Dark Knight Megathread

[Archwizard]

You could attach a follow-up oGCD to Bloodspiller instead of creating a Bloodspiller 'combo', but I think what prompted this particular discussion over combos was how few unique GCDs DRK has.

Agreed, and it's already not an ideal solution.

I suppose a superior alternative would be to go the full 9 yards and make Bloodspiller a 3-step combo, provided you adjust Delirium to compensate for it now being 3 GCDs instead of just one.
It's easier to divide by 3, can be fit into current GCD alignments with adjustments to base skill speed, and as long as the overall combo recovers at least as much MP as Syphon Strike, Shurri's concerns are entirely addressed.
It's a solution I'm slightly less thrilled about though since just having it all be one button is just copying Gnashing Fang, albeit more often and something you can pool.

[Lyth]

You could set up a three step Bloodspiller combo if you like, but as it sounds like you've noticed, you would need to either increase the length on Delirium's buff or reduce the GCD while Delirium is active. You'd need a GCD length of 2.1s to get to your third Bloodspiller before the buff falls off (7 GCDs in 15 seconds). The reason why I suggested doing it with two steps is because 5 GCDs in 15 seconds requires no further alteration to Delirium. You also don't want to get to the point where the new combo replaces most of your standard combo uses.

This is fundamentally different from Gnashing in that your second combo can happen any time you could use Bloodspiller (i.e. any time you consume 50 blood or use Delirium). All that Delirium does is ensure that you can get three upgraded combos off in a row.

[Shurrikhan]

Hmm. In theory you could sidestep this by having the second combo step instead be an oGCD -- something like "Bloodspiller causes your next Edge of Darkness to change to a more powerful ability" similar to Continuation, and the same for Quietus with Flood.

Agreed, about the MP difficulties.

Bloodspiller would effectively then need both 50 Blood and 3k MP to fully use. Especially if we didn't want to limit the combo to when used only in Delirium, our >6 Bloodspillers per minute would require >18k MP per minute. We don't nearly have that.

You could sidestep this by having Delirium temporarily negate the MP cost of such a skill though, I suppose, and perhaps have the upgraded skill have a lower MP cost overall (say 1000-1500MP)?

Halving the cost sounds pretty good to me. I still have concerns about the basic constraints themselves, though:

We'd lose a lot of our freedom in timing our MP expenditure if we made this sort of tie-in.

Some degree of constraint can be good, offering some further depth, but too tight of constraints just turns the affected tools and their respective resources into one, reducing available depth.

What seems a good equilibrium to you?

[Shurrikhan]

I'm sure that you can come up with some more convoluted Dark Lucky Charms if you tried. But if you're just cycling through ABC combos in sequence to collect those Dark Lucky Charms, then it's bound to play out similarly to PLD's Boring Blade setup.

Note the "if". There's a good deal of context available here.

I don't know why you're so insistent that the system could only ever be so reduced. It's been made barebone on Endwalker DRK at the expense of SAM mains. It was purposely made barebone in Eorzea's explanation of the structure itself as to focus on just that structure. That doesn't mean that it could only ever be so shallow.

If you apply the same treatment to, say, Dark Arts, it would seem fundamentally incapable of anything but raw potency with shifting zero situational value. It conflates any insufficiency in balancing or context with the system itself being irredeemably flawed.

By all means, feel free to dislike and critique a given framework, but let's not purposely try to view it as incapable of anything more than its most barebone form.

Enshroud is just the natural evolution of Gnashing Fang. It absolutely is a thousand times better, but I think that the reason why it's so slick is because they had the previous expansion to test out the original concept. But you do have to give credit to GNB's design, as it's a really interesting idea and a step above the original IR approach to burst.

It's...

• an empowered mode that allows for...
• 4 ST or AoE hits before a...
• powerful finisher with falloff AoE that ends the empowered mode.

...There seems a far more direct progenitor for that than Gnashing Fang.

The 600 MP gain on Delirium is really just offsets the loss of the single Syphon from the standard combo it replaces. If you double the length of Delirium to Bloodspiller/Torcleaver/Bloodspiller/Torcleaver/Bloodspiller/Torcleaver by adding a combo step, that's six GCDs and two Syphons that you have to replace, unless you give Delirium a GCD reduction effect as well.

