Another Patch another middle finger to DRKs

[RyuDragnier]

I'm confused where it actually feels bad. It is great in ult/raid/trials and performs just fine in dungeons. What else is there? I mean I guess they could give us Dark Missionary at or below 70 so we aren't the only tank that doesn't have group mit on ucob/uwu.

You just spam MP moves when they're available, and basically 1-2-3 until you get enough gauge and then use the gauge moves. That's it. It's not like WAR where there's a 4 mixed in there from time to time, a 2nd combo like GNB, or some big planned use for that MP like with PLD's current magic damage window. It's just use on cooldown and forget, no real upkeep, no big planning, no nothing. The moves themselves are pretty disjointed too. Shadowbringer isn't linked to anything and is just like everything else, use on cooldown.

[Oizen]

You just spam MP moves when they're available, and basically 1-2-3 until you get enough gauge and then use the gauge moves. That's it. It's not like WAR where there's a 4 mixed in there from time to time, a 2nd combo like GNB, or some big planned use for that MP like with PLD's current magic damage window. It's just use on cooldown and forget, no real upkeep, no big planning, no nothing. The moves themselves are pretty disjointed too. Shadowbringer isn't linked to anything and is just like everything else, use on cooldown.

I'd argue some of the shit you can do with TBN and resource pooling is harder than anything you'd see on WAR by a mile and it is as a whole a lot less forgiving than WAR. But thats not me saying DRK is hard or has much depth, its me saying theres two tanks that are really, really easy and have no depth outside of pool resource, hit resource spender.

Infact I really want people to realize thats how we got here with tank balance, Square Enix didn't sit down and decide "this is going to be the big damage tank".

There was no design decision at all.
DRK is the only tank that has no defensives that upgrade as you level it, while other jobs will get expanded tools on their core kit, DRK gets a random oGCD that doesn't play into any of its resources.
Hell, until 6.1 where they finally put Stalwart Soul at a reasonable level, a good chunk of DRK's kit wasn't even usable in dungeon content in the lv 60-71 range. It just existed in this broken state and SE didn't care enough to touch it until 6.1
Funny enough its still kinda messed up as the new lv 40 Stalwart Soul says it gives you Blood Gauge, that thing you don't even unlock until lv 62.

And thats just how the job has been designed ever since its joke of a rework way back when. And now with EW I view it as a straw that broke the camel's back situation.

How many unrelated damage only oGCDs can you shove into a tank until their burst window beats out most DPS classes?
I guess the answer is 12 and a summon that casts 6 more at a higher potency.


Similar story with its defenses right now, DRK has strong raw mitigation not because its a design intent, but because while other jobs got moves like Raw Intuition, or Sheltron, DRK got things like Dark Mind.
Which isn't a bad skill, its just one of many skills that never really lead anywhere, Short CD magic only mit thats neat. Come EW, we saw other jobs Defensives upgrade into new skills, DRKs didnt, it got Oblation.
Which again, isn't a bad skill, short cd 10% mit on a double cast, but its leading to this point where other Jobs will be using their evolved mitigation skills to some effect.

And DRK will just kitchen sink it with every single skill its ever been given and end up with a higher number. Kinda perfect storm that Oblation and Dark Mind have the exact same upsides of being low CD.

[Casualty]

You just spam MP moves when they're available, and basically 1-2-3 until you get enough gauge and then use the gauge moves. That's it. It's not like WAR where there's a 4 mixed in there from time to time, a 2nd combo like GNB, or some big planned use for that MP like with PLD's current magic damage window. It's just use on cooldown and forget, no real upkeep, no big planning, no nothing. The moves themselves are pretty disjointed too. Shadowbringer isn't linked to anything and is just like everything else, use on cooldown.

