Dark Knight Megathread

[Zairava]

Sidenote: I think an even stronger constraint that could be worth waiting for, though, is what ought to be done for tanking as an entire role -- and not just in the sense of contextual gameplay (pre-positioning bosses, coordinating mitigation CDs back and forth with one's cotank, etc.) or bloated systems like our former Enmity "management". There's tons more that each tank job could enjoyably include... if the role were so permitted.

I want to return to this point in particular, especially the enmity management portion.

I've thought on and off extensively over this particular point of discussion, and nothing I could possibly come up with would help tanking as an entire role that wouldn't be considered either streamlining or bad, seemingly pointless homogenization that would mostly be used in dungeons, rendering it niche and just overall not helping tanks mechanically.

Henceforth, I return to and look to the enmity management. No, this doesn't mean make it a hindrance and reliant on the entire party's cooperation. I have spoken about this method before, but this would be personal enmity management. I still refer to this as possibly one of the better and easier things to implement as enmity is baked into the game.

So, this is how it would work:

1) The simple modifications first

• Tank Stance is changed to already be baked in. No turning it on, no worrying about having to reapply it after being synced down. You just get it naturally.
• Our former DPS stances make a return. GNB is given it's own variant as it was added when they were "removed".

2) How it actually functions. You may be able to see where I'm going with this from the prior changes

• Enmity Generation is about 25-50% of what it is now.
• Activating dps stance reduces your enmity generation to that of our generation without tank stance on currently.
• We get our Enmity Combo finishers back. However, they are NOT a seperate action.
• The dps combo finisher gets roughly 30-60 higher potency than the enmity combo. This does NOT mean the enmity combo has the same potency as our current 1-2-3 combo does. It means it's lower.
• The enmity combo finisher is what we have without DPS stance on. It gives bonus enmity, obviously.

  PLD -> Rage of Halone
  WAR -> Butcher's Block
  DRK -> Power Slash
  GNB -> ???

• With DPS stance on, we have our current combo finishers. These finishers Replace the Enmity combo finisher upon activating DPS stance. this is to prevent attempts of staying in dps stance for an entire fight, if being relegated to attempting to hold aggro off of pure dps wasn't dissuasive enough.

  PLD -> Royal Authority
  WAR -> Storm's Path
  DRK -> Souleater
  GNB -> Solid Barrel

This, I feel, leaves a comfortable skill floor, as you can just stay in tank stance if you so want to, with a high skill ceiling for people who want to go for that extra. As there could be optimizations as main tanking with provoke during dps stance. You aren't using say, just one Power Slash and holding aggro reliably for that higher dps gain during DPS stance. The enmity management is also solely on the tank themselves, not everyone else needing chip in and use diversion/lucid at the start of a pull or otherwise.

It could also be said that dps stance should have a cooldown to prevent just using one enmity combo then hitting Darkside for example, but I'm on the fence about that in particular.

[Shurrikhan]

enmity management.

A few points, not necessarily in any cohesive form:

If the difference between having an enmity stance vs. a potency stance is simply which finisher you use...

1. It feels unnecessarily punishing to opening enmity (on our combo openers, oGCDs, and ranged attacks) and AoE enmity generation, since you penalize the whole of enmity generation by 50-75% just to buy it back with only a singular single-target skill per job.
   
   
2. In that case, why not simply offer the alternate finisher freely, a la the difference between Storm's Eye, Storm's Path, and Butcher's Block if each fed from Maim?

3. Moreover, though, what is the intended goal of this system?

While the old Defensive/Offensives stances at least also allowed for an extra degree of fall-back safety against mechanics and tankbusters, this would leave only the old game of "How tightly can I barely outpace, up to the end of the fight, the enmity my team has generated?"

Unless something about Enmity itself has changed or encounters bring in ways with mess with it, now that you have removed the opportunity cost across actions other than the combo finisher, there's also nothing left to game while managing that enmity -- no complicating factors beyond whether someone would overtake enmity on the particular target within 3 GCDs (with PLD and GNB being uniquely disadvantaged). There's no difference, even, in what to use raid buffs on, as increasing the damage of an Enmity Finisher would mean that many fewer Enmity Finishers required overall, thus winning back that damage, regardless, so long as one still manages to let their excess Enmity on the given enemy be trimmed away before its death.

