Dark Knight's /Dark Missionary

[Archwizard]

I'm personally less worried about Ultimates than I am about level sync'd content or just leveling the dang job in the first place. A lot of jobs suffer from getting actions trimmed one expansion only to have a replacement added in the next near level cap, so it makes lower levels less fun and more difficult to play at.

DRK's already lost original Dark Arts, Dark Dance, Dark Passenger, Sole Survivor, Blood Price, spammable Abyssal Drain, and Shadowskin -- and those are just the actions that impacted its survival. In the process, its rotation has been reduced to knockoff WAR aside from a double-weave heavy burst at max level, and its "replacement" survival tools all come at level 70 or later.

So I'm not going to say it "hardly matters", especially when a majority of players go through duty roulettes every day on every job under the sun but only 1% actually go through Ultimates.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I'm personally less worried about Ultimates than I am about level sync'd content or just leveling the dang job in the first place. A lot of jobs suffer from getting actions trimmed one expansion only to have a replacement added in the next near level cap, so it makes lower levels less fun and more difficult to play at.

DRK's already lost original Dark Arts, Dark Dance, Dark Passenger, Sole Survivor, Blood Price, spammable Abyssal Drain, and Shadowskin -- and those are just the actions that impacted its survival. In the process, its rotation has been reduced to knockoff WAR aside from a double-weave heavy burst at max level, and its "replacement" survival tools all come at level 70 or later.

So I'm not going to say it "hardly matters", especially when a majority of players go through duty roulettes every day on every job under the sun but only 1% actually go through Ultimates.

The difference between casual content and high-end raiding is that a -10% mitigation skill vs only magic damage not being available outside of high-end raids (Ultimates) is because numerically, your impact is so minimal there is no need for the average player to learn that action yet, whereas for the Ultimate raiders you'd push the job from "already damn good" into "you are stupid if you don't bring it" tier. What you want is more engagement at Lv70, which I think is good. I don't agree with the "streamlining" by pushing even more mitigation downwards and making Bahamut and Ultima even easier, especially in light of the recent Living Dead rework. (huge buff in my opinion)

How about fundamental offence gameplay changes, like those in Stormblood or Heavensward? You mentioned various skills of it after all.

[Archwizard]

What you want is more engagement at Lv70, which I think is good.

No, what I want is for DRK not to feel like it's made of paper when I'm healing it outside of 70-80 content. The "huge buff" you praise on LD was a bandaid on the fact it put a Doom effect on you for 7 years and put the onus on your healer to keep you alive despite you popping a supposed invuln -- it brought it up to a level passable with others of its caliber, which rather emphasizes my point.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

No, what I want is for DRK not to feel like it's made of paper when I'm healing it outside of 70-80 content. The "huge buff" you praise on LD was a bandaid on the fact it put a Doom effect on you for 7 years and put the onus on your healer to keep you alive despite you popping a supposed invuln -- it brought it up to a level passable with others of its caliber, which rather emphasizes my point.

Two potential suggestions:
1.) Dark Mind mitigation gets split half-and-half (10% generic, 10% magical) to make it more applicable in turn of a 1% net nerf on magical damage mitigation
2.) Dark Dance being readded as a 1:1 physical counterpart to Dark Mind (60s CD, 10s duration, 20% physical mitigation)

Missionary being put in a lower level bracket will not make you any tankier as most mobs in the levelling dungeons tend to do the majority of their damage in physical, which my suggestion helps with. For anything with magical damage, DRK is beyond fine with Dark Mind alone. For group mitigation you still have Reprisal every minute.

[Archwizard]

2.) Dark Dance being readded as a 1:1 physical counterpart to Dark Mind (60s CD, 10s duration, 20% physical mitigation)

Would first require an action trim, since DRK is currently so bloated that all bars are filled. Also unlikely since Dark Dance was given to GNB as Camouflage.

But stranger to me is that you would propose adding a new action for personal mitigation at lower levels, as an alternative to dropping the level of TBN, a tool it already has... while also claiming that dropping the level of a tool would make it too powerful in specific content, in full defiance of the fact that the changes you proposed would also make the job more powerful at end level?