How can you argue that WAR is good gameplay, while at the same time knock DRK? Any complexity with WAR has far gone out the window. There is no gauge attachment whatsoever to anything but Fell Cleave, Inner Release doesn't override Infuriate, and there is 0 planning around your burst phase compared to where it used to be. I could argue that at least on DRK you have to pool MP and ideally bank a Dark Arts for burst, and it is actually possible to overcap with blood weapon if you are being careless. Shadowbringer isn't linked to anything and is use on cooldown (or well burst, but w/e) but neither is is orogeny/upheaval. There is much more room for optimization heading into cooldowns. Heck, you can mess up and not bank enough blood for Living Shadow. Mess up on Warrior and you unfortunately lose out on the difference in potency between a buffed Fell Cleave and an unbuffed one. The only thing that WAR actually has is an occasional swapped out third tier combo so you don't drop your self buff.

I'm not going to argue that the kit can still be fun, but it seems disingenuous to knock one but not the other.

My point was not about complexity though - it was about the fun factor. The poster I originally replied to said that raids were the only fun part about DRK. If that is true, then I'm just not sure what about other content makes it less fun. It performs well in all content reasonably well, and if you like the kit, then it is enough to enjoy and do well regardless of what you are doing. I can't think of anything of the top of my head and think "it does well in raids but sure is clunky here"

[RyuDragnier]

How can you argue that WAR is good gameplay, while at the same time knock DRK? Any complexity with WAR has far gone out the window. There is no gauge attachment whatsoever to anything but Fell Cleave, Inner Release doesn't override Infuriate, and there is 0 planning around your burst phase compared to where it used to be. I could argue that at least on DRK you have to pool MP and ideally bank a Dark Arts for burst, and it is actually possible to overcap with blood weapon if you are being careless. Shadowbringer isn't linked to anything and is use on cooldown (or well burst, but w/e) but neither is is orogeny/upheaval. There is much more room for optimization heading into cooldowns. Heck, you can mess up and not bank enough blood for Living Shadow. Mess up on Warrior and you unfortunately lose out on the difference in potency between a buffed Fell Cleave and an unbuffed one. The only thing that WAR actually has is an occasional swapped out third tier combo so you don't drop your self buff.

The two jobs are insanely similar, except for some things. Darkside is up 100% of the time because there's nothing that uses it or makes you have to worry about it, compared to the buff for WAR actually being able to fall off. DRK's cap skill Shadowbringer is not connected to anything, and is used on cooldown, compared to WAR's Primal Rend which is attached to their burst window button (Inner Release). WAR has a button that instantly gives it gauge and powers up the gauge moves, while DRK doesn't have anything that does that to mix things up. WAR has things that lend themselves to good job design, DRK does not.

[Crater]

Infact I really want people to realize thats how we got here with tank balance, Square Enix didn't sit down and decide "this is going to be the big damage tank".

There was no design decision at all.

I think that's very obviously untrue.

At the outset of Endwalker, it was extremely obvious that it was an intentional design decision for DRK to be the big-damage, offense-oriented tank at level 90. It wasn't a freak accident that DRK just so happened to gain 1.5-2x the amount of potency from 81-90 that every other tank did, nor was it a freak accident that that "big damage" identity didn't extend back to level 80 (where the tanks, at the time, were left roughly equal on damage) - because at level 80 DRK maintained a significant defensive advantage over other tanks.

In 6.2, some of this design is muddled, because obviously SE's intention for tank design as a whole didn't work out the way they hoped it would (for instance, PLD now gains a pretty obscene amount of potency in the 81-90 range). But you have to ignore every piece of evidence to look at the way tanks were intended to function in Endwalker to come to the conclusion that it all just happened by accident.

Just because it's not the class you want it to be, doesn't mean that there wasn't a clear and specific intention behind its design. It's a very coherently-designed tank, both offensively and defensively, regardless of whether you happen to like the way they've designed its offensive or defensive components.

[Kalaam]

I wouldn't say coherently designed.
The job changed a lot from initial design and it shows in so many regards, the amount of animation clipping during its burst shows well that it wasn't planned to be like that originally. And while of course job design can change over 8 years, it's normal, a kit that doesn't have any inner interraction and is almost fully disconnected outside of 2 oGCD requiring dark side to be up isn't what i would call "coherently designed".
If DRK had PLD's 6.2 damage, nobody would defend its design. The only thing it has going for it are raw numbers, that can change from one patch to the next.