Countersuggestions coming on edit.

[Zairava]

Snip

1) The main reason why the enmity generation would be nerfed so hard is because we currently generate way more than we know what to do with currently. I personally wouldn't want to go lower than half of current. If we kept it with my changes in mind, there is a chance we could have a repeat of just constantly being in dps stance and pushing as much as possible that way. Which bring up the question of why even bother have the enmity finisher to begin with? I don't know if there's a cap on how much enmity can be held, but if there is one, it could potentially solve an issue here.

Another point is that the aoe for tanks have been a long process, being that in shadowbringers we finally got a 2-part combo, and Paladin got total eclipse in stormblood. The bonus enmity could also be something that's slapped onto the aoe combo, but the primary reason for the single target finisher in particular having the bonus enmity is to make accessing a reliable burst window in DPS stance faster.

2) I would like to make the finishers separate, but it's more to avoid not using the finisher in itself in turn for more dps. Which, aside of dps stances being removed, is very likely the reason why the enmity combos were removed to begin with. (They could just as easily have kept those in place of the dps combos and just transferred the mp/hp restore to those, though). The other reason is bloat, but that could be resolved in a number of ways which would make having them separate much, much less of a problem.

3) The overarching goal of it is for something for us to pay attention to and monitor, especially in downtime between bursts. To keep the current low skill floor and make the skill ceiling higher.

We would actually have some use for provoke while main-tanking. It's there as a crutch in case you really need it, but not something you would want to resort to. We would still have shirk for tank swaps, so ideally you would want to stay in second in the aggro meter, not too different to now, or it has ever, been.

The only real way to completely prevent just barely staying above the party in dps is to make dps stance have a cooldown, which at that point really isn't really fixing what I'm trying to solve.

Another thing I had in mind was for us to keep our current high enmity generation and to make it gradually wear off while in dps stance, which might sound more appealing. When I think about it, though, it sound like it would be a mess to deal with in any content that requires two tanks, and would probably lead to people complaining about not being able to use, say, souleater while main-tanking.

[Shurrikhan]

1) The main reason why the enmity generation would be nerfed so hard is because we currently generate way more than we know what to do with currently.

I agree that, if you want to make anything approaching gameplay out of Enmity, the current Enmity modifiers are excessive, but you still need to account for initial enmity grab and for AoE. That's why we originally had further enmity modifiers on Unleash (while spammable GCD Abyssal Drain did not), Flash (Total Eclipse did not), Overpower, etc., alongside Shield Lob, Unmend, and Tomahawk. If you want to put added stress on Tank Enmity, you'd also need to put back in those modifiers.

Or, put more simply, you'd be better off investing little to no Enmity above what is proportionate to potency dealt into finishers, because you'd no longer have the tank stance affect the GCDs prior to those finishers to, albeit at DPS-cost, cover those low-Enmity GCDs.

In that regard, the old tank stances would appear to me to work much better than what you suggest here, but at minimum, you'd need to push the enmity budget nearer to opening GCDs, with a Damage Finisher likely doing no greater enmity than an opener and a Enmity finisher still doing only, say, 2x an opener, as not to only ever secure Enmity in the 3rd GCD (and only on one target, at that). As such, the practical constraints would then make those differences in Enmity between the Enmity Finisher and the Damage Finisher seem rather lackluster.

2) I would like to make the finishers separate, but it's more to avoid not using the finisher in itself in turn for more dps.

Right, but you'd be doing that anyways, just via a more convoluted route (hitting 1-2-[DPS-Stance]3[Stance-Off] instead of 1-2-4 for one's alternative combo).

Put a CD on the DPS stance and it becomes 123-12[S]3, then turning the stance off as soon as possible, and activating it again just before the next Finisher. But I still don't really see the gameplay value there.

3) The overarching goal of it is for something for us to pay attention to and monitor, especially in downtime between bursts. To keep the current low skill floor and make the skill ceiling higher.

Okay, but...

