Dark Knight Megathread

[Oizen]

The issue with Oblation is it doesn't have enough impact.

Dark Mind is secretly good because 20% is a fair chunk of mitigation, especially for a 60s cooldown, it honestly makes it one of the best skills in high end play for Dark Knight. I get why people who play the class casually hate it, as dungeons dont even really use it, but its a big reason why DRK has been prefered this tier outside of damage output. A rampart 60 seconds is pretty good.

On the other side, 10% mitigation for a 60 second cooldown isn't that good, this is never a mitigation you'll use alone, and if I'm being honest it wont even be good enough to pair it with just one other mitigation. The only time I use this is if Im tanking something that needs 3 pieces of mitigation which is incredibly rare.

Its not useless, its just really underwhelming. Yeah you can put it on an ally in a tight spot, but again, its 10% mitigation and competes with TBN. Its not going to be the difference maker that saves them, while TBN might be. And yeah getting two stacks of Oblation is nice, but its so low impact that I dont ususally ever find myself in a tight spot thinking "Oblation will save me!" so I actually tend to just neglect this skill outside of like...two fights in this game currently.


I'm not really into the idea of bumping it to 15%, I'd much rather see a heal utility or anything else really put onto it as I actually do not believe DRK needs any more raw mitigation. If it was instead a self heal or ally heal skill that offered 10% mitigation as a bonus, it would be pretty good.

[ShadowMurloc]

Hey yall,

I don't know if these exact changes have already been proposed, but these are just a few potential changes I had in mind to beef up DRK sustain.

I don't claim to be a veteran of the class or the game, but it's the one I've played the most! These are the changes I've wished for in my experience with DRK. I'd love to hear thoughts on how these changes would conflict with other parts of the kit or may be be too good. The numbers are more speculative.

>> Oblation: 10% damage reduction, refunds existing or pre-existing TBN when it is broken if MP is at under 50%; grants hot if broken at or over 50%

(Oblation feels very underwhelming as a capstone mitigation ability/doesn't feel impactful to press/doesn't interact with the kit.)

>> Living Shadow: Same duration but no longer a glorified dot, copies every offensive action and gives you half the benefit.

(This has probably already been proposed but I'm not sure. Is this too similar to the clone on Ninja?)

>> Carve and Spit: Now on the GCD, recovers health if MP is at or over 50%, recovers MP if it is under 50%. Leaves a big bleed; ticks restore HP/MP.

>> Abyssal Drain: Now on the GCD, recovers health if MP is at or over 50%, recovers MP if it is under 50%. Leaves behind the "Salted Earth" AOE; ticks restore HP/MP. Salted Earth combo removed.

(I'm sure some people like the ability, but I find the salted earth combo to be little more than a fire on CD and forget skill. I think ability itself should be removed and it's damage potential distributed to more impactful abilities like Abyssal Drain (preserving the cool animation) and Shadowbringer. As these abilities will be more potent with this change, I think they might deserve a devoted GCD.)

>> Shadowbringer: Adds 50 (maybe 25?) to Blood Gauge.

(Shadowbringer has a longish cooldown, and this change could give the capstone ability some more offensive/defensive potential to justify that; see below.)

>> Bloodspiller and Quietus: Shield for 25% of damage dealt stacking as a non-extendible buff.

(This change would give the DRK some durability when spamming blood spenders, and give Delirium a potentially defensive use case. I'm guessing this might too good, it could maybe give a little DR instead?)

My idea with these proposed changes is to give Dark Knight more sustain without treading into Warrior's identity as the lifesteal/self-healing more reactive tank, giving Dark Knight some more synergy through it's kit and emphasizing MP / TBN management.

One problem I could see is that staying high on MP would be more difficult without the on-demand generation of Carve and Spit; that said, I envision the shared CD abilities providing a large amount of MP when below 50% to compensate.

I'm not sure if/how broken these changes would be, just some thoughts I had.

[Crater]

I know a lot of tank busters which are physical. In fact I know more which are physical, then magical.

Excluding attacks that deal less than 2/3rds of a tank's health when completely unmitigated, and excluding attacks that are almost universally dealt with via invuln, this is the complete list of physical tankbusters in Endwalker endgame content:

P1S: Heavy Hand
DSR: Heavenly Heel, Ascalon's Mightx3

By contrast, the magical tankbusters:

ES EX: Hubris
P2S: Doubled Impact, Coherence
P3S: Heat of Condemnation, Beacons of Asphodelos
P4S: Elegant Evisceration, Nearsight/Farsight, Demigod Double, Heart Stake
DSR: Soul Tether, Dark+Holy Orb, Staggering Breath, Hallowed Plume, Trinityx2, Ahk Morn's Edge


You can go back through Shadowbringers content and you'll find a similar distribution; Stormblood content design is slightly less one-sided, but still tilts heavily toward magical tankbusters. You have to go back to Heavensward to regularly find fights with threatening physical tankbusters, and I don't think it's controversial to say that Heavensward content design and level 60 balance in 6.x don't really have a lot of bearing on the current state of the game.