How are you more concerned about locking out actions from lower level content "that hardly matters", than you are about proposing actions that would affect ongoing, relevant content? The math... isn't mathing.

Missionary being put in a lower level bracket will not make you any tankier as most mobs in the levelling dungeons tend to do the majority of their damage in physical [...] For group mitigation you still have Reprisal every minute.

You say that... but then we have Gunbreaker getting DMis at 64. And yes, you've already said GNB shouldn't have HoL at that level either, but it's already the reality we live in and raising the level on it now would be an unnecessary nerf.

So we're in a state where not only has DRK lost many of the tools it had sub-70 for personal mitigation which is a whole can of worms on its own because it means DRK no longer performs in Level 70 dungeons/trials/raids the way it did when they were introduced and tuned to a certain expectation of the job's capabilities... but to the relevant point, that another tank has been introduced who has the tools within that bracket that DRK does not get until significantly later.
... Plus Gunbreaker has its entire burst combo at 70.

As I mentioned in my first post to this thread, the point is parity. All tanks bring Reprisal to the table for group mitigation, but beyond that you have 3 tanks who ADDITIONALLY have alternative forms of group mitigation at or below level 70 that don't require a target (which is great because the biggest raidwides often lack a target to debuff anyway) which they can interweave with Reprisal... and one who conspicuously doesn't, for the tradeoff of being a middling performer at that level due to its most powerful tools being pushed higher towards the level ceiling.

You brought up Ultimates as the reason not to drop the level of DMis, but from what I can tell, even the Ultimate raiders want to make that change. Why willingly take DRK at that level when GNB does everything better?

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

-snip for readibility-

Regarding Dark Dance - the reason I am less in favour of moving TBN down rather than making Dark Mind a magical version of Camouflage (preferred option) OR reintroducing Dark Dance (not with the old stats like you compared with Gunbreaker but 1:1 parity with Dark Mind except physical + shared CD) is because it would be of greater benefit numerically in the levelling process using a %-type mitigation than an HP shield.

As to why I am okay with a change to DRK receiving an adjustment to standard mitigation over party mitigation is based on how the fights up to now have generally been heavily in favour of Dark Mind to begin with with very few exceptions. For the few exceptions / oultiers it will have some impact, however not nearly as much as having Dark Missionary in Unending Coils of Bahamut or The Weapon's Refrain.

Regarding to you bringing up Heart of Light & Parity - bluntly speaking, I believe GNB should have their Heart of Light moved OUT of the Lv70 bracket if they are supposed to bring this much damage (literally outdamaging dancer). I don't agree with the way they handled making various things extremely top heavy in the levelling process (example: Holy Sheltron + healing potency on offensive magic only at Lv90 ranges) whilst having completely butchered tank balance at Lv70.

The parity im suggesting is not to give another tank AOE mitigation in a world where there is already way too much for that level but to actually focus on the real outlier being Gunbreaker who brings too much at Lv70.

However I will concede that my view differs in this aspect from many other Ultimate raiders. The easier and more obvious choice would be to demand for Missionary to be moved down rather than Heart of Light being moved up. I simply do not agree with this though as we would feed into two big issues that we usually frown upon:

- homogenisation (every tank "must" have their X at Lv Y, every tank "must" have a type Z skill, etc)
- powercreep

I know it sounds a bit cockeyed but this is how I view it honestly. I won't ask people to agree with me, I'm merely hoping that I won't get stamped as an idiot for thinking this way.

[Archwizard]

However I will concede that my view differs in this aspect from many other Ultimate raiders. The easier and more obvious choice would be to demand for Missionary to be moved down rather than Heart of Light being moved up. I simply do not agree with this though as we would feed into two big issues that we usually frown upon:

- homogenisation (every tank "must" have their X at Lv Y, every tank "must" have a type Z skill, etc)
- powercreep

I think we need to talk about this bit real quick because there's elements of it that are being used too broadly.