A. You don't actually need to pay attention to it until nearing the end of the fight, so long as you're not being absurdly excessive in Enmity generated. Any extra Enmity from raid buffs, since that Enmity allows for more Damage Finishers (instead of Enmity Finishers) is just going to turn equally into damage as well, so long as enough TTK remains. The only complexity there is that you simply only ever swap to tank stance just before the finisher, and try never to swap in before unloading resources (Gnashing Fang, oGCDs, Bloodspillers, Conf combo, etc.), because it punishes you on all GCDs while only rewarding you on a single action.

B. Is that margining really... satisfying? If there's one thing most players have been least annoyed to lose (and the greatest number of players happy to lose), it's been any pure maintenance mechanics. Thus far your system is effectively just an extra combo finisher, but it appears to be used in among the least nuance-capable and knowledge-rewarding ways possible. Old Storm's Eye would add a rhythmic anchor, but this one --worse even than stacking up to twice-- would stack infinitely. A DoT combo like old Goring Blade, for instance, at least adds a rhythmic anchor and varies its use over target count (at least til 3+), but this instead faces only anti-synergy, especially as DPS start using AoEs instead. Perhaps consider what else that extra GCD or finisher option might be used for instead, and what gameplay those alternatives could provide?

[ForteNightshade]

This, I feel, leaves a comfortable skill floor, as you can just stay in tank stance if you so want to, with a high skill ceiling for people who want to go for that extra. As there could be optimizations as main tanking with provoke during dps stance. You aren't using say, just one Power Slash and holding aggro reliably for that higher dps gain during DPS stance. The enmity management is also solely on the tank themselves, not everyone else needing chip in and use diversion/lucid at the start of a pull or otherwise.

It could also be said that dps stance should have a cooldown to prevent just using one enmity combo then hitting Darkside for example, but I'm on the fence about that in particular.

This is the primary reason they removed enmity management in the first place. Nervous and inexperienced tanks wouldn't touch their DPS stance, thus dealing significantly less damage for no discernable benefit. Even with your suggested aggro generation thresholds, you'd still tank almost exclusively in your DPS stance because 25-50% higher than everyone else adds up quickly. Not to mention, Provoke + Shirk would allow tank to walk that line even longer. The end result is a return to the old days which very few players found engaging. Enmity simply isn't an interesting mechanic because it's entirely binary. What you're describing isn't really a skill ceiling but more playing correctly and playing incorrectly. Siting in tank stance is objectively wrong because there's no tangible benefit to doing so.

Another issue is the opener, especially nowadays in this burst centric meta the devs have insisted upon. One tank essentially sacrifices massive amounts of DPS because they have to open with their stance. I can all but guarantee PF would be a complete mess with tanks fighting who has to "main tank." Which brings up yet another potential problem. If tanks couldn't simply Provoke and Shirk each other but actually had to turn on stance occasionally, one tank will be essentially taking a giant L for most of the encounter. Take a fight like Hegemone. You can go over half the fight without needing to swap once after the initial Synergy depending on RNG. So now you have a scenario where one tank is having to give up damage because of an arbitrary aggro system that is neither interesting nor rewarding.

At the end of the day, aggro management simply isn't a rewarding system. It actively punishes the player without providing any sort of benefit.

[Zairava]

Snip

It's just the first thing I come back to when I try to think of what can be done with tanking as an actual role, since we already had it in the past and was something I actually liked. My obvious bias is obvious.

That said, I really am trying to wrap my head around what actually can be done given the current iteration, and I can't help but feel like the answer directly related to how the tank jobs are designed themselves.

I've thought of debuffs coming from your aoe/ST, buffs to yourself from them, etc. Which essentially is just storms eye or what flash/Dark Passenger were. This also would imply bosses would be allowed to have these debuffs, which is incredibly unlikely I imagine.

Say...

DRK:
Salted Earth gets its pvp variant. It pulls mobs to you
Dark Passenger comes back as an upgrade to Flood of Shadow when TBN pops. Edge gets an ability that does the same. They both apply blind and it also applies to bosses.

WAR:
Storm's Eye remains the same
Orogeny/Upheavel increase the potency of your next fell cleave/Decimate by X and gives a vulnerability debuff to the mob(s) hit by them.

Those are just examples though, and are more interactive and passives we really don't need to pay attention to, as we would be using them anyway. Which solves almost nothing.