Dark Knight Megathread

[Malthir]

Personally I would like to see dark arts go back to a more toggled version with dark arts on we constantly drain mana our moves add effects or we press it and it halves darksides timer to add special effects to the next move for example; damage reductions on some moves, blind again, barriers on others. It would need some balance checking but it would be a much better way of addressing the Drks lack of self sustain without just giving us self heal and turning us more into warriors. ALSO BRING POWERSLASH ANIMATION BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!! I don't care where we have it I just want that animation back it was the most badass animation we had and they yeeted it for no reason

[DRKoftheAzure]

??? Dark Arts isn't tied to Darkside, though. Its indicator is tied to the Blood Gauge, and only for visual convenience.

No the indicator is tied to the "Darkside Gauge" but it to be fair I understand the confusion since most people probably don't even look at job UI elements to begin... which proves my point about pointless UI bloat honestly... though if you're only looking at your hotbar and not the job gauge, I say that the devs failed at making good UI elements for jobs, and thus further proved that not every job needs 1 or 2 cool looking UI elements...

It also has no button; it's purely a TBN secondary frequency-constraining mechanic.

I was talking about Dark Arts BEFORE 5.x onward, A.K.A., Pre-Shadowbringers Dark Arts.

Moreover, if you made a percentile bonus like Hissatsu: Kaiten, then it'd have to be tuned as to only be useful around our most damaging weaponskills, Bloodspiller/Quietus, which means it'd see use only...
[A] as a brainless bundle (always hit DA before Bloodspiller), and
[B] very infrequently outside of the likes of a Delirium-based Bloodspiller-spam. (The natural frequency of Bloodspiller is just 2 in 17 GCDs.)

Not just weaponskills, but high damaging abilities like Carve and Spit, Salt and Darkness, Edge of Shadow, Shadowbringer, which would probably be better the Hissatsu: Kaiten, but would somehow also justify the long cooldowns of those mentioned abilities, although if it were implemented now, it still wouldn't change the fact that Dark Knight has a boring GCD rotation, unless you put the abilities I just mentioned on the GCD, which would be a band-aid fix to the "Brainless bundle" argument but Dark Knight is pretty brainless to play right now anyway...

I like what Dark Arts currently is, as a way to cast MP skills without spending the MP.
We just need more MP skills, and more ways to get Dark Arts Stacks.

I think the system has a lot of potential and I hope they do something more with it instead of it being the Edge/Flood spam tool

I agree. A lot of potential, but unfortunately the devs would probably squander that potential somehow...

It would be interesting, although possibly weird to balance, if dark arts kept the free spell aspect but could be used on things that cost more than tbn.

And that's why the devs will never change how boring Dark Knight plays no matter what level you play at, in more ways than one... would be nice if we didn't have radio silence from the devs and the gave us an explanation that was even REMOTELY believable...

Personally I would like to see dark arts go back to a more toggled version with dark arts on we constantly drain mana our moves add effects or we press it and it halves darksides timer to add special effects to the next move for example; damage reductions on some moves, blind again, barriers on others. It would need some balance checking but it would be a much better way of addressing the Drks lack of self sustain without just giving us self heal and turning us more into warriors.

First off; you got both Darkside and Dark Arts mixed up though I kinda don't blame since it was PROBABLY a long enough time for you to know what the two skills did by themselves but other than that you got MOST of that right.

Second; the special effects thing is... not really a good idea especially if MP generation is going to an issue...

ALSO BRING POWERSLASH ANIMATION BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!! I don't care where we have it I just want that animation back it was the most badass animation we had and they yeeted it for no reason

I say bring back enmity combos back for both Warrior AND Dark Knight, introduce the Off Tank and Main Tank roles like they did with Pure Healers and Barrier Healers, and have them be listed as Off Tanks and have Paladin and Gunbreaker be Main Tanks, AND they can still have the enmity toggles.

[Shurrikhan]

Not just weaponskills, but high damaging abilities like Carve and Spit, Salt and Darkness, Edge of Shadow, Shadowbringer, which would probably be better the Hissatsu: Kaiten, but would somehow also justify the long cooldowns of those mentioned abilities, although if it were implemented now, it still wouldn't change the fact that Dark Knight has a boring GCD rotation, unless you put the abilities I just mentioned on the GCD, which would be a band-aid fix to the "Brainless bundle" argument but Dark Knight is pretty brainless to play right now anyway...

But then you take only the worst of the old DA design, as it becomes obligatory bloat to be attached to certain actions (Bloodspiller, Shadowbringer, Carve and Spit) and avoided on all others because it only gives a percentile damage increase instead of any of its former additional effects.