It seems there's a few different definitions of what qualifies as "homogenization" slithering around, and this seems like the most egregious one. Because when content exists that expects your current tank to have things like on-demand mitigation to deal with a tankbuster, obviously every tank "must" have X by level Y and "must" have a tool to deal with situation Z where they're expected to do something. There's always going to be some level of overlap between what all tanks can do, because there's always going to be an expectation of their role to balance around. To refute it so broadly creates a slippery slope.

My understanding of "homogenization" is that no two tanks should play the same way -- they don't do the same thing in the same way, even when they should still be capable of accomplishing the same ends. It's why they all have tools like on-demands in the first place; the tools themselves are not the same, even if they all have a way to react to the same situations.
Which, yes, already creates some issues when DRK plays like a knockoff WAR and shares exactly the same group mitigation with GNB, and I will happily see DRK get another full rework if it means clawing back some personal identity.
But to try to extend this to things like "TBN and DMis shouldn't be usable in the same content as comparable tools available to other tanks" is an unusually strict take. It would be understandable perhaps if there was some compensatory alternative available -- for instance, if DRK's MP-based skills also leeched back some HP, then it could compensate for not having an on-demand mitigation at a lower level, in the same way that GNB getting Aurora and Camouflage so early is an attempt to make up for HoS coming so late -- but frankly, not everything can be compensated in similar regard, including raidwide mitigation (which is only comparable to... other raidwide survival tools).

As for power creep... like you said, your take is "a bit cockeyed" given how cherrypicked it is here. You're using the excuse of "Power Creep" to set a hard limiter, but as I said before, you're not examining where jobs are compensated (in both directions, up and down) with this cap.
Just looking at the level 70 bracket again -- even in your proposal where HoL gets pushed up out of the bracket, you have: PLD with the lowest damage but three raidwide tools; GNB with the highest damage, but only Reprisal; WAR in the middle on both accounts thanks to Shake It Off...
... and DRK with still lower damage than GNB and nothing more to show for it. It doesn't have any strong points in that bracket like Paladin or Gunbreaker, doesn't meaningfully compare to the "all-round" average marked by Warrior, nor does it have its own niche to break the comparison. It does the bare minimum, and you're using the excuse of "Power Creep" to say it shouldn't do more than the bare minimum, which is exactly the opposite of what Power Creep is.

Power Creep applies to the sum total of what a job is capable of in its context. Reducing the level of tools the job would get anyway, doesn't alter that sum total -- at most, you have to examine the context (and we've been focusing on contexts where the job is otherwise lacking, so... it's fine).
As I already pointed out, adding "Dark Dance" would have significant ramifications on current content; even on a shared CD with Dark Mind, it means extending Dark Mind's CD from niche Magic Resistance to a second Rampart on a lower CD (barring the extremely niche non-physical non-magical damage that requires flat resistance). Sure, most tankbusters in Savage are magic damage anyway, but it still means more situations where the CD can be burned and mitigation can be increased for an end-level tank when it was a pointless loss before. It increases that sum total, which is why it's conspicuous that you used both lines in the same post.

To be clear, I have no issue with increasing the functionality of Dark Mind because it frankly is nigh-useless outside of high-end content, I just think your argument for why X but not Y is inconsistent.

[Jolyin]

The difference between casual content and high-end raiding is that a -10% mitigation skill vs only magic damage not being available outside of high-end raids (Ultimates) is because numerically, your impact is so minimal there is no need for the average player to learn that action yet, whereas for the Ultimate raiders you'd push the job from "already damn good" into "you are stupid if you don't bring it" tier. What you want is more engagement at Lv70, which I think is good. I don't agree with the "streamlining" by pushing even more mitigation downwards and making Bahamut and Ultima even easier, especially in light of the recent Living Dead rework. (huge buff in my opinion)

How about fundamental offence gameplay changes, like those in Stormblood or Heavensward? You mentioned various skills of it after all.

I do think TBN/dark mind has a lot of value for level 70 ultimate's
not to mention u can hold Tbn charges for raid buff/Blood weapon/Delirium/LD also got buffed
i originally made this post thinking why was dark missionary not 70 or lower like other
I'll hold off my verdict on wither Dark Missionary are needed until i clear UwU,Ucob