SB) cannot exist in the game's current design. it would need to be a modified version purely for defense (that does not use offensive resources) or purely offensive.

I feel like there's more room for creativity if DA was brought back for defensive/utility abilities. For attacks I can only imagine it doing straight potency increases which doesn't seem that interesting but maybe other people have better ideas.

[WhyAmIHere]

Do not bring back Dark Arts, unless it has a specific and focused use. Continuation, Eukrasia, and Hissatsu: Kaiten are what I'm basing my opinion on. The big failure of Dark Arts in Stormblood was just how frequently it was used, and for how many skills it affected. None of my listed skills suffer from those downsides. As it exists now, in the form of a TBN-breaking-so-you-get-a-Flood-or-Edge-for-free proc, is fundamentally useless, and just a holdover for the sake of keeping the name in the game in some form. You could call it anything and the proc would still function the same.

[Claire_Pendragon]

Flood and Edge are literally Dark Arts... (or at least in half...)
And since DRK had to watch its MP in HW, to make sure it didnt run out, thats why TBN requires MP. To mimic that playstyle. ("dont spam DA, so u dont lose dark side")

Well, it WOULD be just like it, but with the exception its just not enjoyable. DA biggest problem in HW was that its animation was too long, and most of the oGCDs u mix it with had long animations, leading to clipping. By turning it into one oGCD, it does help, but!!!
The loss of "dark Side" isnt really a fear. Instead its the loss of TBN.
Therefor, it should instead be;
Flood grants dark Side. Edge does not. They share a CD, but edge takes far less MP than Flood. Flood is only worthwhile because of its dark side buff. (the same way WAR uses Storms Eye instead of Path) So you dont want to spam edge until out of MP, otherwise u cant use flood to get darkside back.

This is 1 of 2 steps to get "the old HW DRK feeling" back, while keeping the current system.

[Shurrikhan]

If they were to do away with delirium, it would likewise mean doing away with the energy gauge and going fully back into MP with cooldowns, which is what most people would probably want with dark knight as we don't have a tank like that. Gunbreaker builds strict charges and uses those to perform attacks in a pattern, where Dark Knight without Delirium is more like a dragoon that cycles between the main combo and OGCDs.

The difference between the two, until you have a spenders not just of 3000 MP cost, is only GNB's system holds 3 charges while DRK's holds 3.33 and DRK enters the instance with full charge while GNB enters at no charge.

The difference between single-cost gauge/MP spending and cartridge spending is only that: whether there's a starting penalty (largely offset by their generative CDs anyways) and aesthetic.

[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.

[AziraSyuren]

Shake is weird. It's honestly felt very weak compared to its competition in a few scenarios, like J-Wave in TEA, Terminal Relativity, and most of P4S P2. I know those are very specific scenarios, but they're at key points in difficult fights where the performance of those abilities is most important. Shake it Off is ridiculously powerful for single-hits, sure, but multi-hits always end up coming at the most important moments in the most important fights. But then they- very rarely- give us fights with physical raidwides so it ends up being the only one that's actually usable, along with Veil.

It's really weird for something like that to be so inconsistent in performance, and it really does feel archaic.

[Shurrikhan]

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.

Shake is weird. It's honestly felt very weak compared to its competition in a few scenarios, like J-Wave in TEA, Terminal Relativity, and most of P4S P2. I know those are very specific scenarios, but they're at key points in difficult fights where the performance of those abilities is most important. Shake it Off is ridiculously powerful for single-hits, sure, but multi-hits always end up coming at the most important moments in the most important fights.

Well, that didn't take long.

Nevermind that a non-tank would have to otherwise have been killed by magic damage roughly 1 & 2/3s times over for HoL/Missionary to break even with Shake it Off... or that Veil's requires the PLD to have 50% more HP than the squishies to get the same barrier value onto them (and still it'd apply only two-thirds value to the co-tank and none to the PLD himself)...

And let's not conflate the number of hits with the amount of %HP that'd otherwise be dealt to a given player (or more usefully, a non-tank)? The number of hits is irrelevant; all that matters is how much damage the party takes.