Dark Knight Megathread

[bundythenoob]

What would that identity be?

do players not remember HW/StB DRK and its unique gameplay kit?
it wasn't just a bootleg WAR, it was much more about resource management and maintaining consistent damage
Blood Weapon/Blood Price giving us plenty of mana to spend made the job feel FAST since your APM went up every 45 seconds thanks to the extra resources
Dark Arts empowering your skills felt GOOD since you were making split second decisions based on the context of the fight
Delirium and the mana/blood interchange that it allowed felt INTUITIVE, the job had room for tons of optimisation

was the job perfect? not in the slightest... but did it feel good to play?
I personally LOVED having to learn how to git gud at DRK back in the day, it made the job feel rewarding once I better understood the kit and how it worked
Visually, DRK might still be the magic-based Tank, but our actual, ingame kit has been reduced to "press DPS laser button", which is quite sad considering what we used to be able to do.

[Shurrikhan]

do players not remember HW/StB DRK and its unique gameplay kit?

Note the suggestion that was actually made, though, to which Carighan asked the question you're quoting.

It wasn't to return to HW/StB DRK. It was literally just to re-add DA.



I.e.,

Q: In what way / to what extent would present DRK's identity shift if DA were re-inserted? --> Likely answer: Unnoticeably.

Q: Would DA itself be sufficient to give DRK a distinct identity? --> Likely answer: No, especially so long as defensive expenditures of MP would remain mere traps.

Q (in extension): If not sufficient, what else would we like to see that might make it so? What would be synergetic to it? How would those things craft a tank that FEELS different?

Stormblood gave us decent examples of something at least mildly better, sure (though it was scarcely if at all less braindead in Stormblood outside of dungeon Quietus-cheese, and not much more in Heavensward).
But, said Heavensward/Stormblood DRK is also not something that can be recreated anywhere near verbatim / as it was in the present game.

Enmity and its separate combo actions are effectively or wholly gone. TP is gone. Active mitigation beyond oGCDs is gone. We'd therefore going to need a gamewide preamble to DRK-specific changes if we wanted to reuse those old designs, at which point we wouldn't be saving time anyway by looking at the past anywhere near verbatim.

As such, we may as well be less complacent and dream a little bit larger, especially if that might be able to achieve something even within the scope of a game that doesn't much allow for tanks to have any nuanced skill expression through their actual tankiness.


Edit:
To be clear, I'd far rather see frequent and nuanced use of active mitigation, revitalizing tanks as a whole. I'd love for tanks to offer in-fight engagement even in repeat clears, especially in more "tank-ish" ways.

But short of that, a "return to Stormblood DRK" would probably look solely like...

• losing a bit of CD-based APM in exchange for GCD APM (1.14 from BW-accelerated GCDs, which is far, far less than just what the decoupling of BW itself provides),
• exchanging <strike now for X potency of damage> with <amp next GCD by X potency of damage>,
• possibly having TBN give a free cast of Blood of a free MP cast (which would make it a hefty DPS loss unless DA were heavily nerfed relative to Edge/Flood or Bloodspiller/Quietus heavily buffed), and
• some extra MP via Blood Weapon that we could as easily give by literally other means as well (passive tick rate, Syphon Strike and Stalwart, CnS, current BW/Del, or any combination of the above).

I don't think that's going to be nearly enough to make DRK feel distinct. Not even close.

By all means, though, I'd love to see varied GCD lengths, but far more so --- such as the ability to ramp up to Hysteric speeds before ending the phase via an empowered oGCD nuke before the state can't be sustained anymore. I'd want back choice between Blood Price and Blood Weapon, or reasons to rotate between them, but emphasized to far more than they did in HW/StB. Bring back Darkside, but as more than just a mechanic we have to remember to turn off before jumps if over 3 ticks' time in length and back on again after, perhaps even offering a sort of HP-sacrifice mechanic that allows DRK to get more value out of what would otherwise be downtime for self *and* heals, both. Let's take what seemed neat and turn it up to 11 and, from that, see what might stick.

[bundythenoob]

SO SORRY!! I misread the quote chains! D: will be sure to get more coffee before lurking.
you guys do bring up some cool discussion points though, so thanks for the replies!

IDENTITY. Not the gameplay stuff. Because then we open a whole new can of worms.