[The_User]

I love it when the tank buster is physical so I can hold my wonderful short recast 60 sec best mitigation aka Dark Mind and eat the damage instead.


I'm happy to be the chosen one. I'll take any physical damage and keep "my precious" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyPG0qEbJM8&t=170s Dark Mind

[Shurrikhan]

I love it when the tank buster is physical so I can hold my wonderful short recast 60 sec best mitigation aka Dark Mind and eat the damage instead.

You do have a far shorter recast -- the shortest recast among all tank CDs -- too, no? It works just as well against physical damage.

[The_User]

Sure, we don't talk about how weak it is compared to other short recast tho.



It would have been nice if there are so many tank busters that other short recast can't keep up and only mine can...

[Shurrikhan]

Again, I wouldn't mind if DRK had a bit more of a generalized component on Dark Mind if

1. DRK's mitigation were otherwise undertuned,
2. Dark Mind, thereafter, still held its current advantages, and
3. Putting the missing mitigation, or that part thereof, into Dark Mind produced more theme/polish/fun than spending that budget on other skills.

Just throwing extra strength atop an already strong skill just because its strengths are more subtle than others, though, is rarely a good idea.

When a 15s recast mitigation is safe when it's used only 1 time every 60s I know I'm blessed.

You know the second boss in Smileton? The one that appears to deal virtually no damage?

You can pop TBN off it nearly on CD. It's just a matter of maximizing the enemies' uptime on you over TBN's duration. (Added benefit to the ilvl caps.)

TBN adds a further learning curve, and you won't always be able to hit it on CD, but if your worry was a physical tankbuster against which DM would do nothing... well, either your concern was unwarranted, or it's going to pop TBN.

[The_User]

Can't say how grateful I'm for having a shortest recast super awesome mitigation that isn't going have any impact on my dps if I take advantage of it short recast.


When a 15s recast mitigation is safe when it is used only 1 time every 60s I know I'm blessed.






Everyday that I don't have to rely on other healing action in the raid because I don't have any never fail to make me proud

[The_User]

Exactly! *More than 1 TBN= start losing dps* is hella safe.... any concern over using more than 1 TBN per 60s is unwarranted!



We such a fool for not appreciate the 15s recast real neat mitigation that gonna cost our dps if we didn't treat it like a once per minute recast mitigation...


This is the next level of genius, how could anyone came up with this mind blow universe shattering level of ability design?

[Crater]

The point to be made here is that when you have a literal 5:1 ratio of magical to physical tankbusters in the game's modern-era content, that is a pretty good indicator that the encounter designers are not throwing darts at the wall to determine damage-typing on tankbusters and leaving DRK to twist in the wind. Any time a tankbuster turns out to be physical, considerations are being made for Dark Mind's type-specificity.

Sometimes that's as simple as tank damage in the fight being so infrequent and weak that every tank has an enormous overabundance of mitigation with or without a tertiary defensive. Sometimes it's because they want to soak up your invuln to make it more difficult for you to use elsewhere. Sometimes it's there to act as a limiter on Dark Mind by forcing you to spend Rampart or Shadow Wall so you have fewer things to stack 60s later.

Ignoring the actual observable, practical reality that Dark Mind is an incredibly effective mitigation tool in content that actually exists, simply because it sticks in your craw that there are hypothetical encounters that do not exist and show no signs of existing anywhere in the foreseeable future, seems... unproductive.

It would have been nice if there are so many tank busters that other short recast can't keep up and only mine can...

P3S, P4S, and (especially) DSR all have situations where the shorter cooldown on TBN is a distinct benefit over the 25s options on other tanks.

Focusing on the last phase of DSR specifically, tanks are hit with, effectively, eleven tankbusters over the course of slightly more than 3 minutes: eight pairs of Trinity attacks, each of which are roughly equivalent to a Savage-level tankbuster of 80~90k damage, and three Ahk Morn stacks, which deal Ultimate-level (several hundred thousand HP, unmitigated) damage to both tanks.
TBN, and TBN alone, can catch every Trinity, leaving all of DRK's other mitigation for the Ahk Morn stacks - and with good timing, you can fit a wholly-unnecessary TBN onto the Ahk Morn stacks too. Every other tank A) Has weaker primary mitigation for Ahk Morn, and typically must use their short-mitigation skills there to help survive, and B) Couldn't even hit every Trinity with their short-mitigation skill if they wanted to.