DRK needs a revision

[Lyth]

I don't think that the potencies are important at the moment. The point of the media tour was to act as a proof of concept to illustrate how the abilities work. It's also difficult to assess because the devs are designing this from the viewpoint of raid content that they have been actively testing for months. We just have potencies which may be outdated, no damage formula, and the assumption that this raid tier will play out the same way as before. The fact that Bloodsplitter ignores the damage penalty of Grit would be irrelevant in Creator Savage, where you don't need any Grit uptime at all. If the mitigation requirements on the next raid are significantly higher and force ShO/Defiance/Grit usage, our perceptions may change entirely.

What is significant, however, is that the ability concepts are relatively fixed for the next two years or so. Potencies, effects, and recasts can change. I think this is what we should focus on at this point.

I don't really mind losing Scourge and Delirium, so long as the dps loss from losing Scourge is compensated for elsewhere. Scourge is muscle memory at this point if you were practising it, but I recognise that it does expand the dps disparity for newer players without really adding any challenge to experienced players. The INT down loss was for the best, and the increased reliance on Souleater and the resulting potency increase are nice. The biggest issue here is that the healing on Soul Eater is still dependent on Grit, and DRK has no other form of self healing. I couldn't care less if we don't have an Equilibrium or Clemency equivalent, so long as we could squeeze even Storm's Path level healing out of Souleater out of Grit, if only for the purposes of soloing content more effectively, like the other two tanks.

The animations will be missed, though.

The loss of Reprisal is a bigger issue. In Heavensward, each tank had access to a raid mitigation move, between Divine Veil, Storm's Path, and Reprisal. The change to Reprisal presents two problems. First, PLD retains access to Divine Veil and also gains Passage of Arms. The ability to cross-class Reprisal on top of this gives PLD a fairly large surplus of raid mitigation. Second, the counter attack was a signature ability, which was subsequently copied over to Shield Swipe. DRK lost the ability, and PLD kept it.

I think part of the problem that people have with the shared role actions is that DRK was more dependent on cross-class abilities than PLD or WAR in Heavensward. So when you remove an ability like Mercy Stroke or Foresight from WAR, you end up double taxing DRK. Meanwhile, the abilities removed from DRK don't influence PLD or WAR, because they were not cross-class. The end result is that DRK has fewer actions than the other tanks after the pruning.

The Blackest Night is an incredible cooldown. It might even be the best resource-based mitigation ability in the game, and it encourages mastery of fight timings and a more active defensive style compared to press-and-forget. The trade-off is that if TBN is balanced as a dps gain, it's functionally just Infuriate with a bonus shield. You just activate it whenever it's up. If it's balanced as a dps loss, it becomes undesirable to use when off-tanking. If it's a dps loss, I'd be more willing to spend a DA cost on top of TBN's base cost to make it party-wide as OT, functionally acting as a much more costly Divine Veil on a shorter recast.

Dark Mind is in a really weird place at the moment. The base 15% magic mitigation on a 60 second recast is still really nice, but when will you DA this, now that you have TBN? If you TBN + DM, you have a 20% shield and 15% magic mitigation. If you DA DM, then you gain 30% magic mitigation for the same cost. The only time I see DA DM being used is if you have a multi-hit magic tankbuster, or if you need to stack both TBN and DA DM (but this is expensive and seems like overkill). I feel like this needs to be reworked somehow, especially after the PLD changes to Sheltron.

One of the factors that offsets DRK's strong resource-based mitigation is the fact that it has less access to free mitigation cooldowns than the other two tanks, so you'll end up sacrificing dps to mitigate (this is an issue when you're playing a tank that doesn't intrinsically provide the highest dps). Shadow Wall is still significantly weaker than Vengeance and even Sentinel, despite the fact that WARs now have access to Rampart as well. Living Dead remains the most healer intensive ultimate defensive ability, despite the fact that DRK still has the least amount of self-healing out of any tank. I would pay any amount of resources, be it MP or blood, to be able to remove the Walking Dead effect myself.

Bloodspiller and Quietus are nice, but this is functionally Fell Cleave and Decimate an expansion later. What differentiates them? Do they hit harder but less often? Or are they more spammable but hit for less? Failing either of these, can they offer something unique, such as more lifesteal? I wouldn't mind these abilities being relatively weaker, even in spite of getting them two years later, if they provided me with additional utility, such as healing out of Grit.

Delirium is also in a strange place. We already have lots of skills that restore MP, and the change to Darkside makes MP management significantly easier. If the goal was just to allow you to exchange between blood and MP at a roughly equivalent rate, then the cooldown needs to be much shorter. If the goal was to give you a dps boost on a long cooldown, then either you need to gain more MP on the conversion (2400 MP just about breaks even with 50 blood, and Sole Survivor gives you more MP for on the same recast for free if you use it correctly), or you need a much longer extension to Blood Price and Weapon. I know that a lot of this hinges on Bloodsplitter's final potency, but I don't understand the function of the new Delirium on a conceptual level.

