The completely REASONABLE changes to the Dark Knight job thread

[Ipkonfig]

If you look at both PLD and DRK:

Rampart - Shadowskin
Sentinel - Shadow Wall (10% difference but serves its purpose of breaking a tank buster)
Bulwark (Physical) - Dark Mind (Magic)
PLD Shield - Dark Dance
Hallowed Ground - Living Dead
RoH STR Down - PS INT Down

Some of my Paladin friends aren't to excited about Sheltron so I left it out, I guess it's very hard to time and ends up eating an auto attack instead of what you really want to block, like if you are solo tanking Rav Ex and want to block the split-able tank buster solo and you time it wrong so it takes an auto and then you eat the full buster.

Taking into consideration Dark Dance's effect with Dark Arts and the 33% up-time on the buff, assuming you keep it on CD for an entire fight, and assuming an average Paladin block rate/strength, a shield and DA/Dark Arts actually equate to roughly the same overall damage reduction, as long as we are assuming auto attacks, which regardless of what you're doing can be dodged/blocked. Now there are certain mechanics, typically Tank Busters that can't be dodged but can be blocked, but more often than not you don't want to leave stopping a tank buster up to the chance of if or if you won't block. The proposed change to Dark Dance would severely handicap this concept dropping its overall effectiveness by around 15%. Now if you want to boost the parry to 50% and increase the amount of damage parried by 20% if you use Dark Arts, that would make it equally effective and eliminate the dodge.

I think since these classes are all designed in a vacuum they all have paper balancing factors and while on paper DA/Dark Dance is roughly the same DR over the course of a fight as having a shield, it just doesn't seem like it because RNG mitigation is never good mitigation.

From the list above it looks like PLD is more niche for physical and DRK is more niche for magic, yet they can both do either it's just one will be better than the other in certain situations. Since DRK was designed along with the new content it's a very safe assumption we'll see a need for magic damage reduction meaning DRK will shine.

The only real change I want is more group utility. Delirium Blade is great for the -10% INT which was amazing in T13 with a Monk, and since no one in my FC is leveling Monk for HW DRK can bring that debuff. Looking at PLD though they get -STR% on Rage, they can Stoneskin, Clemency, and Divine Veil which are all awesome utility. I guess Clemency is really only good for downtimes in combat because while casting you can't block or parry so a chunk of your mitigation disappears to cast a heal.

I would like Delirium to have an extra effect, like Magic Vuln increase to help your casters, possibly add an effect to Dark Side that changes your damage to magic so you can benefit from your own debuff. It fits with the ability thematically. Make Sole Survivor cast-able on a party member, if they would drop below 1 HP, instead stop them at 1 HP make them "zombie" that is immune to damage for 5s and heals you for 20% of your HP and MP, it would still work on a MOB as well, but obviously not the immune to damage part, just the 20% HP/HP if they die with it. I guess I do hate self healing effects on a tank so if Souleatter would instead of a health buffer based on damage, that would be much better.

[Morcavious]

snip

Souleater may seem annoying, but it's frequent enough that I bet it comes pretty close to the effect that a PLD's shield has AAs. We're looking at ~13K HP right now, so it's not unreasonable to see a DA Souleater healing back ~5-8% of your health pool. With a little bit of practice that's nothing to scoff at.

I do agree that we'll likely see more magic damage going forward. I bet that's why they were careful to make the new WAR/PLD abilities physical only. If that's the case, then DRK are sitting rather pretty.

Are you talking about the proposed change to Dark Dance of making it 50% parry instead of 30%/20%? If so, I'm very firmly in the boat of 50% parry. I'd gladly give up the full avoid for the increased chance to parry a tank buster. Either way I think people are vastly underestimating it.

I would be shocked if they made Delirium give a magic taken debuff.

[ZodiacSoldier]

Nobody is arguing about the ability to tank trash. Everyone is worried about boss fights.

Parry reduces damage taken by 20%. If you've got a 100% chance to parry the boss your tanking for for 20s, then how is that not essentially equivalent to 20s of 20% Physical DR?

Ok I see your point about it being a 20% physical DR for 20s, but Rampart and Shadowskin are still better CD since they give 20% reduction to all damage sources and on top of that they still have the chance to Parry normally.

I guess they can consider giving DRK a 30 sec cooldown that parry the next attack as a possible mitigation.

But you also have to consider the whole balancing issues. Currently WAR does the most DPS as a tank, PLD has the most mitigation and DRK is in between. If you want DRK to have as much mitigation as a PLD, they will have to nerf their DPS to be the same as PLD.

