Dark Knight Megathread

[Shurrikhan]

I read it, but you're introduce another selfsustain issue to then "solve" the problem you've introduced, It's a bad idea. If they want to go with the Drks draining their own health to damage they would become either completely impotent or OP as all hell there wouldn't be a middle ground.

That's not particularly accurate, no, unless healer oGCDs would otherwise go to waste (at which point, it redeems otherwise wasted party resources, but no more).

It just requires that the offensive potency rewarded be lower than the GCD rDPS opportunity cost of restoring that health.

It works fine for a DPS mech since they aren't the ones getting damaged most of the time, but introducing into a tank is problematic AF.

No. This part is irrelevant to whether it'd be workable, and on the contrary, it being on a tank allows it greater efficiency in party resource usage.

On a DPS it'd likewise be able to redeem otherwise wasted free heals, converting them into offensive potency much like Energy Drain does (though probably at nearer to pre-nerf efficiency), but your ability to do the same for mitigation-based free eHP increases would be limited to the single, if any, personal defensive found on a DPS (none on DRG, SMN, RDM, or the physical ranged).

And that's assuming the HP spent could ONLY be spent towards pure offense, not %mitigation, etc. In the latter case, you could keep HoTs from overhealing over damage lulls, all while banking potential mitigation for a tankbuster, smoothing out damage intake.

Yes, there is a decent advantage also in being able to spend all one's HP before a damage-less jump (again redeeming otherwise wasted healer resource), but that's far from huge, let alone balance-breaking. We see just as much diversity in potency-recovery available just via the % of a kit's damage is passively generated / "free" (generated only from time elapsed or generated specifically over downtime).

In 60 seconds, a DRK will passively generate a Shadowbringer (600p), a Carve and Spit (510p), 1.33 Edges (613p), and .67 Salted Earths (167p). Delirium effectively counts for another 918 and Blood Weapon for another 367. That's 3175 potency per minute, or 3492 with Darkside... generated freely.

Even just a quarter of that is likely going to make a larger difference per average fight than the ability to HP-spend under raid buffs or just before jumps in which the DRK can be healed back up.

:: For point of comparison: Auto-attacks account for 2,200 effective potency per minute on DRK, and DRK's raw combo ppgcd is 257 -- or, 286 [314.6 under Darkside] when including Blood spent on Bloodspiller (faintly higher if you account also for Living Shadow's contribution as a Blood spender, under a particular GCD rate), giving just shy of 10000 ppm from uptime. Run the same for WAR, PLD, GNB, and you'll probably find a fair bit of disparity there that has nonetheless been considered pretty damn acceptable.

The reason why Drks are No.1 in savage raids

They aren't. They currently beat only PLD at best in aDPS while bringing the least mitigation+healing combined to most fights (likely to every fight in this tier).

5% more than WAR and Pal

DRK currently offers slightly less damage than WAR, even in the most raidbuff heavy of compositions. GNB is the highest damage tank in the game at present, and WAR has the highest combined damage and sustain (effective mitigation+healing).

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Edit: (Daily Post Cap)

However what you're failing to recognise is why would a party want to do extra work to take you when they can take a different tank that doesn't require them to do as much and achieve the same thing.

That question is effectively just either "Why take an underpowered job?" --despite no one having suggested that it should be underpowered-- or "Why would take a job that has performance not commensurate to its effort" -- which is a hell of can of worms, especially so long as the likes of SMN having a higher damage ceiling than RDM despite having higher reliability and ease of play, both.

Which is all irrelevant to the concept of a tank that damages itself to do damage

They're not irrelevant, though; they're two sides of the same coin: disproportionate performance as downtime increases. They're both effective batteries, one storing the results of time and the other HP.

The reason why that persons whole build idea is bad, is they are baking in a self dot to a class that already struggles with self sustain

I can't comment as to the quality of the package of ideas all together --I'd still need to actually simulate them-- but neither is it particularly worth making judgments of that nature on an exploratory/spitball idea. You condemned the concept itself of HP spending according to certain warrants. I've therefore given you the reason those warrants are faulty or, at best, irrelevant unless you're willing also to address the other ways identical balancing (non)issues occur.

To put it most simply, though: The most sensible place to allow for the utilization of any resource is among a kit that actually works with that resource -- especially if in to limited totals and/or through actions that must themselves be optimized.

Putting HP-spending on a DPS who has no interactions with damage intake would likely end up either a long-winded way to offer every healer an Energy Drain analog by spending their otherwise excess healing on that job or a soft reward for bringing Regen (or otherwise low ppgcd opportunity cost) healers and soft punishment for not doing so.

Put HP-spending on a tank, on the other hand, and you have the resource being used by the person entrusted with knowing the incoming damage curves and for whom that (e)HP is actually already manipulable and integral.