Dark Knight Megathread

[baklava151]

I guess my main question (for anyone/everyone), then, is what might we do that could create situations or events that could more worthwhile anchors for our bankable skills and resources than are raid CDs?

Naturally, that would require that their advantages are more potent than a certain degree of raid buffs.

That has a couple new problems, of course, if DRK's bankable/flexible skills and resources don't exceed what they can use for their own anchors/windows outside of CD alignments: When raid buffs are too few or weak, those raid buff windows become irrelevant and the job loses that gameplay; and, when raid buffs are too many or powerful, DRK's own anchors may lose relevance and therefore cost DRK that play. So, we'd probably ultimately need to give DRK a bit more to work with there (which is nebulous in that there are so many ways to go about that, including even just expanding particular oGCD's cooldowns, like Edge/Flood's, as not to be all dumped into a single of DRK's own new windows).

:: To be clear, though, I'm all for the ramping, pace-varying, "risk-reward focused" DRK. That's what I wanted most from DRK when it came out, and I've only come to want it more over time.

This starts moving into a different topic regarding the state of raid buffs in XIV, but I think ideally raid buffs would be minimized or eliminated, with the exception of BRD, DNC and AST if possible since that's a big part of their identity, and giving DRK some kind of self buff where it can dump its hard hitting moves. I like bringing up ShB DRG as a good example because that was a fun part of its gameplay, entering or delaying Life of the Dragon so that it always lined up with its buffs.

I admit, I'm struggling to come up with any sort of maintenance combo that doesn't blatantly riff on PLD's (like bringing back Scourge) or WAR's (like putting Darkside on GCD). In theory you can get a similar time-gated element through other means, but those would probably involve restrictive/drifting cooldowns or new resources (including stacking effects).
... And frankly, while this may be reductive, I don't think "replace Souleater on every third combo" really offers much appeal for shifting our downtime.

However, I would invite the jury to consider that GNB also lacks a maintenance combo, and to my knowledge, there is no call for them to get one due to their varied GCD options.

Not that I'm saying "let's copy GNB in lieu of copying WAR or PLD," because ideally whatever we end up with is still unique to DRK's identity, but I would invite using GNB as a case study in considering acceptable alternatives for downtime, eg considering what works for them that says they don't need a maintenance combo? From there we might be able to work backwards.

A big part of it is Gnashing Fang happening every 30 seconds, it's enough to break up downtime but also not super spammy. Burst Strike also helps, it gives you a 4 to break up your normal 1-2-3 combo but also gives some resource management to think about since it also uses cartridges. Hard to say how we could get something like that on DRK though.


Separately I like a lot of ideas in the thread but man, figuring out what would work and what wouldn't and putting it all together in one coherent package is hard. I don't envy the devs.