Dark Knight Megathread

[Nosaji_]

Maybe instead of having a portion of unhealable HP (which could be difficult to represent on a gauge as this isn't a mechanic we have yet in game) it instead reduces your max HP by 20% ? Like a reverse WAR skill.

That'd be far more intuitive, yeah. A reverse Thrill of Battle!

It's unclear to me based on the wording, but the Blood Price effect says that the wound can be "diminished" by your own healing effects- I assume this means that every 10% you heal, you lose a wound, like how Undead Rebirth works right now.

As much as I like the idea of being able to spend your own HP and I think it's suitably propped up by all of the healing in that kit, especially Sole Survivor as a sort of safety net, I doubt the devs would put something like that in the game. The amount of people who would just kill themselves, regardless of the tools you have to prevent that, would be huge
I know PvP has it already so maybe there is grounds for it in PvE, I'd welcome the surprise.

[Kalaam]

PvP is more of short bursts of combat, during a raid, dungeon boss or trial the damage is more variable (depends on your gear, etc) whereas for PVP everyone has the same baseline when you have the same class. If you were to have your 20% penalty right when a burst comes out, this could make it way more dangerous for a dark knight, especially if you can go lower than that.
Bad timing would just make you die, and to compensate for such a risk you'd likely need very, very high damage. Which would throw a wrench in the job to job balance. ('cause then if the damage is very high, everyone will pick DRK for races and stuff)

[baklava151]

Been working on a doc with some ideas about a DRK rework for the future, in part inspired by the PvP rework, in part inspired by some of the discussions in this thread, and reiterating a few ideas from a previous writeup I made.

Here, for those interested.
Short version: Less WAR-lite, more "Dark Knight", bunch of QoL things crammed into the nooks and crannies. Change summary at the top.

I wouldn't say it's final, all numbers are just examples, and it's purely my own thoughts on a direction for DRK. Constructive criticism is welcome.

I like the general direction. Of course it's hard to say without actually playing it but it's definitely interesting.

Spending Abyss to unlock different weapons skills and to use Scourge to put Penance on the enemy seems like a neat idea. The only thing is that once you get Penance up, it looks like you have to follow up with Power Slash and Bloodspiller, which would essentially mean you're just doing a faster 1-2-3 when you pop Darkside. It feels like this DRK would need a separate burst mechanic that ideally you want to line up with your Scourge usage for max damage. I'm thinking along the lines of DRG in ShB, where you could delay or enter Life of the Dragon so that it would fall under one of your buffs. Alternatively, buff Abyss generation and/or lower Abyss cost on Darkside so that you can maintain 100% uptime on Penance, and the goal becomes using as few Scourges as possible to maintain Penance uptime while maximizing Power Slash + Bloodspiller uses. Maybe also pop in another Abyss spender somewhere?

I'm on the fence about letting a tank use its own health as a resource, though at least you buffed its self-sustain. Thematically it's cool but I can see healers getting up in arms about DRKs nearly killing themselves after blowing all their Shadowbringers without using Red Wing or Abyssal Drain. It's hard to say without seeing it in action but I suppose you could alternatively make Shadowbringer another Abyss spender.

I'd personally change Salted Earth's additional effect to reduced damage or increased resource generation of some kind. I just can't imagine where Heavy would be useful.

Martyr I have no clue what to say about, it looks cool but it might also be straight up busted lol.

The rest look fine to me, I still would not miss Living Shadow if it was deleted but if the rest of the kit is solid I'll tolerate it. I also wonder if there's a way to have more interaction between Abyss and MP.

[Archwizard]

I think the whole TBN/Blood Price interaction is a nice concept but just having up to 20% of your HP be un-healable would probably annoy the shit out of healers, I get that it's there to incentivize you to instead spend Dark Arts on it, but that just keeps the whole "only use TBN when you know it's going to break" problem, which I would personally rather just do away with- I don't like having mitigation tied to dps. Although, the healing from Red Wing would let you pretty easily heal up that damage you gave yourself, considering that each one is, at worst, a Bloodwhetting GCD. So maybe it'd be best to just kill the Dark Arts proc.

