Dark Knight : Just another mitigation tank

[Verius_Nox]

Based on a lot of the replies to this thread, SE should never add another class to the game, unless it is very similar to existing classes, so as to not allow any class to be potentially outdo any other.

People are literally saying they like how very similar classes are. You're not gonna get anywhere OP

They can make new styles fine, it's a matter of how they implement them and they have to be very careful.

When it comes to tanks, SE is trying very hard not to have an FFXI ninja problem again, where you only tanked as ninja or you didn't tank at all because it was so glaringly better than any other tank out there. It was an evasion style tank. lifesteal tanks are equally as difficult to balance correctly. Blood death knight tanking in WoW has either been really underpowered or really overpowered, no in between.

People want new styles of gameplay but they don't want years of broken mess for the sake of it.

[Kaedan94]

Blood tanks aren't reliable. Either they have too low HP and have trouble surviving tank busters, or they have too much HP and end up being the "god tank", with no reason to play any others.

Basically there's no way to balance self healing, HP, and mitigation. Either they suck, or they're OP.

[Malevicton]

snip

The first thing you suggested was a blood tank, and when people called that out the only 2 examples you could list weren't even tanks.

Sure saying some sufficiently vague like "more interesting mechanics is better" is pretty universal, but like what? All of your examples so far have been either not tanks, absurdly broken, or - in the case of your personal experiences - shown to just be a straight up lie.

So sure, more creativity is good. Job homogenization at a certain point can get bland. What are you suggesting? And please don't just say "blood tank because it worked in a pvp rts"

[Sove92]

- Reprisal is tied to a CD (so max of 66% upkeep), but also requires a parry to proc it, which means Storm's Path trumps this immediately as it's a combo finisher.

The kicker here is that Reprisal and Path both stack with each other. If this ability were to be changed to not need a parry, they would have to be non-stacking. The CD itself isn't even bad, 66% upkeep is fine, no good raid grp has Path up full-time.

- Delirium (This debuff becomes completely useless with a MNK in the party, however I am glad that another class got some sort of magic attack reduction skill to make MNK less of a raid core than it already is).

Can still use it as your dps combo finisher, the debuff doesn't overwrite DK, because it's weaker (no blunt decrease).

Either way, we are not gonna get a blood tank anymore, there are many examples on earlier pages why that's not happening.

[Lorielle]

Basically there's no way to balance self healing, HP, and mitigation. Either they suck, or they're OP.

There's ways. Call me optimistic, but I don't really believe there's no way to tweak it so that it's fair that Dark Knight can Self Heal at a reasonable amount. After all, they have a number of things keeping them from using it regularly.

[Asierid]

There's ways. Call me optimistic, but I don't really believe there's no way to tweak it so that it's fair that Dark Knight can Self Heal at a reasonable amount. After all, they have a number of things keeping them from using it regularly.

Considering no one (in all these years) has managed to do it in a way that didn't make it either broken, or underwhelming...I doubt it. There has yet to be an effective and balanced drain tank.

[Lorielle]

Considering no one (in all these years) has managed to do it in a way that didn't make it either broken, or underwhelming...I doubt it. There has yet to be an effective and balanced drain tank.

"It hasn't happened yet. It's impossible to do."

Somehow this logic seems a little faulty.

[Chihaya]

There's ways. Call me optimistic, but I don't really believe there's no way to tweak it so that it's fair that Dark Knight can Self Heal at a reasonable amount. After all, they have a number of things keeping them from using it regularly.

As long SE keep the way they are doing with tank busters in progression, all tanks needs mitigations.
PLD popping CDs, WAR popping IB and Vengence.

Blood heal sounds good for consistent high damage
However if they tweak raids into this, it would have little use for other tanks as their mitigation are short duration with long CD. Might as well just use a tank that can heal themselves all the time. Also, putting a short duration with long CD on self-heals defeats the whole "blood tank" concept if they have to still rely heavily on healers to heal them most of the time

[Altena]

The kicker here is that Reprisal and Path both stack with each other. If this ability were to be changed to not need a parry, they would have to be non-stacking. The CD itself isn't even bad, 66% upkeep is fine, no good raid grp has Path up full-time.

While I agree, it fails as a supportive skill by tying it to parry. I would be fine with a longer CD

Can still use it as your dps combo finisher, the debuff doesn't overwrite DK, because it's weaker (no blunt decrease).

I wasn't exactly clear in my OP by what I meant, while yes it is still your highest damage skill if you don't have the MP for DA > SE, and you're still going to use it even with a MNK in your party, but the utility part of the skill becomes useless.

It was pretty poorly formatted but I was saying that Delirium was one of the positives to DRK, and you are definitely still going to use it even with a MNK.

[Dhex]

They may be functionally the same but all three tanks have distinct play-styles. This is like calling Monk "Just another melee DPS" because Dragoon exists. If you want something that is fundamentally different you run into the issue of superiority by function - Paladin being preferred over Warrior at the outset is proof of that.