[Suggestion][Personal Notes] My Ideal Dark Knight

[Sazuzaki]

[Action][Ability] Blood Price (Lv. 35) [Range: 0y][Radius: 0y][Cast: Instant][Recast: 5s]
Converts 30% of your maximum HP to grant 1 stack of Blood Veil to self and restore 30% of your maximum MP.
Blood Veil Effect: Creates a barrier around self that absorbs damage totaling 30% of your maximum HP and when barrier is fully depleted or duration reaches 0, consumes 1 stack unless depleted to reset duration to 30s
Duration: 30s
Maximum stacks of Blood Veil: 1
Cannot be executed when below 30% of your maximum HP.

[Action][Weaponskill] Scourge (Lv. 38) [Range: 3y][Radius:
Delivers an attack with a potency of 360.
Additional Effect: Reduces Blood Veil duration by 10s
Can only be executed while under the effect of Blood Veil.

Compared to some of the other ideas I've seen for DRK spending HP for mana, this actually seems well thought out. The barrier you get prevents you from literally killing yourself, and there's a way to force Blood Veil to be shorter when not MTing. Seems you'd be using Scourge regardless if you're MT or not. Only problem would be whether it would break faster when you're MT, since that would affect Scourge usage.

Edit: Didn't read the recast time for Blood Price. Def make adjustments to that to avoid what the person below me said.

[Mikey_R]

[Action][Weaponskill] Scourge (Lv. 38) [Range: 3y][Radius: 0y][Cast: Instant][Recast: 2.5s]
Delivers an attack with a potency of 360.
Additional Effect: Reduces Blood Veil duration by 10s
This weaponskill does not share a recast with other actions.
Can only be executed while under the effect of Blood Veil.

I imagine it is a typo, but there is currently nothing stopping you from spamming Scourge as your highest Potency per GCD. The reason I say this is because no GCD has the description of 'Doesn't share a recast timer...' unless it's recast timer is a multiple of the GCD, that is not the GCD itself. 2.5 recast is the GCD, so it is a redundant statement.

I also suspect the intent would be for it to only be accessible whilst you have Blood Veil, which also comes with a can of worms. With a 5 second cooldown on Blood Price, you basically have an infinite amount of Blood Veil's at your disposal (HP? That's the healer's job to manage, and don't pretend that isn't what this will boil down to. Pretty sure most know I am generally against using HP as a resource, so I won't go into it here). Since you aren't using MP except for Darkside (which, BTW, is stupidly strong in it's current iteration of 30% extra damage for 30 seconds), it means it isn't a resource you have to worry about.

I could go more into what I personally think, however, I suspect alot of that will be alleviated once the tooltip for Scourge has been fixed to better reflect what was most likely to be intended.

[Sazuzaki]

(HP? That's the healer's job to manage, and don't pretend that isn't what this will boil down to. Pretty sure most know I am generally against using HP as a resource, so I won't go into it here).

I think as long as we have sufficient tools to replenish said HP, and our HP spending skills aren't spammable, it could work.

If Blood Price had a CD to align itself with Blood Weapon (which restores both HP and MP in this case), that would be pretty fun to do. I would say a problem that could arise would be if our burst aligns with a tank buster/auto-attacks, but the 30% shield has us covered.

[ForsakenRoe]

I imagine it is a typo, but there is currently nothing stopping you from spamming Scourge as your highest Potency per GCD. The reason I say this is because no GCD has the description of 'Doesn't share a recast timer...' unless it's recast timer is a multiple of the GCD, that is not the GCD itself. 2.5 recast is the GCD, so it is a redundant statement.

Saying 'on the GCD, does not share recast timer with other actions, 2.5s recast' is not completely new per se, to my knowledge it's happened exactly once in the past. When Empyreal Arrow was added in HW, it had this exact set of conditionals. A weaponskill, that worked like an OGCD Ability. The only reason it was different, and made like that, was so Barrage would affect it (it being the BRD's highest hitting skill at the time)

So yeh, this would make Scourge function as an OGCD, albeit one that can proc 'on-GCD-hit effects' like Blood Weapon's MP restore

And yeh, having the recast on Blood Price be that low turns it into 'force the healer to constantly heal me, while I dump all my HP into spamming the funny OGCD-GCD skill'. And because a certain site is a very silly site, all of the 'chadding' bonus damage the DRK would get would be attributed to the DRK, not the healer providing the resources for them to keep doing it (unless formula changes were implemented to calculate this stuff)

Personally I think spending MP is a good compromise to keep the aesthetic. Spending HP in any form just opens up the chance for someone to kill themselves with a badly timed skill usage. I know it says 'applies a shield' but there's those White Hole type moves where if you're not 100% HP, then it's bad news, and the shield won't help you there

[Mikey_R]

Saying 'on the GCD, does not share recast timer with other actions, 2.5s recast' is not completely new per se, to my knowledge it's happened exactly once in the past. When Empyreal Arrow was added in HW, it had this exact set of conditionals. A weaponskill, that worked like an OGCD Ability. The only reason it was different, and made like that, was so Barrage would affect it (it being the BRD's highest hitting skill at the time)

So yeh, this would make Scourge function as an OGCD, albeit one that can proc 'on-GCD-hit effects' like Blood Weapon's MP restore

The thing is, FFXIV, in one of the expansions, changed everything to follow a simple guide so that you can tell exactly what something is meant to do (I believe this was in Stormblood).

All weapon skills deal physical damage (if the do do damage) and are on the GCD, all spells deal magical damage and are on the GCD and (most) abilities are oGCD. The exceptions to this are Ninja's Mudras and Ninjutsu, Monk's anatman and Machinist's Flamethrower, all of them being abilities. I suspect this is from a time when they were all oGCD and they were just never updated and, to further solidify this, all of Dancer's Steps are classed as weapon skills and not abilities. It is also worth noting that it isn't because Ninjutsu changes that is is classed as an ability either. Astral Flow is classed as a Spell, however, when it changes to Deathflare/Rekindle/Mountain Buster, they are all classed as abilities, since they are oGCD.

So, with how it has been laid out, Scourge will be a GCD that has a 2.5 second recast time, just like every other GCD.

Also, on a separate side note, it is a bit annoying how this poster seems to want to get their thoughts together. Rather than making a separate document, editing the post there and then posting it here, they seem to be copying all the actions as they are currently for the level range they are working on and then updating it to their proposed changes at a later time, which makes it very hard to know what to comment on. Was it intended to be the same? Is it going to change down the road? Who knows.

[Sazuzaki]

Personally I think spending MP is a good compromise to keep the aesthetic. Spending HP in any form just opens up the chance for someone to kill themselves with a badly timed skill usage. I know it says 'applies a shield' but there's those White Hole type moves where if you're not 100% HP, then it's bad news, and the shield won't help you there

You made a really good point there, can't have HP spending skills without the jank to come with it; a bit like GNB's Continuation which is bad for a tank but still really fun to do correctly.

But as I've said before, as long as we have a way replenish the HP we spend quickly and efficiently (eg. Blood Weapon, Abyssal Drain, etc), a way to cover our lost HP (the shield), and we absolutely can't spam our HP spending abilities, I still think it could work. White Hole mechanics would be a problem, but it's not like there wouldn't be ways to avoid that.

Should probably also clarify I'm well aware that they would never add HP mechanics to Dark Knight. I just enjoy thinking about what it could be like/how it could work.