Delirium doesn't just give you 600 MP flat, though. It gives you 200 MP per ST GCD (500 per AoE GCD) under Delirium. At present, it covers all Blood skills. Unless you'd specifically choose not to include Torcleaver under that effect, increasing the number of GCDs under Delirium from 3 to 6 will therefore also increase the MP generated over Delirium from 600 to 1200 (or 1500 to 3000 in AoE), so we shouldn't need to make adjustments for Delirium itself, only for the 3 natural casts.

Alternatively, we could just give the MP generation to Bloodspiller, Torcleaver, and Quietus naturally, removing the MP gen effect from Delirium, and then we've dealt with all of it. We'd have 600 more MP per minute, due to naturals now likewise being MP-neutral, but that's hardly overpowering.

[Archwizard]

You'd need a GCD length of 2.1s to get to your third Bloodspiller before the buff falls off (7 GCDs in 15 seconds).

To be fair, that's assuming Delirium remains as it is and allows exclusively for 3 uses of Bloodspiller/Quietus, with Bloodspiller leading into the combos while being the only part to consume Delirium stacks.

But if Bloodspiller is a combo action, Delirium doesn't necessarily need to allow 3 Bloodspillers, especially if every piece of the combo is a progressively stronger GCD than Bloodspiller. It could allow for one free use of the combo and still be an overall upgrade.

I should think Delirium would have to be redesigned. At the very least, even in your proposed 2-step combo it would have to be redesigned such that it allows MP generation on each GCD even if it's not consuming stacks, since that appears to be the premise you're running under.

[Lyth]

I think if you're keen on copying over SAM's lucky charms system, the best thing to do is propose an implementation that works within the framework of our existing system. But I think that you'll still run into the standard 'maintenance combo/damage combo' woes that most jobs have, except on the finisher.

I wouldn't have interpreted Archwizard's suggestion to involve a follow-up oGCD that costs MP. The idea of a GCD/oGCD combo is interesting and it's one that hasn't really been explored outside of perhaps Soul Reaver, and there the payment is only on the first step. Having to save up MP specifically in order to use Blood would have been unnecessarily awkward. That being said, it doesn't address our need for more unique GCDs.

Any change to Bloodspiller is going to naturally influence how the Delirium window plays out. Delirium stacks at present only applies to Bloodspiller/Quietus, so if you added in one or two combo steps, you would just consume the stacks every second/third GCD. It just naturally changes how players execute the window without any alteration to the ability. By definition, any follow up combo action (i.e. Torcleaver) would require you to have previously used Bloodspiller to get the full potency, so there's actually no need to integrate it into Delirium unless you really want to rework it. Let me give you an example.

Torcleaver (Lv. 100 Weaponskill) - Delivers an attack with a potency of 120. Combo Action: Bloodspiller, Combo Potency: x (500+) Combo Bonus: y

Even f I added this action without any alteration to the existing DRK kit, your Delirium window changes because you're going to want to complete the combo before proceeding to the next stack.

The main reason for altering Delirium is to ensure that your MP resource generation remains similar. Now granted, you could always attach MP generation directly to Bloodspiller/Torcleaver itself as was suggested earlier. But if you don't want to do that, the alternative is just increase the MP gain on Delirium, such that each Bloodspiller covers the opportunity cost on a non-resource generating Torcleaver. You're welcome to think of ways to improve on Delirium itself around this, but I was just thinking in terms of how the addition of an action could change our rotation without requiring any full on reworks.

In short, the challenge I'm putting out is this: using only three new action additions and no action reworks, how could you significantly spice up DRK's (GCD) gameplay? There of course will be action reworks in practice, but I think if you start with this mindset you'll get the most value out of the new expansion additions.

[Eorzean_username]

Hmmm yeah. I'm trying to keep OGCDs out of the picture in any ideas I think of, because I feel like the formula of "Just give them another raw damage OGCD to slap on cooldown" has reached Maximum Staleness in Endwalker, in addition to how unpleasant these OGCD-packed burst sequences are for players with less fortunate connections or geolocations.

But each option has its own problems.

I think at the end of the day though, the Tank framework seems to be that they're not intended to be particularly complex, so looping back and forth between relatively simple goals doesn't seem like a design issue to me — at least, not unless the entire Tank system is allowed to breathe and expand more.