Visual presentation and mechanical gameplay of the job fantasies felt intrinsically tied in the past than they do now. Visually, WAR swings a giant axe (gameplaywise, WAR had lower APM), while DRK uses rune magic to allow us to wield the our greatsword with ease (DRK had higher APM), with PLD being the middle ground for both.
FFXIV's rendition of DRK uses runes and sigils to empower itself, which translated gameplay-wise into skills like Blood Weapon, Blood Price, TBN, and Dark Arts.
The visual effect of Dark Arts was something that made DRK stand out from the other tanks AND created a separate gameplay style for itself. Dark Arts gave us some good old style-points along with rewarding good mana usage!

I do believe that being an "anti-magic" tank would just NOT work within the current XIV encounter design, but if DA was re-integrated (maybe it could do something like, change your next Souleater to Power Slash) , then you at least get a return to older visual identity AND mechanical gameplay, rather than the current iteration.

We'd therefore going to need a gamewide preamble to DRK-specific changes if we wanted to reuse those old designs, at which point we wouldn't be saving time anyway by looking at the past anywhere near verbatim.

I think by re-integrating Dark Arts, the devs could solve some of the issues you brought up while further developing DRKs visual identity and gameplay kit for future expacs.

increased GCD APM via Blood Weapon would help the job look visually distinct AND separate itself mechanically, since we would be returning to the consistent damage type gameplay of HW/StB, rather than the current 2 min burst with giga downtime style. This would also allow WAR to regain its own visual identity of having that 2 min berserker window, which I always thought was a cool thing that separated us.

exchanging <strike now for X potency of damage> with <amp next GCD by X potency of damage> might seem redundant on paper, but DA-empowered abilities open the door to future skill design and even the return of old animations. having TBN give free Blood skills again wouldn't be a loss if those skills could be empowered by DA to leave bleeds/debuffs to offset the lost potencies

if we allow DA to give our personal cooldowns a "Dark Price" effect, we could use the extra MP/blood to offset the DPS loss from mitigating (or even let it be a DPS GAIN with more adds like it used to be), while also opening up future defencive cooldown design. This would let us feel like we're sacrificing our HP for more power once again

Allowing Darkside to return as a way to sacrifice HP for raid buffs during downtime sounds amazing. Bring back Sole Survivor and other sigil-based effects for this sort of thing!




Re-integrating Dark Arts might seem like a challenge, but the devs were already more than halfway there, at least from my experience. I mean, SGE's Eukrasia exists, so why can't Dark Arts exist too?

[Carighan]

do players not remember HW/StB DRK and its unique gameplay kit?
it wasn't just a bootleg WAR, it was much more about resource management and maintaining consistent damage

IDENTITY. Not the gameplay stuff. Because then we open a whole new can of worms.

DRK's identity was "The anti-magic tank". To a very very marginal degree and looking just at the class, it still is. Just that encounters no longer exist like that (compare for example old WoW where in TBC you wanted a Demo Warlock to tank some bosses). Nothing specifically shreds tanks that don't have extra magic-specific reductions, and hence asks for a magic-specific tank.

And now? What is DRK's identity? And what would it be if DA came back? The "get yourself RSI faster than ever"-tank?

[Shurrikhan]

IDENTITY. Not the gameplay stuff. Because then we open a whole new can of worms.

DRK's identity was "The anti-magic tank". To a very very marginal degree and looking just at the class, it still is. Just that encounters no longer exist like that (compare for example old WoW where in TBC you wanted a Demo Warlock to tank some bosses). Nothing specifically shreds tanks that don't have extra magic-specific reductions, and hence asks for a magic-specific tank.

And now? What is DRK's identity? And what would it be if DA came back? The "get yourself RSI faster than ever"-tank?

Honestly glad that "identity" is buried then. An "identity" just being a category of fights for which one's participation is more permitted or other tanks less so has never been healthy for any game where one is supposed to be able to play what class they want rather than only what role (with the expectation of having one of each type).

Typal capacity alone is a crap identity, its main difference in "feel" coming before combat, in selecting one's class, or occuring mostly just on the healers supporting it (in a tank's case).

Perhaps in a game where magic were more functionally different than just an arbitrary nominal distinction such could then have gameplay impact, but asking for identity *outside* of or inconsequent to gameplay is just how you reduce the roster of choices available for a given fight, especially if encounter design isn't able to constrain itself enough to roll with the types available. Identity should stem primarily from gameplay, not be purposely separate to it.