Actually, my thinking was quite the opposite!

I was concerned that having Shadowbringer consume HP would force healers to waste CDs or raid DPS keeping DRK up through their own burst windows, despite the fact that I had ramped up DRK's self-healing through its MP skills specifically to allow for HP consumption. The idea of Blood Price, then, was to discourage healers from wasting effort on the DRK and encourage you to self-heal it.
Dark Arts is mostly there for if you're the main-tank and can't afford to waste HP, without penalizing your DPS. Since it isn't pitted against any other DPS resource, you're still equally capable of casting unimpeded even without triggering Dark Arts, and can work around the penalty if you're otherwise prepared.

Also, Blood Price only blocks external healing for half the damage you deal to yourself, because 20% unhealable HP would be way too high. So it's only 10% per cast, though it does stack if you get carried away.

It looks like Scourge's effect is meant to replace the current Darkside buff, but IMO having it apply 12 seconds would be annoying, and 20 seconds is still a pretty short time considering that you'd need to either use 3 Souleater combos or CnS to use it from 0 gauge- I think that a job which augments it's abilities like this already has enough going on, and It'd be better to just not have a buff like that to maintain.

The goal of Scourge is essentially to replace the constant "Darkside" effect with a more potent effect that could be used for No Mercy or Fight or Flight-style burst windows.

The devs have mentioned in the past that they dislike the idea of having DoTs on jobs, because a lot of players find them tedious or confusing, which is why I favor Vuln debuffs like Trick Attack or Death's Design instead. Plus it fits DRK's prior iterations debuffing enemies for its own benefit, without just bringing back the Reprise effect.

Maybe it'd be better to have [Martyr's] barrier % grow with the amount of party members standing in the radius, otherwise it could just be used as an on-demand 100% shield which right now would give you around 160,000 EHP. People could (would) abuse that and use it like a pseudo-invuln, I can't think of anything that does more than 160k damage right now (bar enrages).

The idea of it being abused as a "pseudo-invuln" is exactly why it consumes all your MP and prevents actions, actually -- people would very rarely use it if they realized it would come at the cost of DPS, so it encourages its use only in scenarios where you can get return from it.
If you want to use it that way though, so be it I say! I like the idea of DRK having a degree of flexibility for risk and reward scenarios. If you risked it all for nothing, that's on you; the game shouldn't hand-hold you for everything you do!

Maybe instead of having a portion of unhealable HP (which could be difficult to represent on a gauge as this isn't a mechanic we have yet in game) it instead reduces your max HP by 20% ? Like a reverse WAR skill.

I considered something like that, but realized there was a significant flaw with reducing max HP:

1) If you're max HP and use Shadowbringer 3 times in a row, you end up at max health. The restriction from keeping you from using it below a threshold that would kill you would be impossible to code, and depending on how its coded, the effective cost could diminish after repeated use, which is the exact opposite of the intended effect.
2) Reducing your max HP would have significant impact on your barrier skills (which block damage for a percentage of your max HP) and your self-healing skills (which boost or trigger healing effects as your HP gets low relative to your max). It would also mean there's nothing to heal, so your self-healing effects would go to overhealing. Anti-synergy is bad.

It's unclear to me based on the wording, but the Blood Price effect says that the wound can be "diminished" by your own healing effects- I assume this means that every 10% you heal, you lose a wound, like how Undead Rebirth works right now.

More or less! Right now the idea is that you put a "reverse Barrier" on yourself (which I have dubbed Wound like the debuff from XIII-2), which instead of adding to your max HP to block damage, fills in gaps after losing health to put a cork on your max HP.
The Wound then takes "damage" whenever you self-heal (without negating the health recovered), depleting it like damage against a barrier. 10% HP is about 500 potency self-healing, so a single Red Wing should virtually remove the effect.

Right now, the worst case scenario I can think of is being put into a Doom effect (heal 100% HP in X sec or die) while having a Wound active, no MP, no Sole Survivor, Darkside active, and not having triggered Undead Rebirth.
Like I said above though, "that's on you," 'cuz you have to work to be put into that bad a circumstance. (Especially since I removed Walking Dead.)