If you just add more "raw combos", you end up with what could potentially just be a lot of clutter or tacked-on nuisance: Paladin and Warrior only gain a (in my opinion) dull and rote maintenance mechanic out of their extra combo, and Gunbreaker successfully dispensed with it completely.

That's actually something I really appreciated about HW Dark Knight — the subtlety of Delirium vs. Souleater being a decision governed by having foresight about MP. With the decoupling of the DRK OGCD system from the GCD system in Shadowbringers, the opportunities for what you can do to justify combos shrank.

Dancer and Monk show that 'repurposing existing GCDs' is a reasonably successful way to add GCD gameplay without actually adding new combos, which is why my mind went there.

Then there's the Machinist 'it's basically a generic OGCD cooldown but it clocks your GCD' filler GCDs, but that seems like a relatively bland way to just shove in extra actions that are technically GCDs, but only in the sense of how much space they occupy in the rotation loop. (hopefully that made any sense)

And there's the Gunbreaker/Red Mage approach of "cooldown combo", which also seems pretty successful and fun.

I'm trying to think of what else can really be done with GCDs...

[Crater]

I don't know if I really agree with this approach of presuming that DRK needs another GCD-based attack simply because it has fewer of them than other tanks, and then working backwards from there to figure out if and how you can actually do something interesting, fun, or productive with it. I don't really see what problem is being solved here, or what meaningful extension to the class's gameplay is to be gained by figuring out how you could implement Bloodspiller 2 or spin Delirium's GCD-based gameplay as being substantially different from Gnashing Fang's GCD-based gameplay.

[Lyth]

I suppose more broadly then, if you were the expansion designer for DRK, and you are allowed to introduce in three new (or upgraded) actions of your choosing, on the condition that you don't alter anything else, how would you freshen up DRK's gameplay? I only suggested GCDs because I've seen recurring complaints that relate to combos and Delirium, but you're welcome to take it in a different direction as well.

You don't actually have to touch anything at all, but there are a lot of creative minds here, so let's see what people come up with.

[Archwizard]

I would like to remind everyone present that nobody here is the arbiter on what the devs consider to be acceptable standards for a job expansion or rework.

You are free to praise or constructively critique the existing job design, even if that means just saying "I like it as it is" and moving on. Nobody can force you to write an entire rework document to back up saying "I don't like X."
You are free to propose any reworks you come up with, provided you are not attached to them to the point of being disappointed if they are not met and you don't pull the thread off-topic.
You are even free to constructively critique suggestions and proposals other people offer, even from a subjective standpoint of "I wouldn't play this job and here's why."

Personally I think there's value in that last one, since it allows you to examine the job through a new lens, pick apart What Works and What Doesn't Work (both in the existing and proposed iterations), and synthesize together new proposals with feedback. "This was a neat idea, but I really would like to preserve X element of the existing job in particular because that's something I really enjoy about playing it" -- that sets a starting point for where to go next.
Much like comparing notes with the other tank jobs, just with hypothetical ones instead. Give it a fair crack sometime!

But devs aside, nobody can or should impose exacting standards upon anyone, because the only standards you can place upon others are your own. No "you can only create 3 new actions and no buttons" nonsense; who here has the authority to set that standard? What other job reworks or expansions have ever fit such stricture? The devs can go as far as they need and want, they just usually prefer a conservative approach mid-expansion for balance reasons, and it's not like they haven't changed something in a .X only to completely flip it on its head at the next .0 opportunity.
(Yes, DRK is pretty bloated with job actions as-is from an objective standpoint. If someone actually forgets that and proposes 5 new actions we don't have space for on the bar, you are free to point that out in post as a practical concern.)
Literally just be constructive, thoughtful and fair, because this is a feedback forum.

Because here's the kicker: Odds are, 99.99% of such proposals don't actually end up in game. You are at no risk from watching someone go ham... unless it actually gains traction and popularity among the community. And usually, that's because they have a point about the concerns implicit to and inspiring such suggestions, and I have rarely seen game devs implement community suggestions verbatim.

Besides, when it comes to spitballing around these parts, many of us take an iterative approach: Shoot for the moon, re-examine it, then dial it back. Personally I think that's as valid a lens as any, and to start from a restrictive premise just caters to stagnation of ideas.