You'd have your major offensive skills feeling nerfed just to support an extra (bloat) oGCD before each use to empower (un-nerf) them back to what they were... but zero actual decision-making or additional flexibility/versatility.

I say bring back enmity combos back for both Warrior AND Dark Knight, introduce the Off Tank and Main Tank roles like they did with Pure Healers and Barrier Healers, and have them be listed as Off Tanks and have Paladin and Gunbreaker be Main Tanks, AND they can still have the enmity toggles.

Again, though... why? Just... why? There is not a single thing Enmity combos do that Enmity stance toggles don't do at least as well (and far less wastefully). Enmity combos are just not a good use of buttons, however one looks at it/them.

[DRKoftheAzure]

But then you take only the worst of the old DA design, as it becomes obligatory bloat to be attached to certain actions (Bloodspiller, Shadowbringer, Carve and Spit) and avoided on all others because it only gives a percentile damage increase instead of any of its former additional effects.

You'd have your major offensive skills feeling nerfed just to support an extra (bloat) oGCD before each use to empower (un-nerf) them back to what they were... but zero actual decision-making or additional flexibility/versatility.

Once again Dark Arts, is one those things that might be impossible to actually make engaging in its current state unless we rework it from the ground up, or just outright delete the mechanic entirely... and regardless of where this conversation goes, I do not believe there is a right way of actually make making Dark Arts good without at least good chunk of the playerbase that like Dark Arts as a mechanic in its current state being up in arms.

Again, though... why? Just... why? There is not a single thing Enmity combos do that Enmity stance toggles don't do at least as well (and far less wastefully). Enmity combos are just not a good use of buttons, however one looks at it/them.

Neither is the concept of pure healer and barrier healer but the devs set a precedent with that so naturally my expectation is the devs finally telling as which tank are actually supposed be main tank or off tank other taking a guess or scream that every tank plays EXACTLY the same for 3 expansions in a row...

[Shurrikhan]

Neither is the concept of pure healer and barrier healer but the devs set a precedent with that so naturally my expectation is the devs finally telling as which tank are actually supposed be main tank or off tank other taking a guess or scream that every tank plays EXACTLY the same for 3 expansions in a row...

That has nothing whatsoever to do with Enmity combos, though. Combos used solely for Enmity are only ever going to be bloat so long as Enmity exists as a simple, non-decaying value, let alone when we have (or, per your suggestion, only half the tank cast would have) Enmity stance toggles.

You don't need Enmity combos to split the tanks cast into MTs and OTs, nor do you need separated MTs and OTs in order to have Enmity combos.

Nor is there benefit in either endeavor. They're both bad ideas without some radical prior shift in the game's context. Simply removing more shit from our tanks to second-class half of them in light-party content --such as by removing Nascent Flash or making it so Aurora can only heal oneself (a la Equilibrium)-- isn't going to diversify our tanks in any meaningful way.

And the "pure" and "barrier" healing distinction is largely lip-service anyways. WHM, the "purest" of "pure healers"... has three mitigation skills. It's just a matter of who can spam what via GCDs, but we don't spam GCD heals anyways. Ultimately, even SCH's worthwhile barrier is still locked behind a CD, Recitation (and Emergency Tactics).

I personally despise TBN as it is now because it's the one thing holding DRK back because, as everybody keeps pointing out, it's the "best" unique due to its low cooldown. Remove that low cooldown, and suddenly it's no longer the best. Hell, it'd likely result in DRK getting actual things it needs without TBN being the excuse for why it gets nothing.

This also doesn't quite make sense to me.

The expansion in which TBN was added, at its greatest strength (12s CD, granting 50 Blood, back when Bloodspiller was far more prominent and Quietus automatically gave MP and had damage fall-off instead of just the fixed minimum AoE damage, ultimately synergizing with DA-AD especially in the context of mass-pulls), was also the expansion in which we had the most self-sustain and most bizarre extreme capabilities/cheese.

We could literally MP-cap ourselves in a single BW-Quietus swing, and pop TBN on CD atop alternating DA-AD and DA-Quietus for nigh immortality.

The most frequent and more than arguably the strongest TBN we've ever had (and a more synergetic form, at that)... uniquely coexisted with the strongest self-sustain and shenanigans we've ever had. How the heck, then, is TBN the thing that would be holding us back?

If TBN replaced that insane self-healing, I'd see your point. But it didn't. It introduced our era of peak self-healing. Or, more precisely, it was introduced just fine alongside it and in synergy with it. The same expansion that gave us TBN also gave us our mass-pull god-mode era -- alike to (enjoyably, imo) a convoluted but technically slightly higher-highs Warrior in dungeon-cheesing.