If You Were A Class/Job Designer...

[JackFross]

DRK:
A lot of these are rather sweeping changes. I am not a meowthematician; but just take from these ideas the idea behind them, not the exact implementation. 'w'

A lot of this is interesting, but you're kind of glossing over every major issue with the Job in favor of trying to strengthen the strongest part of the Job as it currently exists.

Dark Arts working the way it does is very good - implementing it to augment essentially all of your skills would just add way too much glut to a class that's already incredibly complex.

The Darkness attack has several glaring issues:
1. It would be impossible to balance. The mana expenditure directly leading to damage dealt will lead to a skill that will either be insanely overpowered or completely worthless, and nothing in-between. If it's just "good" - no one will use it, since you get far more benefit out of using your mana for other utility things and your main damage combos.
2. In the case of where it's "good" and deals "1.2x" the amount you'd do with a combo in that time, you could run into some pretty serious health issues when acting as the Main Tank if you use the skill. It also would cause severe mana issues in that position, the likes of which you'll more than likely end up wasting a Carve and Spit on to dig yourself out.
3. The mana loss will just flat out -never- be worth it, especially with the changes/modifications to Dark Arts you suggest in this post.
4. And most importantly - it would need to replace an existing skill, and there is not a single current skill that I would want to lose.


So, I'll expand on what I mean by the "issues" with Dark Knight that you seem to be missing:
Several skills in the Dark Knight kit do not mesh -at all- with one another.

Dark Dance is best utilized in mass pulls. Boosting the parry chance is most noticeable when you have a shitload of damage flowing in. Dark Arts + Dark Dance completely flies opposite to this idea, in that it no longer meshes with what Dark Knight should be using first in a mass pull - Blood Price. You could wait for BP to drop before doing DA+DD, however at this time, you really shouldn't be SPENDING mana, but rather refilling it to fuel your next run of BP-AD spam.

Dark Passenger is the best AoE skill that Dark Knight has, especially when you Dark Arts it. However, Dark Arts + Dark Passenger is an INSANE Mana expense, best used while under the effect of Blood Price --- oh wait, but it blinds the enemies. :|

And then having two skills which like parries while having no significant parry skills.

Dark Dance is 30%. DA+DD makes that lower because you dodge before you parry and the parry rate isn't increased.


The Dev team has specifically stated that the reason Darkside and Dark Arts work off Mana rather than Health is because Dark Knight is a tank. You can't have a tank who is freely shifting health up and down. It trivializes healers - all you'd need to do is stop spending Health and just use the plethora of Health regen you would undoubtedly have and suddenly you would become literally invincible.

We don't need to spend health to deal damage to be Dark Knights. I know I'm in the minority in saying that.

Like, yeah. Dark Knight needs more ways to spend Dark Arts for interesting tanky reasons, rather than them all being all offense all the time as it is in the current meta. I suggested things like this in the post I made about changes to the Tanks:

1. Dark Dance - Dark Arts+Dark Dance should increase the Parry rate from 30% to something more like 60-70%, instead of increasing dodge chance.

2. Dark Passenger - Dark Arts+Dark Passenger should deal 250 potency and inflict damage reduction - effect identical to and cannot stack with Storm's Path.

Some of the other ones are silly, now having played 3.2 DRK pretty extensively. TP issues don't exist anymore sooo... yeah.
I would also suggest that DA+DD should actually just be 100% parry because, seriously, why not? Low Blow procs? Why are we not allowed to use Dark Arts for mitigation while also getting some offensive benefit out of it? I dunno, seems silly to me, but maybe I'm just weird. With this sort of change, I wouldn't even be mad if DD was suddenly a 90s cd, so long as that base 30% went up to like 40-50%.

I also think Grit (or Greatswords) needs to have a built in Parry chance buff. Could just make it built into the Parry stat - while in Grit, your Parry increases by 50% or something. Give DRK a reason to stack Parry - make it scale better on us. :\




tl;dr: The main issue with DRK is they're built around WANTING TO BE HIT and then are given skills that clash with this ideal by bolstering dodge chance and inflicting blind at the expense of their main resource.