DRK Consolidated Feedback Thread

[SyzzleSpark]

snip

As hard as it may be to believe, it doesn't come from a place of malice. The job I run content on most often after DRK is actually WAR. And frankly the only honest justification I have for continuing to main DRK is that I just like the job more. That being said, when I'm on WAR, I feel I am able to far more reliably and easily mitigate more damage consistently, and while finding the sweet spot for IRzerk can be a challenge, it feels good to do and master on a fight-by-fight basis. I have room to optimize and I'm rewarded for it. The job offers everything I loved about 3.0 DRK, actually (except utility). I don't have a logical reason for continuing to main DRK other than "I wanna."

Its fair to say "grass is always greener..." but that's a two way street. For a lot of DRK mains WAR as a job is enjoying a lot of what they miss about 3.x DRK (again, sans the utility), and yet many of its players are complaining about those very things. If you don't want easy mitigation and a higher skill ceiling we'll gladly take them.

The duality of WAR was something that a lot of people, as I recall, hailed about the job in 3.x. People praised the ability to freely make choices on the fly and the fluidity of doing so. I think more than anything in Defiance being bad, IR was just really unbalancing for the job overall. But that's a topic for another thread. The trade-offs that were inherent to the job were considered one of the neatest things about playing it.

I'm sorry my thoughts on that job are so triggering to a lot of people, but I'm actually trying to stick my nose in a lot less lately, since apparently I'm on a bloody watchlist for some people, keeping track of what I say about WAR and how often (last time I said anything on the subject was over a week ago?). It feels weird that people actually keep tally of what I say and have preconceived notions about what opinions that I, specifically am allowed to express. I'm just one person (syz drk post good yay syz war post bad grr). Lythia's points simply got me thinking.

[Chrono_Rising]

Inner beast comes with a dps cost, this doesn't make it a "bad skill", it makes it a low priority mitigation. Same deal with Clemency, I would never want to heal myself, but it is there in a pinch, and if my other option is death then I'm going to cast it.

Most (if not all) of the savage fights you can alternate mitigation for tank busters on both paladin and warrior and have something for the inbetween as well, which will cover you for at least 10 to 20 seconds, without touching low priority self heals or mitigation (clemency and IB). I think the core of the issue that people have is that TBN is basically the answer to everything and has a questionable effect on our personal dps/healer dps.

Dark knight doesn't have an emergency self sustain: TBN so healers have 5 seconds to heal

Dark knight doesn't have much mitigation between tank busters: TBN an autoattack once every 15 seconds

Dark knight doesn't have enough mitigation to survive with one cooldown: TBN for more mitigation

Have a DPS window coming up and I want to use bloodspiller: TBN for more blood depending on where you are in your gcd

A healer somewhere sneezed: Use TBN just in case

Does using this skill this often do anything for the class other than emphasize mana managment and fight knowledge? The answer is maybe it nets you 1 to 3 potency, or maybe it doesn't break and you lost 140 potency.

Does it give healers a window to dps? At 5 seconds you are going to need to announce that you used it, so maybe it will net your healer an extra cast if you can type that fast or use voice.

Does it slow incoming damage so that regens can keep up with some of the incoming damage? No, it makes your incoming damage feel more spiked because you're essentially nullifying damage all at once instead of slowing damage over 20 seconds for about the same effect.

Does TBN work as mitigation on its own on tank busters? Usually it needs to be paired with something (perhaps just tank stance if things didn't go to plan) costing you 4200 mana (almost two dark arts definately a dps loss even with blood regen); does super well for low hitting tankbusters. PLD: Tank stance + shelltron mitigates more on most tank busters in savage, is usually up and is relatively easy to pull off while recovering some resources (dps loss). WAR: Tank stance + IB mitgates less due to the way tank stance works but has higher ehp, and as an added bonus will restore some hp for the switch into tank stance, again this probably points to things going awry and is comparable to the dps loss for the other two (because you didn't lose a GCD changing stances but you are forced into tank stance for longer).

TBN is up more frequently, this is 100% true, but the frequency of use feels more like a mechanic than mitigation which is not particularly rewarding for timing well and is punishing if you time it poorly. The fact that it needs such a short cooldown really points to the weakness in the kit prior to 70. Even with pressing this button as often as you can while breaking it, dark knight still feels undertuned in comparison to the other two tanks in terms of mitigations and dps.

However, I do feel this conversation has gone down a semi random path of needing to measure up to low priority mitigation and low priority selfsustain of the other tanks, and I feel this is to the detriment of the conversation as a whole leading people to start new conversations.

tl;dr
TBN is basically a versitile catch all skill requiring timing and fight knowledge. Used and communicated well it can be helpful for healer dps and personal/individual mitigation, but is a low reward (one to 3 potency per use in practice I think) with high risk to personal dps (risking 140 potency per use). Overall dark knight feels slightly undertuned for the amount of utility and dps it brings, but people seem to be really caught up on one powerful skill meant to fill in every gap dark knight has in its mitigation toolbox.

[FallenWings]

If you don't want easy mitigation and a higher skill ceiling we'll gladly take them.

