Dark Knight job vs Death Knight (WoW)

[AspectOfWinter]

Now that Dark Knight has been confirmed as a class I've been really wondering what could lie in store for us in 3.0 lorewise, what reasons they will have for joining the war effort, and so forth.

To me, the fact that it doesn't require Gladiator as a base job raises some questions. Do you think DRKs will be pretty much this game's version of Death Knights from WoW?

I never played FFXI, but were DRKs in that game as "evil" as WoW's DKs? Do you think it's virtually a given that the DRKs in this game will fall under this trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...ociopathicHero

Then again, Cecil from FF4 really managed to go against the stereotype...

[Naria]

I've never played WoW, but I would not describe XI's Dark Knight as evil (or Dark Knight in any Final Fantasy I've played, although I have not played them all). The main NPC Dark Knight in XI was a hero/one of the main protagonist NPCs in the initial storyline. Tragic or "emo" perhaps, but not evil.

The closest XI probably came to an "evil" job class while I was playing it was probably Blue Mage, and again that varied depending on the NPC. There were some heroic Blue Mages in Treasure's of Aht Urghan's storyline. The nature of Blue Magic in XI just tended to encourage insanity in it's practitioners. . . and monstrous transformations.

[Enkidoh]

I only ever played WoW for barely more than an hour and never gained Death Knight so I have no idea how that is, but DRKs are actually a traditional Job throughout the FF series, and usually they're somewhat bloodthirsty, although still possessing their own brand of honour and chivalry. Besides FFXI's Zeid whom Naria already mentioned, FFIV's main character, Cecil Harvey, actually started the game as a DRK, only to change to PLD later in the game (after famously conquering his own dark side). This page explains the traditional trappings and abilities of the Job throughout the series.

[WellFooled]

To me the defining feature of Death Knights were their control of the undead and their own undead state. They seemed very much like Necomancers to me.

Dark Knights are harder to define since each Final Fantasy has its own lore instead of one giant shared world, but they tend to employ wicked, self destructive, and draining abilities while not nessisarily being evil people...I think of them like batman :P

Besides their dark armored appearance, I think the only possible similarity are the draining attacks which both Dark Knights from FF and Blood Death Knights from WoW employ. Too early to say if this sort of ability will make it into FFXIV though.

[AspectOfWinter]

I guess we don't know for sure yet, but I'm wondering if DRK's story will have as "dark" of a theme as BLM's.

[Alberel]

I was there at the fanfest when they announced DRK and Yoshi expressly said that whilst DRKs use dark magic they are not evil. They are much like a BLM, using a dark and corrupting power for a good cause.

With regards to a comparison to Death Knights... the class in WoW is essentially a heavily armoured necromancer whilst DRK is associated with a different kind of dark magic. Based on previous games in the series they typically function by using their HP as a resource and have skills to drain stats from their enemies to recoup what they spend. I'm not entirely sure how they'll translate this into a tank role (a tank that spends its HP as a resource doesn't sound like a great idea) but I could see DRK being a drain or leech tank of some kind that essentially is able to heal itself to some degree and mitigates damage by weakening opponents rather than improving defenses.

[Saikou]

Death Knights are among the living dead. Dark Knights are very much alive. If anything, their dark arts would be closer to warlock magics than necromancy, corrupted runes, and plagues. Dark Knights have always been thematic of using their own life force to attack or draining the life force, in the form of attributes sometimes, of their enemies. They are actually quite different in concept, the WoW Death Knight and the FF Dark Knight. Theirs is actually dead, ours is kinda Batman - making Yoshida's tease of the announcement quite fitting.

[Nahara]

what reasons they will have for joining the war effort

If I were to take a wild stab in the dark, considering we're going to Ishgard and Isghard has been closed to us since forever, I would say that Dark Knights may have always been a thing in Ishgard and we're just now getting introduced to it because we actually get to go there. Further, I'd say that Dark Knights might be a more secretive order of knights, as opposed to the publicly known Temple Knights and the Dragoons (maybe acting as the Holy See's black-ops group or something like that).

As for how the Dark Knight compares to the Death Knight... it seems not many people here played WoW up to the introduction of Death Knights, but I can say in almost* no uncertain terms that you were just flat out evil. Like straight up, unabashedly evil. You worked for the main villain of the expansion, you murdered anyone and everyone that got in your way in cold blood, probably resurrected them into undead servitude, and maybe even exploded their remains in a violent spray of gore when they outlived their usefulness (though, admittedly, Corpse Explosion was pretty hilarious). Breaking away from the main villain and joining one of the factions had more to do with the fact that he sent you on a suicide mission and you want to exact revenge on him for that, rather than any kind of reformation or desire to do good (not that either faction was very altruistic to begin with).

Dark Knights, as pointed out already, are not evil (and also still living). They may have dark powers, but they are wielded by good people (eg. us) and used for good purposes (eg. fighting evil).

*: I say almost, because the people you kill in the Death Knight starting area were the Scarlet Crusade who are also evil and you normally just murder them whenever you come across them anyway.

[Alenore]

snip

Not exactly. At the beginning of the story, the Death Knight was simply raised by the Lich King (or one of his necromancer), and is pretty much a slave. He has no choice but to obey him, except for a very few.
Thing is, that min control is broken during the story and from that point, while you pretty much want to pwn the Lich King for revenge, you also get back the feelings and stuff. For instance, Thassarian still cared for his sister, tried to waste as few lives as possible, ...

[Malrend]

The only game in the FF series, that has included a class (in this case an NPC class) that could be regarded as being similar to WoW's Death Knight, would be the Deathknight (one word) of the remake of FF Tactics, the War of the Lions.

In War of the Lions, Dark Knight is a new addition, unique to the remake, as the class was previously unique to a temporary ally, his class was then renamed "Fell Knight". Further into the game you encounter an undead character whose class is "Deathknight" and it is essentially a "Fell Knight" with major stat boosts. I'd like to point out that this difference is mostly caused by the fact that the character in question is undead.. Just like the WoW class. I suspect that this information could easily be gleaned from the link that Enkidoh posted further up.

In its very first incarnation, Dark Knight was called "Mystic Knight" and could actually use low-level white magic.. One could argue that this made the Mystic Knight more of a Paladin than a Dark Knight, but when the game was later remade for the Nintendo DS, Mystic Knight was replaced by Dark Knight (the design stayed mostly the same). What one should really take away from this is that the Dark Knight has almost always had some magic component to it, but not always has this magical component been something related to darkness (and therefore in the case of most western cultures "evil").

My own personal view of the Dark Knight has always been that they are very similar to the Red Mage. Where the Red Mage focuses on magic, but supplements it with some darn good fencing, the Dark Knight focuses on his martial prowess and adds a limited amount of offensive magic to expand his repertoire. However, given the nature of the spells that they are often given (Drain, Osmose, various status afflictions), they still retain some flexibility like that of the Red Mage.