Overall, I think that conceptually we're moving in a good direction, but there are still a number of big quality of life issues that need to be addressed. The balance is difficult to gauge without hands-on testing and we probably won't know for sure until we get into the raids ourselves. That being said, I have some worries, and this could go very well or very poorly.

[Raim]

It does change how you play. The game has built in stance dancing and its intended. People who stay in tank stance the entire fight are not playing optimally. They have skills like Blood Price that now require Grit, while other skills do full potency when not in Grit. Its intentional that you are encouraged to change/drop tank stances on the tanks when you feel its safe to do so. Thats a mechanic in itself, and I don't see tanks getting the Cleric Stance treatment in the future because then offtanking would be awkward.

[aqskerorokero]

Think about it...PLD needed a revision at the start of 3.0, and possibly gets it now in 4.0, so wait?

[Lyth]

I know that you say this in jest, but most of these problems have been outstanding from DRK's inception in 3.x.

Not that I necessarily think that PLD is free from issues, either. The design philosophy for PLD has always been to provide more mitigation at the cost of less damage. The problem is that this forces an environment in which you swap between PLD and DRK based on whether you need PLD's extra mitigation, or whether you can get away without it.

I'm actually not sure that this type of thinking has changed, especially if PLD's dps ends up being tuned lower due to these fancy new mitigation moves. It's actually in all tanks favour to get the balance right, in order to prevent situations in which you have to hop between two main jobs on a fight by fight basis. I wasn't a fan of HW's PLD/DRK slot and WAR slot. I want two tank slots.

[Omni-Vocational_Ryan]

My one big concern from looking at the kit for drk is there's too much behind dark arts now, almost everything can be darkarts in our dps combo and our mp recovery is halfed by being able to use only one of our blood weapon/price buff.

I'll have to see come the final build but right now drk looks like it's a bit off balanced in the mp it needs verus the mp it gets back

I for one would take the darkarts potencies on blood skills and make them the regular potencies.
I would also reduce dark passenger's mp along with the blackest night to not cost the same as a dark arts
maybe a half a darkarts will a longer cooldown on night

[Ultimatecalibur]

It does change how you play. The game has built in stance dancing and its intended. People who stay in tank stance the entire fight are not playing optimally. They have skills like Blood Price that now require Grit, while other skills do full potency when not in Grit. Its intentional that you are encouraged to change/drop tank stances on the tanks when you feel its safe to do so. Thats a mechanic in itself, and I don't see tanks getting the Cleric Stance treatment in the future because then offtanking would be awkward.

False. Stance Dancing was not intended play, it was emergent play resulting from 3.X builds that made enmity generation meaningless. Stance Changing based on needs of the fight (be they tank swaps or add spawns) was intended. Treating Tank Stance as a cooldown was not.

Sword Oath and Shield Oath originally interrupted combos while costing a gcd and Warrior lost it's Wrath stacks when it exited Defiance. Grit has a fairly high MP cost intended to dissuade Dark Knights from swapping in and out of it to much.

Blood Price was originally intended as the Dark Knight's tank stance MP recovery method with Blood Weapon being the dps stance MP recovery method as it was locked out of Grit. Players were the ones who found a way to use both when tanking out of Grit.

[Adventica6]

Locking blood price behind grit is the developers way of telling you to stay in grit 90% of the time. They don't want that BS of tanking without grit anymore and all of these changes prove that.

[Claire_Pendragon]

Im sorry, but I dont consider Unleash an AoE anymore.

Half threat (lower threat than abyssal drain), less than half the dmg of abyssal drain, for most of the MP cost, and only targets around u, not ranged?

There is no longer a reason to ever use it at or after Lv56.

MAYBE with the proc, for free MP cost.
(but even then, I will never see that)

[Reynhart]

Since the idea was to reduce the number of skills, I wonder why they didn't simply fuse Unleash and Abyssal Drain

[Brannigan]

Second, the counter attack was a signature ability, which was subsequently copied over to Shield Swipe. DRK lost the ability, and PLD kept it.

Paladin has had shield swipe as a counter from block since 2.0. They just moved it off the GCD later. Monk also had lolHaymaker off of evades. I'd hardly call this a signature ability of Dark Knight outside of the debuff it placed. You're better off talking about Low Blow and its reset trait for that, I think.
With that said, while I have a higher opinion of TBN than you (it basically looks good for dealing with stuff like tank busters, a7s lightning beams, and all sorts of other wacky single target stuff during progression), I do agree that Dark Mind is in a really weird place. I could see it being 30% without DA, and DA turning it into a group 10~15% or so. Cooldown is probably too short for that, though. Either that or give it some weird synergy effect with your team's spell casters (you gain MP when they cast? idk). Or they could have DADM max out the blood gauge when you take magic damage. Something like that.
Can't say I'm a fan of Delirium (design-wise that is, it might perform well) either. One of my big problems with DRK in 3.x was the boring combo paths since you never had to Power Slash. With the removal of Scourge and Delirium, DRK is basically a 2.0 paladin with Dark Fell Cleave and some extra oGCDs.
I think DRK will end up performing fine, but the gameplay changes are weird.