Dark Knight Megathread

[Oizen]

No I agree, and I view that as be design. I never viewed Oblation as meant to be competitive with with the other lv 82s. Its meant to augment TBN to be so. I also view the ability to use both charges back to back or on two targets as a benefit of it.
I do think the weakness of DRK's defense kit right now is stemming from the MP nerf almost exclusively right now. TBN barely feels available to me. Its fine enough in AOE but when trying to min-max raids I'm not enjoying it.

[Terhix]

(...) which is pretty negligible next to the other effects each tank gets, the healing recovers more than the shielding from TBN prevents (...)

Which nobody disputes, but that's a very different assessment from DRK missing % mitigation or Oblation itself being bad. You could buff Oblation to 20% mit, or heck, why not 30%, making DRK the absolute undisputed king of mitigation, and DRK would still remain the only tank in the game unable to solo a dungeon boss 100 to 0. Whether you are doing large pulls in dungeons or getting auto attacked by a boss in a raid the problem is the same - slow attrition of non-lethal damage eating into your HP that all tanks can recover from except DRK.

Good news is you can easily fix it without any major changes or the job losing (more of) its identity: make Abyssal Drain heal for non-meme amounts and make it usable in raids. If that's not enough give us a regen while standing in Salt and Darkness like it does in PvP, or any of the other suggestions people have given for adding some form of self-sustain to the job.

You don't have to touch TBN, you don't have to touch Oblation, you don't even have to touch Dark Mind - all of these buttons are fine at what they do. I don't know what it is about mits that makes people want every tank to have roughly the same buttons with the same values. PLD has lowest DPS of all tanks and nobody suggests that it should have the same DPS toolkit as GNB, but somehow talk about tanking and suddenly a lot of folks want TBN to be yet another Heart of Corundum.

[Derio]

Oblation is in competition with Equilibrium, Aurora and bulwark. If anything I think Oblation is fine and they should look at Dark Mind changes first

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Oblation is in competition with Equilibrium, Aurora and bulwark. If anything I think Oblation is fine and they should look at Dark Mind changes first

Technically Bulwark is an "Extra CD", which are Bulwark, Thrill of Battle, Dark Mind and Camouflage. If we were to look at the equivalent use for Equilibrium, Aurora and technically Oblation... it's techncially Clemency. It's not a cooldown, but that button fits this category more, in many ways.

But otherwise, yeah, we should be looking at Dark Mind first.

[Oizen]

Oblation is in competition with Equilibrium, Aurora and bulwark. If anything I think Oblation is fine and they should look at Dark Mind changes first

Thats a good way of looking at it. In practice I find that Dark Mind ends up being the button you use to close the gap with the other Shortmits and TBN. Oblation is just the cherry on top.
And honestly I think Oblation has a lot of benefits that are completely slept on by a lot of people. Myself included a long time ago.

[Marxam]

No I agree, and I view that as be design. I never viewed Oblation as meant to be competitive with with the other lv 82s. Its meant to augment TBN to be so. I also view the ability to use both charges back to back or on two targets as a benefit of it.
I do think the weakness of DRK's defense kit right now is stemming from the MP nerf almost exclusively right now. TBN barely feels available to me. Its fine enough in AOE but when trying to min-max raids I'm not enjoying it.

I have the same line of thinking when I first saw oblation despite everyone hating on it back in EW and saying it was a weaker rampart. However I feel they need to extend that same logic and design to TBN. Can you imagine if TBN was on 2 charges and cost no mp?

[rxantos]

I only have one things to say:
BRING BACK PLUNGE!

[Shurrikhan]

I have the same line of thinking when I first saw oblation despite everyone hating on it back in EW and saying it was a weaker rampart. However I feel they need to extend that same logic and design to TBN. Can you imagine if TBN was on 2 charges and cost no mp?

I'm assuming you also mean it'd grant no Dark Arts.

...The second charge would obviously greatly increase its power. The removed MP cost wouldn't change its theoretical maximum power in harder content, but could increase it in softer, as you could potentially get greater total mitigation out of more frequent uses that make partial use of its barrier (e.g., only nearly break it) than fewer uses that make full use of its barrier.

I'd be fine with the latter if and only if we saw some replacement complexity. More importantly, though, I doubt we'd get either without an increased CD.

[Marxam]

it wouldn't say it would be more complex but i would make it easier to use since it just functions as a 25% hp shield similar to how Oblation is just a 10% mit. No longer will you have to hold 3k mp for at all times for a TBN. Obviously its recast would need to be increased but putting it on par with all other tank cds of 25 secs will help justify it having 2 charges.

I still think that removal of DA was the worst thing to happen to DRK and what led us to this point. Rather than refining what DA did well and focusing around that they gutted it. Compare that to WAR that had its mechanics around Infuriate and in now in DT we got some semblance of wrath stacks (still feels half baked imo) where after maxing out your stacks of 3 you get access to a big spender.

If DRK kept DA it would shift the 3k mp spender of TBN to it. We would also probably still have AD as a gcd as well so casuals can no longer complain that DRK has no sustain in dungeons.

[Malthir]

They need to throw the 2m burst window design into the bin where it belongs, it's what's killing most jobs. The jobs were at their most fun imo, when they were focused on play style instead of mechanics. What I mean by this is tanks had 2 OGCD mitigation moves back in HW.
- The paladin was a block tank and had a move that proct off of blocks, they had some heals and white magic moves for self sustain, they also could blind the enemies making them take less white damage.
- Warrior was unga bunga tank, they did better damage than paladin could not block but had the most health to counter that.
- Drk was the parry tank, an inverse of the paladin the drk had a move that proct off of parry and a move that increased their parry chance. They had no real self sustain but they had slightly more health than the Paladin and they could apply Status debuffs to enemies as well as being able to blind enemies to take less white damage.

Not all moves gave aggro, you also had TP so spamming wasn't an option, basically you had to play with a semi functioning brain, as opposed to now.

Then around SB they decided each needed a full mechanic of their own, but wanted it to fit within a burst window, so they homogenised all the new mech so they were functionally the same. They got rid of status effects, so everyone got handed self sustain out the rear and loads of OGCD's to do mitigation, where as before your moves gave you the mitigation, now it's on a 60s button press. They removed TP, they flattened MP and didn't think how it would impact DRK, SB is when they completely and utterly gutted tanking in this game and it's never really recovered just been on a downward slope since then, this is also what caused healers to suffer.