Dark Knight Megathread

[Shurrikhan]

Basically a level/stat squish like with how World of Warcraft did it, if I'm understanding this correctly. The alternative would be to make level sync just not affect what abilities have at that level, which would be easier on the devs, but level/stat squish is inevitable if the devs plan to go past level 100... Also, I'm gonna go out on limb here and assume that ppm means Potency Per Minute. But other than that, yeah I have to agree on that.

Not quite. It's just an shuffling of what levels skills are acquired at.

Let's start with ARR. Let's say it gives 20 additions (new actions or gameplay-affecting or otherwise significant traits) over its 50 levels. You'd put the first 15 of those at 1-29 (every 2 levels), and the remaining 5 over 30-50 (every 5 levels). You get the gameplay earlier.

HW then adds at least 5 additions, granted every 2 levels.

That's fine while it's new, but once it's old, you just add it to the lv30+ pile and distribute it more evenly. So rather than getting 5 skills over 30-50 (per 5 levels) and 5 skills over 51-60 (per 2 levels), you'd get a new skill every 3 levels, with 2 of the HW skills being made available earlier (as early as level 45).

Once Shadowbringers comes out, the additions from Stormblood are likewise more evenly distributed. Instead of an addition per 3 levels 30-60 and per 2 levels 61-70, you average an addition per 2.67 levels, with some slight adjustments to fit a new consistent rhythm (32, 35, 37, 40, 42, 45, 47, 50, 52, 55, 57, 60, 62, 65, 67, 70).

Etc., etc. That'd be what you call a roll-in model that would keep each expansion relatively fleshed out but wouldn't overly delay kit depth in the longer term.

And of course, what I want in general doesn't need to be anything so elaborate as that, so long as the kit is pretty solid by level 50, rather than needing to hit 60 or 70 to feel fleshed out.

I didn't want get rid of a lot of Dark Knight oGCDs either, but I didn't want oGCD spam for a bloated opener, with almost nothing to do in between the next burst window, and the 1.5 GCD combos/actions were the next best thing.

Again, though, the opener only needs about 2 more weave spaces. Those 2 weave spaces are all that stand between "enough room to do my mitigation/taunts/job without damage loss" and "not enough room to do my mitigation/taunts/job without damage loss." 3 if we really wanted to be comfortable.

Now, if you turn our opener into 1.5s GCDs, though, we go from having 16 weave spaces between the nine 2.5s GCDs skills we can fit within those 20s to just 14 weave spaces between those fourteen 1.5s GCDs skills that one can fit within those 20 seconds. You actually make it worse.

This is because each GCD of 2.4s or greater room for 4 actions (including the weaponskill) at very low ping, while a 1.5s GCD has room only for 2 actions, despite taking up a 60% GCD. (Yes, players at very low ping or using a plugin to undo the netcode's self-sabotage can weave 3 oGCDs per GCD, but even they will clip trying to weave a second oGCD into a 1.5s GCD.) The 1.5s GCD, atop making Skill Speed worthless, leaves more than you cannot use (.3s, up from .1s).

But either approach for Dark Knight I would not be completely against if the filler rotation is at least engaging enough for a lot of people to not complain about it.

Those models both covered almost solely the "filler" weaponskills, yes.