[Nosaji_]

The idea of Blood Price, then, was to discourage healers from wasting effort on the DRK and encourage you to self-heal it
[...]Since it isn't pitted against any other DPS resource, you're still equally capable of casting unimpeded even without triggering Dark Arts, and can work around the penalty if you're otherwise prepared.

I see, that makes sense

The devs have mentioned in the past that they dislike the idea of having DoTs on jobs

I didn't know this! That's a shame, I quite like the idea of having a DoT- although, looking at old Summoner, maybe it's for the best...

1)If you're max HP and use Shadowbringer 3 times in a row, you end up at max health. The restriction from keeping you from using it below a threshold that would kill you would be impossible to code, and depending on how its coded, the effective cost could diminish after repeated use.
2) Reducing your max HP would have significant impact on your barrier skills (which block damage for a percentage of your max HP) and your self-healing skills (which boost or trigger healing effects as your max HP gets low).

I'm sure they could find a way to get around these if they were to implement this stuff-
TBN could just take your max HP +10% for each stack of Blood Price, everything else that's max HP dependent could do the same thing!
If the game can calculate all of this damage and healing so quickly through all the different buffs etc. with no problem, I don't think doing that stuff would be an issue

Although, I don't think anybody outside of Square actually knows for sure how the game stores these things, so I'm probably over-complicating it

[Kalaam]

I considered something like that, but realized there was a significant flaw with reducing max HP:

1) If you're max HP and use Shadowbringer 3 times in a row, you end up at max health. The restriction from keeping you from using it below a threshold that would kill you would be impossible to code, and depending on how its coded, the effective cost could diminish after repeated use, which is the exact opposite of the intended effect.
2) Reducing your max HP would have significant impact on your barrier skills (which block damage for a percentage of your max HP) and your self-healing skills (which boost or trigger healing effects as your HP gets low relative to your max). It would also mean there's nothing to heal, so your self-healing effects would go to overhealing. Anti-synergy is bad.

I hadn't considered it. Then we'd need to have some form of visual indication that a portion of that health is "locked" in some way.

[Archwizard]

The only thing is that once you get Penance up, it looks like you have to follow up with Power Slash and Bloodspiller, which would essentially mean you're just doing a faster 1-2-3 when you pop Darkside.

Yeah, that was the rough idea. I didn't want to overcomplicate the rotation, and if there was an order to using the three buttons, it would just be needlessly unintuitive to swap them around and have it be 3-1-2 or something instead.

That said, the hope is you get a bit more freedom with it if you pool your resources, especially since you can stack Darkside's effect multiple times.

Maybe also pop in another Abyss spender somewhere?

Not really sure what another button could add to it, it already felt like a stretch to bring Darkside up to 3 buttons for the ST rotation.

Unless you mean I should put Living Shadow back on Blood/Abyss gauge.

Alternatively, buff Abyss generation and/or lower Abyss cost on Darkside so that you can maintain 100% uptime on Penance, and the goal becomes using as few Scourges as possible to maintain Penance uptime while maximizing Power Slash + Bloodspiller uses.

Also an option! I won't discount it, I just wanted to make Darkside feel like an occasional but very powerful burst mechanic, rather than something you alternate into until you're using it more than your basic rotation (which is a flaw I found in my earlier attempts to rework the rotation).

Plus like, between the changes to Darkside to transform abilities, and having a constant debuff on the target... might make DRK feel a bit like diet RPR.

I'd personally change Salted Earth's additional effect to reduced damage or increased resource generation of some kind. I just can't imagine where Heavy would be useful.

That's actually why I only added the Heavy -- it's ultimately harmless. There's already enough changes to the damage reduction and personal upkeep of the job, so adding on even more from SE would be extraneous in my opinion.
Since most bosses are immune or have movement carefully controlled by tanks anyway, CC effects generally have minimal impact on EX trials and Savage raids -- only casual content like dungeons and such, where a Heavy to keep crowds in the damage zone could at least find a modicum of value.

Honestly though, I just think it's weird that Salted Earth is just a DoT patch? I'm already struggling to think of what could be done with S&D beyond "one instance of damage". Personal taste thing.

