Thread: Dark Knight : Just another mitigation tank

This post is mainly to vent my disappointment.

When DRK was first announced I had the expectation that it was going to become a blood tank which would spark a different style to tanking. When the skill list first got released I was rather disappointed but held my judgment for when I got it to 60 and had a bit of a go at end game content with it.

I enjoy the concept and game play of Dark Arts, but feel as though some of the buffs to certain skills were an afterthought at best and offered no actual decision making. These buffs basically force you to use these skills either with DA, or not at all.

A few examples would be:-
- Souleater (Damage is mediocre without DA, and you may as well just use Delerium. The HP drain without DA isn't worth it and doesn't make enough impact).
- Carve & Spit (The MP return on this skill without DA is lackluster and you are pretty much wasting your highest potency skill if you don't use it with DA).

The other major issue I have with DRK and the main reason I am writing this post is that it's literally "just another mitigation tank", but not only that - in comparison to PLD it's just a gimp one.

I want to use some comparisons here, so bare with me.
- Grit, as boring and standard as it is, it's just another Shield Oath
- Shadowskin is a copy&paste Rampart.
- Shadow Wall is a gimp version of Sentinel. Same CD, 10% less mitigation.
- Dark Dance is arguably useless as the increase is too low to rely on it to actually mitigate a tank buster skill.
- 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.

This leaves me with "the good" mitigation skills for DRK
- Dark Mind (While this is a unique characteristic for DRK, to have a low CD magic-defensive skill, for this to make a true impact, it must be buffed with DA for a 30%. So the use of this skill comes at the cost of nearly a quarter of your MP bar).
- 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).

Where are the blood tanking skills? Only thing close are Abyssal and Souleater. Ditch all the mitigation for some massive drain style buffs, perhaps turn Grit into a skill that gives us an Adlo-style shield over our HP container depending on how much damage we deal or something. There are many ways that they could have gone with this style of tanking yet they decided to go with a binary PLD, with a few adjusted (lackluster) skills? We asked for another interesting tank yet we got this poor carbon copy.

Final note on skills specifically are the few skills that provide very little to DRK's arsenal.
- Sole Survivor, very very circumstantial and makes very little impact. Biggest use I have found for this was in T4 Alex, after getting sent to quarantine. The 20% HP/MP restore is partly useful so you come back with a little bit more HP than you would have, but aside from this it's lackluster at best.
- Salted Earth. This skill feels like such an afterthought. A higher potency flaming arrow? I mean more damage is always useful, but it is just insanely uninteresting for the potential it could pose. How about giving any mob that enters a "taunt" style effect and forcing hate on the DRK, or simply tacking an enmity modifier onto it would at least make it slightly more interesting.
- Dark Dance, I mentioned this before. Low chance parry, the DA buff (evasion) is pointless, and is pretty much used just to proc more Lower Blows.
- Dark Passenger, while the damage is decent on a large group of mobs, buffing with DA consumes about half of your mana pool, and it's just not worth using. On single target it's a waste of mana.

Now I want to mention some major issues with DRK. This is in comparison to the other tanks most of the time (primarily PLD as WAR is a bit of a unique snowflake at the moment).
- Its inability to self heal / sustain itself. Both WAR & PLD have this ability with a 1200 potency self-heal. PLD to even more extent as it's a spammable spell (provided they have the mana which they can get through Riot Blade), on top of that they have the ability to target a party member and even get 50% potency on themselves while they do it.
- Lack of utility / party supportive skills. Aside from Delirium, DRK lacks any form of party support skills. I want to compare PLD in this case again (Divine Veil, Clemency, Cover, RoH with STR down, on-demand GCD stun).
- Damage. Yes, it lacks it. Also damage that doesn't completely revolve around a resource (MP) that is almost impossible to maintain while tanking a single target. Blood Price on a noteworthy single target is laughable (with its static per-hit, not per-damage MP return scaling), so the only option is to spam enough Syphon Strikes. All of this doesn't take into account that some skills (such as Dark Mind & Carve and Spit) need to be used with Dark Arts, completely crippling any chance of using Souleater frequently. In addition to this, in order to manage your MP you have to ignore enmity.
- Major TP issues. Using a dummy, DRK will run out of TP in roughly 2m 30-45 seconds. This issue carries over to a fight. Tanks have always had this issue. WAR got the ability to partly solve their issues.

The quickfix to DRK to make it comparable? Drop the MRD sub and give it LNC. Change Dark Dance and Sole Survivor into something useful such as party utility, and adjust Salted Earth to give it an enmity modifier (or something).

The long fix? Get off this mitigation train and give us a unique tank.

I know the latter isn't going to happen, but I just needed to vent at how uninteresting DRK turned out to be, and how much potential it could of had.

There are only two types of tanks: Mitigation and Evasion.
Anyone can explain you why evasion tanks are a bad idea in general.

as for the weaker skills, se already said they were looking at them

Originally Posted by Metabug

There are only two types of tanks: Mitigation and Evasion.
Anyone can explain you why evasion tanks are a bad idea in general.

You obviously don't know what a blood tank is then.
To simplify it - a tank that has high self-healing sustain. Basically skills that focus on lifesteal.

They tried that with WAR in early 2.0. It didn't work then, it would be even worse now.

What you wanted sounds like WoW's blood death knight.

Which is broken in so many ways, and was absolutely awful at keeping healed for like.. ever.

How about no.

Originally Posted by Altena

You obviously don't know what a blood tank is then.
To simplify it - a tank that has high self-healing sustain. Basically skills that focus on lifesteal.

this is not a tank

They tried to have WAR originally be more of a Meatshield (high/extra HP) + Self-healing/Life-steal tank and it ended up making it inferior for raiding compared to PLD because preemptive dependable mitigation is pretty consistently better than after the fact reactive mitigation. This resulted in the 2.1 WAR changes that lightened the Self-healing aspect of the job and gave it better straight mitigation with Inner Beast.