Dark Knight Megathread

[Lyth]

@Archwizard: Movement is fundamental to tanks and melee, and any action that facilitates uptime is worth its weight in gold. DRK was the very first tank to ever have access to a gap closer, and it has historically been a very fast, agile job in this game. I find it strange to deliberately make the job slow and ponderous simply because a couple of games like Monster Hunter and Dark Souls have painted greatswords as clumsy, unwieldly weapons, especially when the series' legacy around the weapon has been the very opposite.

Having an ability that returns you to a preset point is not a 'unique' characteristic. If you take a game like Overwatch, were roughly a quarter to half of the ability budget is dedicated to movement alone, there are a couple of characters with this type of 'escape' move, yet they don't feel similar in the slightest.

I think that you can push the skill ceiling of a job significantly higher through the interaction of movement abilities with fight mechanics than you can with the target dummy rotation itself. There's always room for more.

The move that you've shown is aesthetically very similar to the Advent Children Omnislash scene that I referenced. It's kind of hard to do something cinematic like that given the standard GCD length, though. Perhaps having a channeled move is the solution?

@Shurrikan: No. You'd just consume a Dark Arts stack every time that you wanted to move through a higher potency combo, and gain Dark Arts stacks from your Edge/Flood/Shadowbringer uses. The only real advantage over the Bloodspiller approach is that it forces you to be a little smarter about how you time your oGCDs. In retrospect, I think I'd prefer to see them build on the Blood system instead.

[Shurrikhan]

@Shurrikan: No. You'd just consume a Dark Arts stack every time that you wanted to move through a higher potency combo, and gain Dark Arts stacks from your Edge/Flood/Shadowbringer uses.

Right, but is that per combo step or per combo activation, and what is the imagined maximum number of stacks one could hold?

Since there are "stacks" involved, I would assume at least two, but would 2 stacks amount to some 6 GCDs, or 2 GCDs? Because those would provide very different gameplay impressions. That's all I'm asking.

The only real advantage over the Bloodspiller approach is that it forces you to be a little smarter about how you time your oGCDs. In retrospect, I think I'd prefer to see them build on the Blood system instead.

Is "them" the devs or these new Dark Arts stacks? And what is "the Bloodspiller approach" against which this is being compared? The "(every) Bloodspiller combos into Torcleaver" one?

[Lyth]

I think that it would need to be one stack per GCD step, not per combo. Otherwise you would probably overcap during your opener unless the gauge capacity was very large, especially if Shadowbringer gives two stacks.

'Them' refers to the devs. It would be nice if the Blood system offered more than it does presently, so if I had a choice between seeing a combo system built around Blood vs. one built around the Dark Arts gauge element, it's probably better to expand on the former.

[Shurrikhan]

I think that it would need to be one stack per GCD step, not per combo. Otherwise you would probably overcap during your opener unless the gauge capacity was very large, especially if Shadowbringer gives two stacks.

'Them' refers to the devs. It would be nice if the Blood system offered more than it does presently, so if I had a choice between seeing a combo system built around Blood vs. one built around the Dark Arts gauge element, it's probably better to expand on the former.

Thanks for the clarification.

Personally, I'd rather have more control over the combo and its timings, and at this point, I do feel like Edge is much more thematically central to DRK gameplay than Bloodspiller, so I'd rather go with the Edge/Flood/Shadowbringer-built combos, but I can see the merit in either.