I hadn't considered it. Then we'd need to have some form of visual indication that a portion of that health is "locked" in some way.

I definitely have considered it! I even made mockups of the Wound idea.


So this is what your typical Wound could look like. Wounds would always start at the opposite end of your HP bar from your health, and fill in empty space on the bar. Since health can only occupy the bar, this is a visual shorthand for your healing being forcibly capped.
And, like health but unlike barriers, Wounds can only occupy the HP bar as well; the combination of your remaining health and any Wounds cannot exceed 100% of your maximum health.

If you gain a barrier effect however, the yellow bar will fill in the gap (as it does when health is missing) up to the "locked" HP segment, OR stack on top of the health bar, as so:


And then of course, each time you self-heal (via Soul Eater, Red Wing, Abyssal Drain, Sole Survivor or Living Dead), the locked segment shrinks proportional to the amount of health you recovered, whether or not your remaining health was touching the Wound at the time.

Design, color and saturation subject to change and artistic reinterpretation of course to be more distinct and visually pleasing, but the general idea with the dashed bar I had in mind is to indicate "this isn't actually health," and the gaps allow you to see the dark segments of the health bar under it so you can still see that it's missing.

Not sure what the ruling would be if an effect were to reduce your maximum health like, say, Math Boss in Ridorana.
Maybe your Wounds would shrink proportional to the health reduction, or disappear completely since the end of your HP bar is usually lopped off, or you could just die if your Wounds would exceed your remaining health. All risks I'm personally completely fine with -- consuming health should be a risk!

[antonlab]

Been working on a doc with some ideas about a DRK rework for the future, in part inspired by the PvP rework, in part inspired by some of the discussions in this thread, and reiterating a few ideas from a previous writeup I made.

Here, for those interested.
Short version: Less WAR-lite, more "Dark Knight", bunch of QoL things crammed into the nooks and crannies. Change summary at the top.

I wouldn't say it's final, all numbers are just examples, and it's purely my own thoughts on a direction for DRK. Constructive criticism is welcome.

I just finished reading through your entire document of proposed changes and would be absolutely ecstatic if these changes were made into reality. All the skills synergize with each other so well, the theoretical gameplay would be so much more enjoyable managing the gauge in a different way alongside the debuffs, and it also seems extremely rewarding if the player uses them well.

From the way every base skill is gradually improved at higher levels to re-debut the old skills, to the way Sole Survivor is re-envisioned as an integral part of it's kit.

The best part is everything still stays true to the Dark Knight lore in the Final Fantasy universe, especially Martyr, and it would have it's own identity once again.

Amazing effort on this overall. A +1 from me.

Now back to copium because this isn't real.

[DannyDeDitto]

That's actually why I only added the Heavy -- it's ultimately harmless. There's already enough changes to the damage reduction and personal upkeep of the job, so adding on even more from SE would be extraneous in my opinion.
Since most bosses are immune or have movement carefully controlled by tanks anyway, CC effects generally have minimal impact on EX trials and Savage raids -- only casual content like dungeons and such, where a Heavy to keep crowds in the damage zone could at least find a modicum of value.

Honestly though, I just think it's weird that Salted Earth is just a DoT patch? I'm already struggling to think of what could be done with S&D beyond "one instance of damage". Personal taste thing.

Tbh just give it the pull effect from pvp. It would mitigate my absolute hatred for white mages that mess up your pull's positioning with careless Holies, and also should help out with those pesky ranged mobs.

[Archwizard]

Tbh just give it the pull effect from pvp. It would mitigate my absolute hatred for white mages that mess up your pull's positioning with careless Holies, and also should help out with those pesky ranged mobs.

Maybe, but that's only an instantaneous effect on the activation of SE... and if S&D did it instead, you have a wonky thing where S&D both encourages already having enemies inside as a skillshot and pulls them in as a freebie.

Plus, maybe I'm weird, I think there are other jobs where that would be more fitting, including AST on Gravity, BLM on Foul, SCH on some tactical spell or one of the other casters on some Tornado effect. Works fine for DRK in PvP because there's no way to force enemies to stand inside, but it's otherwise a bit outside the theme in PvE, imo.