Dark Knight needs serious help

[Lyth]

DRK's concept and theme are relatively straightforward. That's not the problem. The problem is that there's a historic precedent of making DRK actions punishing rather than rewarding. Dark Mind and Dark Missionary can't be used outside of specific damage types. You have to give up lifesteal to use a single target Carve and Spit. Living Dead is the only player action in the game that can kill you. TBN costs damage if it doesn't break.

RPR has the exact same aesthetic, except pitched at the melee dps group. Could you imagine if Arcane Circle cost damage to use? It's a barrier shield. Time it correctly, and it becomes a raidwide regen. That's a reward, not a punishment. That's not to mention some incredibly unique moves - the best movement action in the game bar none, and a fast paced 1.5s GCD burst that allows for some really interesting situational optimization with Double vs. Triple Enshroud, because the gauge actually lets you stock up beyond what you normally require at two minutes.

There are a lot of changes that could benefit DRK.

• Make Dark Mind and Dark Missionary into barrier effects that work against all damage types. Let them apply movement speed boosts (after all, darkness governs activity and movement).
• Merge Oblation and TBN, remove the cost, and leave it on two charges. If it breaks, it heals the target.
• Merge Carve and Spit and Abyssal Drain into a singular Abyssal Strike that drains HP, MP, and works in both single target and AoE. Perhaps have it scale inversely with MP.
• Add blood to every step of your base combo rather than pooling it all into Souleater, and increase the size of the gauge such that you can stockpile more resources in preparation for burst.
• Move the lifesteal off of Souleater to the blood actions, so the healing effect becomes more of a deliberate decision, while giving you the option to heal up with it in AoE as well.
• Add a combo step after Bloodspiller, and make both steps have a faster GCD. This incidentally turns Delirium into a 6 GCD burst with a speedboost.
• Make Living Shadow interact with your toolkit, perhaps matching your Edge/Shadow weaves for extra damage.
• Give Salted Earth a defensive value, either reducing incoming damage or absorbing HP. Update the gapcloser - fixed distance movement abilities are in vogue for a reason. A forward/backward dash is incredibly versatile when not tied to damage, and makes for fun tricks in places like Criterion where you have to work for your uptime.
• Bring back counterattacks - what made Reprisal so loved wasn't even the debuff, it was the aesthetic of having an exploding stab counter. Counters are one of the really unique features that tank gameplay can bring to the table that melee dps cannot.

WAR has its own set of issues as well, but the biggest problem is that the job is entirely propped up by its powercreep rather than actually being interesting to play. The core job design is showing its age and it has incredibly stale gameplay. Many of the actions are 13 years old. The entire job needs a refresh so that players actually want to play it for the gameplay, rather than its recurring FotM status and ease of use. The biggest problem with the self-healing is that there's no actual strategy or thought in its use.

Also, they really need to bring the invulns closer in line with each other. There really shouldn't be a 3 minute recast difference between tank invulns. Holmgang should be on 5 minutes at absolute minimum, and you could make a case for moving Hallowed to 6 minutes if you had a way to compensate Superbolide appropriately.

[GoatOfWar]

DRK's concept and theme are relatively straightforward. That's not the problem. The problem is that there's a historic precedent of making DRK actions punishing rather than rewarding. Dark Mind and Dark Missionary can't be used outside of specific damage types. You have to give up lifesteal to use a single target Carve and Spit. Living Dead is the only player action in the game that can kill you. TBN costs damage if it doesn't break.

Well, the Warrior police force gets mad if any tank does something better than War and they will cry and bitch about it until Warrior is the undisputed king of everything. You can't have interesting and rewarding mechanics as long as Warrior and it's barebones thoughtless kit exists, because every time you make something rewarding, that means you leave them out. So any sort of interesting mechanic ends up being unrewarding jank and ultimately removed until all the tanks are equally as lame to play. Warrior is grossly over represented online and any sort of concerns raised by tank mains online is drowned by ridicule, gaslighting or downvotes. They genuinely don't see a problem with Warrior being a direct upgrade over Dark knight in every conceivable way. And people who don't play tank engaging in any sort of debate come in there in bad faith, parroting things a certain bald streamer has said.

I genuinely wish Warrior didn't exist, because none of the other tank mains have a similar obnoxious online presence and chokehold on job design.

[Absurdity]

I genuinely wish Warrior didn't exist, because none of the other tank mains have a similar obnoxious online presence and chokehold on job design.