Take them, WAR is continuing to disappoint me with how mindless it has become. I don't like IR because of how 'hard' it is, I welcome that challenge. I hate it because of what it does to WAR outside of it and how it breaks my beloved Unchained.

Outside of their numbers, WAR is just not FUN. Pressing a oGCD on virtually off cooldown and spamming a linear SE>SP>SP rotation is mind numbing.

I'll gladly take DRKs overall toolkit. Atleast with DRK there is mana/blood management as well as the various sprinkling of Bloodspillers, Salted Earth placements and TBN to keep me active despite its single combo rotation.

The only issue(for me) really was numbers for the most part but the class is at the very concept, fun to play and execute. That should be something to be considered in the design of a class. How fun it is to play mechanically.

[Launched]

A bit of a tangent, but I can't help but notice a distinct inability between DRK and WAR mains to see eye-to-eye on the value/lack thereof inherent in their different playstyles. They mitigate effortlessly, but their DPS requires a bit more effort to maximize, however they are rewarded with the highest tank DPS for doing so, and they think this is awful. All you see is them complaining about how hard it is to do damage on their job.

Meanwhile in DRK world, we would kill to mitigate with the ease that they do, and to have a higher skill ceiling that rewards us for maximizing the job. I wonder how the community doesn't see this. Would they rather have to work for their mitigation whilst barely being rewarded at all in DPS for optimization? Cause if so they should all play DRK if you ask me.

It's because from a WAR point of view, the things we do better than the other tanks don't actually make a difference in how fast or efficiently or safely we clear fights.

We do more dps, yes. On average, 50-80dps more than PLD and 90-130dps more than DRK depending on percentile. The problem is, this isn't HW anymore. Those are actually smaller dps gaps than the ones between the tanks in Creator. (Edit: I forgot about A9S aoe padding. PLD was 170/100/200 dps behind DRK in A10S, A11S and A12S respectively, while DRK was very close to WAR). We're doing 80% more damage and the gap hasn't really changed. In relation to the entire party's dps, the dps gained by playing WAR is just completely irrelevant.

Yes, we have the best mitigation. But you're comparing tanks individually as if you're solo tanking instead of being part of a team. It doesn't matter which combination of tanks you take, you can reliably survive any tankbuster, and beyond that point more mitigation is useless overkill. A PLD/DRK combination has TBN and Intervention/Sheltron (depending on who's tanking) for every single tankbuster, that's a lot of mitigation even before using other skills like Rampart. Taking WAR in place of either other tank won't suddenly make things easier to heal because you should be making use of both tanks' cooldowns.

[Chrono_Rising]

This isn't a warrior feedback thread.

I'm not exactly happy with how they have taken so much from dark knight: parry procs, parry resets, and a whole host of oGCD's. It didn't take a huge amount of skill to push these buttons on cooldown, but it gave us some flavor if you will. I would love to see some job changes that actually restored some of this flavor by giving an interaction between our skills.

Bloodspiller: lowers cost of dark arts by 20% for 5 seconds

Dark Arts: lowers the timer on delirium by 3 seconds per use.

[Jandor]

This isn't a warrior feedback thread.

That's warriors for you, they just can't help themselves .

[Launched]

This isn't a warrior feedback thread.

Yeah, DRKs should really focus on their own job instead of complaining so much about WAR and WAR players.

[SyzzleSpark]

Yeah, DRKs should really focus on their own job instead of complaining so much about WAR and WAR players.

The irony in this post is not wasted I hope.

[Launched]

The irony in this post is not wasted I hope.

I try to avoid posting in DRK threads because I'm not interested in the job and don't plan on leveling it any time soon. But I'm not going to ignore posts like "All you see is them complaining about how hard it is to do damage on their job". You're basically just saying "WAR is fine, it does the most dps and has the best mitigation but WAR players are lazy", and you're dismissing the complaints of a lot of people. Tank balance isn't going to improve when people who don't play a job start parroting things like that. Keep your criticism focused on DRK, not on the other jobs you're less invested in (or their players).

[Chrono_Rising]

I try to avoid posting in DRK threads because I'm not interested in the job and don't plan on leveling it any time soon. But I'm not going to ignore posts like "All you see is them complaining about how hard it is to do damage on their job". You're basically just saying "WAR is fine, it does the most dps and has the best mitigation but WAR players are lazy", and you're dismissing the complaints of a lot of people. Tank balance isn't going to improve when people who don't play a job start parroting things like that. Keep your criticism focused on DRK, not on the other jobs you're less invested in (or their players).

There is a difference in saying these jobs have x, y, and z compared to dark knight which does not have an analog. There is a difference in comparing the utility of two classes and asking why the class with less utility does less dps and has less tools for mitigation.

I am not one of the people claiming dark is particularly challenging nor do I claim paladin or warrior is easy, and I don't see a ton of posts here doing that either. However, we don't tank in a vacuum and we do need to compare our kit to the competition.

Perhaps you have an issue in a warrior or paladin balance thread, and perhaps that is with particular people. I think the proper place to address that is in that thread rather than attacking the dark knight community as a whole here and generalizing us as you claim to have been generalized, this is detracting from the conversation as a whole.