Dark Knight Megathread

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

That's a fair asessment. Personally the two changes I'd propose may be stale copies of Addle (for Dark Mind as a buff) and Exaltation (a timed 400 cure potency on expiration of Oblation).

I don't think we need this muchnmore power in general, just a consistency change for Dark Mind and a touch of spice for Oblation.

Also I am not going to disregard the math, but while TBN obviously becomes weaker the more damage is taken (since its just +25% eHP and not mitigation), isn't TBN also a cooldown, like Thrill of Battle, that greatly increases eHP% when stacked with normal mitigation? This and the frequency of access is what I thought makes it strong, even in face of the Lv82 tank upgrades.

[Ryaduera]

snip

So it gets a little complicated here to do the math, so instead of direct math I'll do a lot of estimations and use vagueness that hopefully covers enough ground to make it a bit more understandable, but shielding and healing have fundamental differences in how it effects eHP. Healing can be capped, overhealing is real, but shielding can't really be capped outside of timing out, and with how much damage we're taking in this expansion, that's not really going to happen. At an initial look, this appears to have shielding more favorable, but it's a bit more nuanced than that. Under the circumstance you are missing HP (we're ignoring warrior healing from BW because let's be honest, it's just broken, and we should consider standard levels when stating why DRK is weaker) you can, of course, regenerate it. So the HP value starts to change a bit since you should also consider how much HP was removed and under what curcumstances they needed to burn through your HP. Let's use super basic numbers, 150,000 HP, being lower than what the 99 job gear gives us. My PLD HS heals for about 7600 hp, but for constency of rounding down with our HP, let's round down with our heals, too, and call it 7000. Should be about a 10% drop for both values. Let's remove Oblation and the damage reduction from the equation here as well, to keep it simple.


12s regen for 7k is 4 ticks iirc which is 4 heals. That's 28,000 HP restored. At 150,000 health TBN is 37,500 shield. This looks like TBN should be offering a greater eHP value, but the thing about healing is if you are not overhealing you need to double the value, because in order to leave you at less than full health it needs to do that damage twice, but let's assume half of your healing ends up being overheal, which it probably isn't that much. then you gain an eHP value of 42,000. And if you do get full use of your healing, the enemy has to burn through 56,000 hp. Now remember, this is without the damage reduction percentages in play. With a difference at its base value of 9500 with the numbers provided, the fact that the other tanks get even larger damage reductions on top of those heals makes DRK start to look pathetic. And then, to put some icing on the cake, heals can crit and ramparts buffs incoming healing from your tank abilities, meaning it's even easier to inflate those healing numbers by a lot. I absolutely hate bringing up healing crits because it's RNG and can lead to negligible overheal, but with how often these heals tick and proc, it should be mentioned because they will happen and it will make a difference. TNB cannot be increased outside of increasing max HP, something 2 tanks do that DRK does not.

All that to say if DRK uses TBN below full health, it takes exactly the shields worth of damage to finish them off at that amount of HP they began with, but if a heal were implemented instead it would have to had burnt through more health than you could heal for at any given time. That is to say heals and shields both grow in power equally as significantly as damage reductions are applied, this is basic tanking logic, taking less damage is always good. However, if damage reduction is applied and enemies cannot do more damage than the values of the heal, you end at a greater HP value, but with a shield, no matter what, regardless of how tanky you are, even if you take 0 damage, the shield finishes you off in the same state you began in. This is why only 10% from Oblation is just not enough. The other tanks get heals and greater damage reduction, meaning they can almost always finish off the cooldown in a greater state than they left it in, but DRK will always finish off their cooldowns in the same state they began in, so its cooldown really means nothing because there is no way to bounce back from damage that has already happened, just pausing damage for a brief moment. TBN briefly offers a greater advantage as taking no damage to your actual HP is always better, but it offers no recourse after it is broken, meaning no matter how good a tank you are, DRK will always suffer.

It really comes down to this fact; When tanking, the only thing that matters is the state of the tank after the damage has occurred, everything inbetween is just semantics. Maybe DRK does reduce more overall, but does it matter in this context if the DRK always has less HP after the damage has occurred? I argue no, not even a little bit. And no, Vigilant should not be considered because every other tank has 2 sources of healing, their special 82 mit and one other, and so Vigilant should be considered to be compared to the other tanks healing like Requiescat combo and Aurora, even Equilibrium.

EDIT: To clarify, both healing and shielding increase eHP but have different forms of impact on your tankiness, and healing only loses when you are already full health, otherwise healing and shielding have the same multipliers to your eHP when applying mitigations, but healing will leave you at a higher health value at the end creating a bouncing effect with your HP keeping you full where shielding just won't do anything about damage already taken. So yes, it probably increases eHP by a greater amount with TBN, but if nothing is done about damage taken durng its downtime, it is inherently unsustainable.

[Ryaduera]

12s regen for 7k is 4 ticks iirc which is 4 heals. That's 28,000 HP restored. At 150,000 health TBN is 37,500 shield. This looks like TBN should be offering a greater eHP value, but the thing about healing is if you are not overhealing you need to double the value, because in order to leave you at less than full health it needs to do that damage twice, but let's assume half of your healing ends up being overheal, which it probably isn't that much. then you gain an eHP value of 42,000. And if you do get full use of your healing, the enemy has to burn through 56,000 hp. Now remember, this is without the damage reduction percentages in play. With a difference at its base value of 9500 with the numbers provided, the fact that the other tanks get even larger damage reductions on top of those heals makes DRK start to look pathetic. And then, to put some icing on the cake, heals can crit and ramparts buffs incoming healing from your tank abilities, meaning it's even easier to inflate those healing numbers by a lot. I absolutely hate bringing up healing crits because it's RNG and can lead to negligible overheal, but with how often these heals tick and proc, it should be mentioned because they will happen and it will make a difference. TNB cannot be increased outside of increasing max HP, something 2 tanks do that DRK does not.

I decided to do the math and if HS ticks twice under the first set of mits and twice under just the one 15% mit then it's eHP regeneration would be equal to 33985, slightly less than TBN but if you add Oblation to TBN should make it 40800 eHP, the problem comes exclusively in overheal potential to reduce that PLD eHP with HS, but then they have healing regularly in their offensive kit where DRK gets one heal in pulls and 1 GCD heal exclusively, so once the healing from the other tanks kits are applied it becomes apparant where DRK has a problem in not being able to restore damage that has already been done to it. Honestly, a 100 potency per tick regen on Oblation could probably solve this issue and sway the math towards DRK, but still has an issue with Dark Mind, an easy solution being to add a 10% physical damage reduction and keep the 20% magical. Simple solutions to fix the defensives issue.

[EthanXdeath]

Yes TBN is a cooldown, but it's not free like HS, HoC, or BW. You lose 3000 MP every cast, and the amount of MP regained between it coming off cooldown isn't equal, not only that, it's a straight up DPS loss if it doesn't pop, 3000 MP out the window that you can't get back and you could've used on an edge of shadow for damage instead. The other tanks just have better defensives overall and sustain. DRK has souleater and abyssal drain that directly correlates to the amount of enemies it hits and is on a 60 second cooldown. Personally I think DRK just needs a complete overhaul since it's basically a discount warrior.