Pretty ironic coming from someone who has complained about Warrior over and over and over again since 6.4

[MikoRemi]

Pretty ironic coming from someone who has complained about Warrior over and over and over again since 6.4

But haven't you heard? Warrior's are the cause for all the problems of tanking! If people say it enough, it surely will be true! /kek

Even though most WAR mains either keep to themselves or want other tanks to get better if were being honest here. I'd certainly want to see a more positive direction rather than tearing down good jobs.

[Rithy255]

But haven't you heard? Warrior's are the cause for all the problems of tanking! If people say it enough, it surely will be true! /kek

Even though most WAR mains either keep to themselves or want other tanks to get better if were being honest here. I'd certainly want to see a more positive direction rather than tearing down good jobs.

I'm thinking tanks are likely a bit too good right now more then anything, warrior seems to be easy to point to because of it's absurd healing (which i think is perfectly fine for trial content and self). I do get where people are coming from with its aoe healing and shake regen (maybe I'd be more happy if they gave the magic knight tank more team healing then self healing lol). I don't think warrior is the issue in reality but in general the tanks are just way too defensive as of current which ironically makes them feel more like boring dps because they barely have to worry about defensive management.

I think we're at a point where we need to address tank design in general though has reached to a level where they're all way too defensive and need to be toned down... Dark Knight honestly is really good still just feels clunky and miserable to play for me.

I personally dislike the idea of buffing everything over and over that's how we got to this power creep state with tanks, I don't think nerfing tanks would be a bad idea if it was done together as a rebalance, or failing to do so they can increase the damage of duties? but I doubt they'd do that in any meaningful way.

[MikoRemi]

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To be fair, you’re one of the more sane individuals on the forums even if I disagree personally. Having come from games where nerfs strike upon popular jobs constantly(can be up to or over a year in some cases, thanks Elsword), I’d rather not hurt a good tank doing good things. In Elsword’s case, it basically meant rerolling a character or paying to enhance your gear to negate the nerfs to your damage(doesn’t change how your skills feel though if they got hurt). For a more funny example, Dark Souls 2 put in so many nerfs to weapons/armor/rings/spells that they had to nerf the enemies just to rebalance them once again.

The devs are going to have to address the overall design because it won’t be fixed by screwing over Warrior, Dark Knight and even Gunbreaker as I said in the past can still get plenty of improvements. Warrior is really not that strong enough to be considered powercreep, the moment Warrior’s Fell Cleave can chunk off 10% of a bosses hp in one shot, that’s when we got a big problem.

The moment we have nerfs being used on all the good classes, it just becomes unfun. Again though, that’s just a personal disagreement having seen the other side of things.

[Rithy255]

Snip

Power creep in terms of defensive value more then anything (this can be also attributed to autos as well), I actually like tanks doing a lot of damage and not hitting like a tiny mouse lol. (60-75% of a actual DPS is Ideal), But right now all tanks feel really strong defensively that coupled with lacking autos means you're no longer really managing your defensives... you either hold all of them for the kitchen sink or you can just not really think about using them, dungeons as well are just super easy to wall to wall without even being healed.

I think with warrior it hurts the game more then helps the game to actually have that sort of sustain in AOE, because what is it going to teach new healers? to afk or damage they dont have a job this somwhat applies to other tanks too.. but that can be fixed by more damage warrior just in that department would be very high to cap out. I know dungeon content may not be important to you or hard core raiders but it's content that 90% of the player base does on a regular basis.

I'd say all tanks have been getting power creed defensively (everyone getting their own "TBN"), again warrior is easy to point to because of the AOE healing and the strongest raid wide (paladin too but passage personally needs to just be changed to be less situational and annoying). Ironically having such strong defensives and low damage ongoing makes tanks feel less like tanks to me because all you need to focus on is a basic dps rotation, not to mention bosses move on themselves now lol? I get this isn't a "overhaul tank" issue but it feels like every change that has been made is to make tank into boring dps.

I feel like 7.0 is the time to make nerfs because mid expansion nerfs generally don't go over well, But I think they need to Overhaul all tanks more then just blind nerfs to sustain or defensive value, I just doubt that tanks or healers will get any positive changes sadly if that's the case. At the end of the day I feel like job design for tanks/healers will keep declining or go more towards the boring defensive DPS / boring Healing DPS route they have been for a long while now. Not to say dpsing isn't fun but I don't play tank for boring dps, I actually want to manage my defensives and raid wides... meh.