[SpookyGhost]

Ok I see your point about it being a 20% physical DR for 20s, but Rampart and Shadowskin are still better CD since they give 20% reduction to all damage sources and on top of that they still have the chance to Parry normally.

I guess they can consider giving DRK a 30 sec cooldown that parry the next attack as a possible mitigation.

Raw Intuition (Physical only) = Rampart (Physical/Magical) = Shadowskin (Physical/Magical)
IB (Physical/Magical) = Sheltron (Physical only) = N/A

[Morcavious]

Ok I see your point about it being a 20% physical DR for 20s, but Rampart and Shadowskin are still better CD since they give 20% reduction to all damage sources and on top of that they still have the chance to Parry normally.

I guess they can consider giving DRK a 30 sec cooldown that parry the next attack as a possible mitigation.

Yeah, that was my point. Shadowskin and Rampart are better, which is why Sheltron (and ideally whatever they gave the DRK would be weaker than Inner Beast), but still usable in a pinch for when you need to break a tank buster every ~30 seconds.

[Delorean]

cut the mp cost of grit, take it off gcd and make it stop canceling combos

[Ipkonfig]

@Hundred Come on man.. You know that Raw Intuition will get fixed right? The auto crit heals from side/back are not part of the buff it would specifically say if that was supposed to happen, it's just like if you use Awareness it stops the negative side of RI from even happening which shouldn't work. Or at release when Awareness stopped all crit heals along with crit damage it just took them a bit to fix it.

@Morcavious I find Souleater annoying because the concept of self healing on a tank is flawed, if you are taking damage your healer should be attempting to heal that or even mitigate it with HoTs. Souleater could end up eating a few ticks of a HoT pushing them into overheals wasting the ticks and making that self healing all together superfluous because the healing would have taken place regardless. If it was changed to an hp buffer it would actually be an effective form of mitigation ignoring what healing is currently happening on you.

I'm saying if you want to change the 30%/20% effect of DA+Dark Dance to just 50% parry then it should have a Dark Arts effect of parry absorbing 10% more damage (I said 20% at first, but doing the math that would be a pretty hefty boost.) 10% would make them almost identical in average reduction but drops the avoidance.

[Morcavious]

@Rbstr: Are we sure it stacks with Path? I thought it was concluded that it didn't. Also, thank you for further expanding upon my point about Raw Intuition. You hit the nail on the head.

@Ipkonfig: Self healing is a tricky thing. It can be incredibly powerful if you run with the same healers frequently, as they can adjust as needed to accommodate those heals as a buffer. In a PUG situation they're usually one extreme or the other. Either the healer is awful and your self heals are a life saver, or the healer isn't paying attention to them at all and they're wasted. Either way you're totally correct in the fact that absorbs were be better. Right now you can't really count the self healing as protection against tank busters, but you can certainly count it towards general auto attack stress.

Ah. Nah, I'd personally rather keep Dark Dance as entirely % Parry. 20% seems to be the 'good enough' buffer for most things. Once you hit that threshold it's usually frequency > potency.

[MuzakFan]

@Rbstr: Are we sure it stacks with Path? I thought it was concluded that it didn't.

Yes, Reprisal definitely stacks with Path. I made sure to watch out for this when I did a Ravana HM fight with me as MT and a WAR OT.

[Xenosan]

But that doesn't make it less valuable in a practical boss-related way. The important point is that Raw Intuition will, not maybe will, give you 20% mitigation against an attack when used properly. That's a reliable cooldown for physical tank busters. Similarly Sheltron will give you >20% on a single hit no matter what.

..I find Souleater annoying because the concept of self healing on a tank is flawed, if you are taking damage your healer should be attempting to heal...

^qft

There's an increasing amount of false equivalencies and paper-stat discussions,

I think those theory crafting need to queue T5, T9, Titan, Odin, and other non-dungeon, non-24man-raid 50 content. (God forbid try PUGing it instead of with friends)

From my experience DRK just isn't matching up to PLD&WAR in any party composition in either OT/MT role. Ramuh felt good but that's about mechanics, 15% magic resistance is QoL, not essential. If tanks didn't need it before, still don't need it now. Dark Arts blown on Dark Mind for additional resistance is a DPS loss.

Post 50, PLD gets extra mitigation and utility, WAR gets extra mitigation and dps

Post 50, DRK get QoL. (Dat gap closer tho!)

If anyone has videos or experience of DRK in any of this content doing well, I'd love to hear or see a Vid to learn from (in case the fault is on me and not the job).