Dark Knight Idea thread: Suggestions

[RuneSevalle]

Personally, I really like the specifics of our current toolset, for the most part. The changes I would like to see:

1.Blood Weapon able to be used in Grit. We rely too heavily on our mp to have this vital ability locked out to us while tanking and it's not like we get any real offense CDs anyways.
2. Cooldown timers. Holy cow, some of these REALLY need to be shortened. Looking at you, Shadow Wall.

And my personal favorite change:
3. Slight mechanic change to increase mitigation - I say go kinda like the Death Knight route. Siphon strike could work like adloquium and add a shield on top of its current heal equal to the heal. Any overhealing from this ability could also be converted into a shield to give us a sort of mini Divine Veil. Not a big leap in mitigation, but it would certainly help make up for a bit of our parry/evasion RNG.

[Xenosan]

Personally, I really like the specifics of our current toolset, for the most part. The changes I would like to see:
3. Slight mechanic change to increase mitigation - I say go kinda like the Death Knight route. Siphon strike could work like adloquium and add a shield on top of its current heal equal to the heal. Any overhealing from this ability could also be converted into a shield to give us a sort of mini Divine Veil. Not a big leap in mitigation, but it would certainly help make up for a bit of our parry/evasion RNG.

^I like, It would be an ondemand mitigation option. Between Shelltron and Inner Beast both PLD/WAR look reliable for at-ready tank buster mitigation

DRK can feel like 2.x PLD when it comes to mitigation CDs, but have less to work with (I guess cross-classed actions from both WAR/PLD were suppose to cover for this).

My original thought was have HP absorbed via Souleater & Abyssal create a barrier buff equal to the amount of HP healed over max health (so barrier only happens if HP's topped off). Think Adloquium Lite. Call it Doom Spikes.

(I think I partly like this because it would help justify STR > VIT ;d )

[Daega]

Been DRK since early access. Love it very much but it's a jack of all trades master of none at the moment. Sightly higher dps than PLD but less defense. And WAR is lol right now since their damage is off the charts. DRK could seriously use some MP love. I can effectively run through a whole dungeon with no issues(aggro or mp), but that's just if I cycle everything towards that. Carve and Spit is almost only just a small mp cooldown. No point using dark arts on it when you could use it for soul eater doing close dps but better benefits. If you or another accidentally pull before having enough MP for unleash then RIP, someone's likely to die before generating hate or mp for unleash/abyssal Drain. Blood price only works if they hit you which at that point hey aren't. (Blood Weapon with Grit on would be super effective)

If I could say anything to help with them its lesser time on cool downs. Too often in high level fights I find myself all on cooldown timers. I enjoy the 'If you parry it lessens time on reprisal' idea. That's a huge effectiveness booster, otherwise it's just a crap shoot(boosted with parry buff but still).

So in a nutshell DRK could use some better mitigation tweeks to be a better tank and MP management reliability.

Back before the expansion I was PLD and could effectively output dps. War could always do this too. I hope DRK can go offensive say in PvP without the whole feel of playing in a dungeon requirements on MP. Similar to Monk pre-expansion.

[Beoth]

I'm not so sure about Blood weapon in Grit stance for several reasons:

- TP management: We can only regen use Unleach, Unmend and Abyssal drain on gcd to save some TP, which all require MP and makes us lose dps. Therefore we rely on the off-time during fights (while cancelling Dark Side at the same time). Other tanks have inbuilt mechanics to manage it whitout too much downsides (Shield Swipe is/was a up of dps, Inner Beast/Steel Cyclone). NIN/AST/BRD are our saviors on long fights.

- Threat generation/ DPS: 10% Attack speed for 15 sec with 40 sec CD, that's 37,5% uptime. It's a big increase of our dps, not to mention the gain of mp which permit a lot more Dark Arts use.

Other suggestion: Dark Arts + Dark Passenger = 10% magic vulnerability (no more blind). Bring us more utility pls !

[Harok]

If I had to make tweaks to the class here's what I would do, part 1. Keep in mind I'm at level 53 for DRK so there will probably be some things to add later.

Blood Sword: Decrease the percentage of damage that gets absorbed as MP but allow it to be used in Grit.