If you put a 700 potency on healer's single target spell, making them do more damage than ranged and super valuable, would you say they suddenly have a coherent damage rotation because the numbers are high and "it works well in dps checks" ?

[AC9Breaker]

Dark Knight is fine.

[Crater]

It's coherently designed because almost every tool in DRK's arsenal contributes to the thing that it is designed to do.

Offensively, it is designed around the 2-minute burst, and packing a huge number of attacks into those burst windows.
Coherent design is Living Shadow having a 5-second windup, so that you get all the potency of it into a burst window without having to use an oGCD slot during the burst window. Ditto for Salted Earth being placeable in advance, so that you only need one slot for Salt and Darkness.
Coherent design is TBN letting you put more MP into your burst window than you would be capable of without a Dark Arts proc.
Coherent design is Shadowbringer, as an oGCD, being a purely-additive extension of your burst window, instead of a GCD attack that has to displace or compete with other GCDs you might want to use, or some ridiculous monstrosity like Paladin trying to fit an 8-9 GCD burst into a 6-GCD buff window.
Coherent design is having more potency in the burst window than any other tank, without more than 600 potency being attached to any particular hit, so that DRK doesn't live or die by crit variance, and doesn't need any attacks to auto-crit/DH.
Coherent design is that DRK's skills aren't all tied together in some rat's nest of 80 different job gauges. It's not some poorly-designed shitheap of a class like Reaper that completely ceases to function through downtime; DRK is actually capable of partitioning out its damage sources from places where they aren't needed, to where they are, without its entire rotation crumbling to pieces, which is extremely relevant in things like Ultimate prog.


Defensively, it's simple and similarly coherent: DRK has more percentage-based mitigation than any other tank, and a flat-value shield at the end that eats a bigger portion of what's left based on how much percentage-based mitigation was used. It also has, in general, a coherent identity of having defensive abilities that are less effective on a per-use basis than comparable skills on other tanks, but that have lower cooldowns and can be stacked in greater number compared to the kits on other tanks.


If you don't like it, then you're free to not like it - I'd go back to Heavensward or even Stormblood design in a heartbeat, myself - but it's very plainly obvious to me that there's a clear, coherent intention behind both halves of the class's design. Animations clipping into each other isn't a sign of incoherent design, it's just how this game works. It's not fun that the class is almost literally just a naked 1-2-3 in between burst windows, but it is coherent for it to be designed that way.

[Derio]

We know PLD is getting a small rework in 6.3

I think we can expect a big overhaul on all tanks in 7.0 in terms of damage, mitigation and rotation. Not sure if they will double down on this 2 min burst window or scrap it and go with smaller burst window setups.

[Oizen]

I think that's very obviously untrue.

At the outset of Endwalker, it was extremely obvious that it was an intentional design decision for DRK to be the big-damage, offense-oriented tank at level 90. It wasn't a freak accident that DRK just so happened to gain 1.5-2x the amount of potency from 81-90 that every other tank did, nor was it a freak accident that that "big damage" identity didn't extend back to level 80 (where the tanks, at the time, were left roughly equal on damage) - because at level 80 DRK maintained a significant defensive advantage over other tanks.

In 6.2, some of this design is muddled, because obviously SE's intention for tank design as a whole didn't work out the way they hoped it would (for instance, PLD now gains a pretty obscene amount of potency in the 81-90 range). But you have to ignore every piece of evidence to look at the way tanks were intended to function in Endwalker to come to the conclusion that it all just happened by accident.

Just because it's not the class you want it to be, doesn't mean that there wasn't a clear and specific intention behind its design. It's a very coherently-designed tank, both offensively and defensively, regardless of whether you happen to like the way they've designed its offensive or defensive components.

I think you're giving SE way too much credit when that potency is coming from such amazingly well thought out traits such as "Enhanced Living Shadow II"