Dark Knight Megathread

[Shurrikhan]

Isn't that the issue of not having enough buttons? DRK like many jobs is a victim of SE going overboard on cutting skills and mechanics, but also feeling like they need a full 10 levels worth of skills to sell an expansion.

The game is just ass below lv 70. This isn't a DRK specific issue. Level Sync is just poorly thought out and the devs don't even consider it when balancing or even making new jobs.

To that end, I'd just take roughly the full list of abilities and instead distribute them at a rate of a new gameplay-affecting new action or trait to every 2 levels starting from level 2 until level 30, then every 4 levels thereafter. I'll do a mock-up for what that'd look like in a moment until the latest expansion.

Or, to put it another way, start by actually giving the game a decent ppm and stat-based approximation for enemy HP to meet a target enemy Time-to-Kill (TTK); this would also allow us to upsync content as we wish (if paired with a flexible addition of filler actions that can be easily rethemed, quickly grabbing particular textures, emitters, particles, from skills attached to the boss's or mob's existing abilities and applying them to a template, for which we'd then just need names). From there, when an expansion is new, you get your 2 new something or others every 2 levels, but as soon as it's no longer the current expansion, that and all prior expansion's additions get shuffled down a bit, and old content is rescaled and re-filled-out according to the additions.

I technically added 6 buttons, including a predecessor to Shadowbringer at level 62, 7 if you want to include the summon pet rename, consolidated 4 buttons into 1 button, 3 buttons into 1 button, and yet ANOTHER 3 buttons into 1 button, both both sets of 3 being consolidated combos, for a net reduction of 7, 6 if count the renamed summon pet ability.

Ahh, I see now, my mistake.

I still don't see any 4-step combo or any other set of 4 buttons being consolidated into 1 (you appear to just have Unleash>Stalwart>Salt, Passenger>Flood>Shadowbringer, and Edge>Bloodspiller>Spit), but each would indeed save 2 buttons if you consolidated all of them, for a total of 6; I just read that originally as only of those combos being consolidated, which for some reason I thought was matched by Dark Passenger and Salted Earth being added as a buttons. And if you did indeed turn Living Shadow into a permanent horribly overpowered trait that would indeed be 7. My bad.

Spamming 1-2-3 with the occasional 4 every 30 or so seconds and MAYBE a 1 oGCD every 30 or so seconds, especially if it's for an entire fight or dungeon run...

I mean, I won't deny that DRK is that, GCD-wise (though I don't see much point in basing what we do only on GCDs, when GCDs are only a barely over half of DRK's button-presses), though so is every other tank. In fact, if we consider our core combos and its adjustments or occasional spender as similarly banal, there are only a few jobs that differ from that offensively.

Similarly, sure, we could completely retool DRK's and perhaps every other combo, but whereas I'm pretty certain that most DRKs wouldn't agree with you that all oGCD attacks should be purged from existence, I'm not so certain most DRK's actually want complex combos.

Here are a couple quick mock-up of possible takes on what a more complex combo system might look like, though:

Approach 1: No Skill Held Back

For this approach, you essentially just imagine what the job would be like if instead of cycling power ramps rigidly, you just had different skills of situationally-varied priorities that form highly adjustable pseudo-rotations.

Think Lost Ark or GW2 "combos" or "flows", but generally based around (de)buff durations and other synergies rather than CDs as compared to... well, skills being purely traps until you've hit the skill meant to be used directly before them with zero contextual use cases for skipping ahead...

To really make use of each button, moreover, it probably wouldn't rigidly divide actions categorically between AoE and ST. Instead, if it looks like a cleave, it cleaves. And since nearly every greatsword strike looks like it'd bisect, impale, crush, or shadow-blast multiple people per swing... they now do as they appear to.

As such, you might have every attack deal some amount of immediate damage, with further additional effects atop that, such as...

• Trait - Pull of the Abyss - Your damage dealt to afflicts your victims and enemy damage nullified your attackers with Pull of the Abyss, which sources later attacks.
• Trait - Darkside - Your MP spent generates an equal amount of Darkside, shown on your MP bar as a darkened portion of MP, which can be spent by certain abilities.
• Scourge - Inflicts damage over time to the primary target. Semi-circular AoE.
• Syphon - Steals 400 MP immediately and a further 800 MP over 12 seconds. Semi-circular AoE.
• Unleash - Consumes a portion of Darkside to cause your attacks to deal additional flat potency to each enemy afflicted.
• Crush (animation of Power Slash) - Consumes a portion of Darkside to suppress a target and to a lesser extent enemies near it. Short linear/rectangular AoE.
• Souleater - Generates 15 Blood and heals for 300 potency. Consumes a portion of Pull of the Abyss to deal up to double effect.
• Unmend - Reduces the recast time of Plunge by 15 seconds. Now a "bulb" AoE (area of effect combines a linear attack towards the enemy with a radial attack around the enemy; can still only hit once).
• Stalwart Soul - Consumes Darkside and Pull of the Abyss to generate a barrier on self.
• Bloodspiller - Consumes Black Blood to deal heavy damage and inflict Bloodshed on the primary target, causing them to heal their attacks by a flat amount; effect doubled on attacks that normally generate healing. Additional Effect: Deathblow - Bloodspiller deals up to 250% damage if doing so would finish off its target. If it does so, nearby allies are healed for the damage dealt and you for thrice that damage dealt.
• Quietus - Inflicts Deliverance, which causes its victims to give the Dark Knight HP and MP upon death, increased by any remaining Pull of the Abyss. Additional Effect: Deathblow - Quietus deals up to 250% damage if doing so would finish off its target. If it does so, all nearby enemies are afflicted with the Pull of the Abyss the target would have had (including from Quietus).

Approach 2: Dynamic Combos

The goal of the next approach is that however many buttons you have is, generally, the number of choices you'd have that'd at least be very frequently conditionally competitive, in every GCD.

That said, it doesn't exactly want to spend 8+ buttons to that effect and may wish to actually have far more actions available to it than just its number of buttons, even if they're not all accessible in each GCD.

For instance, just for now, that we restrict ourselves to 4 buttons, one for Steel, one for Soul, one for Shadow, and one for Blood:

• You can open with any of those, and you finish by using that same button again. Simple, right?
  
  That means, though you can use anywhere from 2 to 5 GCDs per string (AA/BB/CC/DD being the shortest, and something like ABCDA or BACDB being the longest).
  
  Each opener would convey some benefit (via duration or resource similar to Sen into Iaijutsu) to the finisher (the use of an already used button). As such, you'd have technically, what... 24 combo options. And yet that took only 4 buttons.
  
  
• Or move that to a 3rd stage, again with 4 buttons. Whatever you use a third time ends the combo string. That'd allow for some stupidly long 'combo' strings (AABBCCDDA), but this is just food for thought.
  
  
• Or just have each combo be 3 steps long, and the prior 1-2 buttons, respectively, determines what finishers are possible / what they'd do. Simple but effective.
  
  
• Or the same as the one above, but with 4 steps.
  
  
• Etc., etc.

The point is just that you can get a far greater number of actions than buttons for a small degree of constraint. And the only big limitation is that total number of meaningful choices should depend more on synergies rather than actual separate conditional skills (A->B->C = unique skill combination #11, etc.) in order not to have too many names to memorize or animations to be developed.