Dark Knight Megathread

[Oizen]

Dark Arts had an animation lock every time you used it. It was kinda jank

[Luizgazen]

Dark Arts had an animation lock every time you used it. It was kinda jank

Just remove the animation lock then, no need to throw the baby with the bathwater...

[Shurrikhan]

Dark Arts had an animation lock every time you used it. It was kinda jank

Dark Arts had no more animation lock than any other (non-movement) oGCD.

[Kalaam]

Dark Arts had an animation lock every time you used it. It was kinda jank

It wasn't an animation lock, we just stopped moving to admire it.

[Colt47]

DRK Blood weapon change did help a lot. It still has that problem of being very loose on whether you can fit using all your defense cooldowns and offense cooldowns properly on rotation. They fixed a few things, but what it needs is to have the actions reduced. Most likely they didn't cut actions yet because they wanted to see how the blood weapon change and living dead change impact things.

[AziraSyuren]

Dark Arts had an animation lock every time you used it. It was kinda jank

Dark Arts and Plunge had some of the shortest animation locks in the game after.... 4.4, wasn't it? Somewhere along that line. It made things look pretty awkward but the gameplay was so much better.

[Archwizard]

They fixed a few things, but what it needs is to have the actions reduced. Most likely they didn't cut actions yet because they wanted to see how the blood weapon change and living dead change impact things.

The question is, what actions could they remove?

I mean, I'm a fan of reworking Oblation into a trait on TBN, and I could potentially see them reworking Blood Weapon into a lower-level form of Delirium since they have the same CD and a similar niche (sorry to fans of their animations).

But as far as damage tools go, there's not much to cut; we're already Warrior-lite. Dark Mind and Dark Missionary may be underwhelming, but they should at worst be reworked or replaced, not removed from the action count.
You could maybe cut Carve & Spit and just bump up AD's damage on the first target to compensate? But I can't think of anything else.

[Luizgazen]

they could fuse Flood and Edge, not a change on rotation really, but saves a button, especially now that there is another line AoE in Shadowbringer...

[baklava151]

Square already does a good job of cutting abilities without us encouraging it, they should be looking at how to spread our actions out through the rotation rather than keeping them concentrated in our opener.

[Marxam]

On paper it looks cool as hell, even though I've heard plenty of people said it was janky in some areas. Makes me wish there were private servers so I could see for myself.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...k-Knight-Guide

It was janky for sure but that was also due to a combination of battle design and job design clashing. DRK could DA+dark passenger for a blind on enemies but blind enemies means they hit you less and you want to get hit more since parries procs your low blows. Its things like that where on paper its good but in execution its a bit of a wash. I think that was my biggest complaint for losing the actions. Its not that they were redundant but rather they had some of the coolest animations. DA is what I think of when I think of DRK similar to how I think of IR for WAR, HG for PLD. It's thematically relevant.

Imo 4.0 DRK was the closest to "fixing" DA and all they needed to do was remove siphon strike from being altered by DA, or, apply the stack system to DA where you get x amount of stacks and appropriate actions just use it up automatically.DA could have worked as a stack system if it was on a 1 min cd and put to two charges. For example:

Dark Arts:
-60 sec recast
-Grants 3 stacks of Dark Arts, 15 sec duration
-2 charges

Actions affected by Dark Arts:
-Syphon Strike = increased mp regen
-Souleater = increased damage, action changed to power slash
-Stalwart Soul = increased damage, reduce recast of abyssal drain (and C&S) by 5 secs
-Unmend = increased enmity, reduce recast plunge by 5 secs

Abilities affected by Dark Arts:
-Dark Mind = increased from 20% to 30% mag reduction
-Abyssal Drain = cure potency increased to 400
-Carve and Spit = Restore additional MP
-Dark Missionary = Increased from 10% to 15% mag reduction

In most scenarios you would use up 2/3 stacks just doing your single target rotation once. Which leaves one stack to use for an ogcd. You could alternatively just use it on gcds. That would be 3 single target or 6 aoe combos. The increased mp regen means that the penalties of failing TBN, i.e. wasting 3k mp, is mitigated slightly. It's also a throwback to 4.0 where you would double weave SS and C&S with DA but now that its a stack system its much easier to use. It also mirrors WAR and keeps with the design of the jobs going forward. Both have a 60 sec cd that their toolkit revolves around, yet both are very different. This would also make designing DRK going forward since there is a precedent set.