Unleash: Keep the initial enmity boost but make it a relatively small AoE life drain DOT. We're talking about 10 -15 HP per tick per mob for 20 seconds. A drain tanking class like DRK really does well with having at least one life drain DOT. The idea is to give DRK a fairly passive form of healing when tanking large numbers of mobs.

[Harok]

Part 2

Reprisal: Lower the damage and remove the parry requirement. DRK needs a reliable to debuff the enemy physically and sadly the combination of long cooldown and the parry requirement prevents this.

Dark Arts: Reduce the MP cost to 3/4s of what it is currently. I like the idea of Dark Arts but the cost is insanely prohibitive when combined with the costs of some of the other skills used to get the wanted effect.

Dark Dance: Change the DA combo to be a form of mitigation rather than dodge increase. Yes, I know this is intended to be used with Dark Passenger but the MP cost is astronomical and dodging doesn't work well in raids. A tank is meant to withstand damage, not dodge it.

[Harok]

And finally part 3

Dark Passenger: Change this to either a cone or circular AoE. Line mechanics usually don't work all that well for tanks since they tend to be surrounded on all sides by enemies rather than having them stacked together. Having a much easier AoE helps to justify the cost and ensure the DRK is maximizing its usefulness.

Living Dead: Provide a visual aura to this skill like a sickly green aura around the DRK. This lets the healers easily know what's happening and to prepare their full heals to prevent the KO. Yes you can set this to a macro, but in pitched battles people aren't going to be looking at the chat window that much and instead focusing on the enemies and the party making this a favorable method of showing what's going on.

[rogandiamond]

Making Blood Weapon usable while in Grit (OR) removing GRIT from GCD is a necessary QoL change.

[rogandiamond]

also, dark passenger needs to just cost 0 MP. it's almost useless without it's dark arts effect, and with dark arts costing an absurd amount of MP, i just can't ever justify using this skill. it's also counterproductive, as the only time youd have that much mana to burn is under blood price... and blind means you're getting hit less, which means less mp. it's a questionable skill in my opinion.

drain's dark arts effect.

I said this exact thing about Dark Passenger in a thread last night. Absolutely crazy dumping mp for DA and then still incurring the fulll mp cost of dark passenger. Atleast make it reduced.

[TouchandFeel]

My general thoughts/ideas so far.

- Salted Earth: Change it from a ground target aoe to dropping at the feet of the current target. Keeps the flexibility of using it at range but removes the clunkiness of ground targeting as a melee class.

- Grit: Lower activation cost.

- Darkside: Change the visual fx to be more tightly concentrated on the drk's body so it is visible on the player even when it the middle of combat with lots of spells/abilities going off, but not so intrusive when people are just standing around a hub.

- Dark Dance: Get rid of the dodge/evasion DA effect and just make it increase parry more by 20%-30%. Dodging things goes completely against the functionality of the main MP regaining CD, Blood Price, and has zero synergy with any other ability. At least parry helps with other abilities.

- Shadow Wall: Decrease the recast time on it to 150 seconds, like Vengeance, plus each physical hit received has a chance (30%?) of applying blind for 10 seconds (p.s. make blind more viable in high lvl content in general, very meh debuff at the moment due to resists/immunities).

- Reprisal: Remove proc requirement, increase cd to 45 seconds, increase debuff duration to 30 seconds, parry refreshes the ability.

- Delerium: Change debuff to "takes X% more magic damage" instead of INT down.

- Carve and Spit: Increase MP gain from it.

- Dark Passenger: Decrease MP cost, change from line to conal aoe, change blind DA effect to applies the debuff Doom Spikes for 10 seconds to the target where they take a 50 potency hit every time they deal damage.

- Plunge: add the ability to use DA with it and have it apply the buff "Grave Determination" for 10 seconds which make the player immune to knockbacks and pull-in effects and removes binds and movement impairing effects (essentially gives DRK a Tempered Will like buff but ties it to DA usage to avoid ability bloat).

- Living Dead: provide better visual feedback for activation of the zombie state (not the ability activation but going into the Walking Dead state). This could be done with a visual effect on the player, but it would have to not clash, cancel out or get lost in the Darkside visual effect. Also add in to the Walking Dead state that heals received are X% (20-30%?) more effective so that the insta-death punishment is eased a little.