Thread: 4.1 Dark Knight Feedback and fixes

The balance of tanks is appalling, especially given this is the expansion in which tank balance was to be given a priority. The problem is these promises were not delivered, what actually happened is one tank was buffed tremendously while the others were stripped of their utility while war had some of its utility restored.
Dark Knight is far out of balance with respect to the other two tanks and needs actual attention.

Mitigation: Boils down to two things:
1) TBN as a buff is too short. This needs to shield for at least 6 seconds and needs a mana cut of 600 mana.

2) Shadow Wall is a bad form of sentinel and and vengeance. There is no reason this should be on a 3 minute cooldown. It should either have a 2 minute cooldown or have an additional effect to justify the three minutes. Or take a middle ground and give it a 150 second recast, 15 second duration and give it the blood price effect regardless of stance. This is not a new complaint, and its time someone actually did something other than ignore this request for 2 years.

DPS: We are behind both paladin and warrior while mitigating less and bring less utility to the team, while other classes got to keep their procs for blocking, ogcds, and dots and even received entirely new buffs and powerful skills, ours were stripped and the new skills do not make up the difference of what was lost.

1) Delirium is disappointing as a buff. On a two minute cool down this should double our damage output for a short time (12 seconds) while also doubling the effects of blood price or blood weapon.

2) Dark Passenger is in a ridiculous state where most darks are taking it off their hotbars since they cannot justify the mana output for the damage and mitigation returns. Please cut the mana cost of this skill by half while not cutting the potency.

3) Our dps buffs blood weapon and blood price line up for every other party dps window. Please take 10 seconds off their cooldowns to give them better synergy with trick attack and other 1 minute buffs.

4) Bloodspiller potency should always be 140 potency above our average GCD to make TBN worthwhile. This is a no brainer.

Utility: TBN is only situationally useful at best, having one tank have a cost on a defensive utility while the other two can mitigate as much or more for free is a formula for pushing dark knight out of statics and pf. We need a party utility that actually brings something to the table.

1) Make sole survivor a party regen buff turning the parties dps into a HOT and mana refresh. This would pair well with the other tanks shields, while staying true to dark knight lore.

We see patch after patch of being ignored, or the only issues being fixed being bugs. People are already being asked to switch their mains for savage content, and the lack of attention will only make this worse. If this continues the only reasonable change to dark knight will be deleting the class since the people who main it will have switched or unsubbed, but I suppose that when that happens tanks can finally be balanced.

Originally Posted by Aana

Question though. Drks mitigation on paper is behind Pld/War. But when you take drk into an actual fight and play it it works out. Mostly out of tank stance (war looses out on IB the best CD in the game) in fights with magical tank busters erywhere (making dark mind REALLY friggin good in practice) it fairs rather well. Is it really a balance problem when it only exists in theory? (Specifically regarding mitigation).

In a vacuum it looks bad, but when you put it into current, real situations the mitigation issues get significantly washed out. I don't know if it was intentional or not but SE has balanced the mitigation aspect with the situation instead of true tank balance. But the question is, does it matter what it is on paper when in practice it works out?

To use an analogy, its like starcraft balance. Zerg crushes terrans on flat, open ground. Terrans win in narrow passageways and chokes. Often the solution to 'imbalance' in that matchup was to change the map pool you play on to better balance open vs closed areas than change the race. FFXIV has given us a buncha spaced out magical tank busters for drk to nom nom on and the meta says play out of tank stance which neuters the bulwark of defence (War) significantly. Do we really need to overhaul drks mitigation based on paper when its performing fine (regarding mitigation. I'm not touching the other stuff).

IMO this is not an in theory difference in mitigation, and certainly isn't in the case of paladin vs. dark in mitigation. However, for the warrior question I would need a significant amount of time to collect enough of a sample to show it statistically. Part of the problem is that we still have this pervasive idea of warrior being only an OT which makes collecting a large random sample difficult and in groups who actually swap to maximize mitigation we need to compare boss uptime as well. I don't think there is a website which collects mitigation statistics saddly.

However, you claim that the two are equal (or at least differences are washed out) in practice, have you collected the data already and are willing to share it publicly?

Arguing from experience (inherently flawed I admit), healers generally seem to have less of an issue healing warrior through fluff damage and tank busters, the fluff is primarily physical which warrior has more mitigation there compared to dark knight. We will also need to see how the warrior shielding will be used to impact their mitigation as well. Tank busters are usually big one hits, which dark deals with well, but the majority of the damage of a fight is the time between tank busters, which is usually physical and so dark is at a disadvantage there. Maximizing healers time dpsing is roughly equivalent to minimizing the fluff damage, and dark has less tools to do this than the others.

The real disadvantage comes from turns like v3s where the damage is primarily physical including the tank busters. Dark can make it through, but pld and war are definitely at an advantage. How popular physical turns will be in the future we have no idea. Alexander became increasingly physical damage towards the end.

Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

IMO this is not an in theory difference in mitigation, and certainly isn't in the case of paladin vs. dark in mitigation. However, for the warrior question I would need a significant amount of time to collect enough of a sample to show it statistically. Part of the problem is that we still have this pervasive idea of warrior being only an OT which makes collecting a large random sample difficult and in groups who actually swap to maximize mitigation we need to compare boss uptime as well. I don't think there is a website which collects mitigation statistics saddly.

However, you claim that the two are equal (or at least differences are washed out) in practice, have you collected the data already and are willing to share it publicly?

Arguing from experience (inherently flawed I admit), healers generally seem to have less of an issue healing warrior through fluff damage and tank busters, the fluff is primarily physical which warrior has more mitigation there compared to dark knight. We will also need to see how the warrior shielding will be used to impact their mitigation as well. Tank busters are usually big one hits, which dark deals with well, but the majority of the damage of a fight is the time between tank busters, which is usually physical and so dark is at a disadvantage there. Maximizing healers time dpsing is roughly equivalent to minimizing the fluff damage, and dark has less tools to do this than the others.

The real disadvantage comes from turns like v3s where the damage is primarily physical including the tank busters. Dark can make it through, but pld and war are definitely at an advantage. How popular physical turns will be in the future we have no idea. Alexander became increasingly physical damage towards the end.

I have run 'theoretical' models of uptime etc which others have done before comparing CDs. But that's right back to the theoretical. As you mentioned, hard data is rare as FF logs doesn't have a lot of war MTs. But I think that is telling in and of itself. But if that shows war's squishiness out of Defiance, or rather, shows Plds strength using its shield is hard to say. But even in Drk/War comps the Drk is largely the MT.

For my own experience, I ran as war in a war/drk combo for all of HW and start of SB. We then replaced the drk with another, less experienced drk who since changed to pld. TLDR: as I was the experienced tank I have been MT as war for 1/3 (2 we swap obviously) and we haven't beat 4 yet. I think war tanking V3 over Drk makes sense for reasons you've stated. Being able to use Raw Int as a tank buster CD makes life much easier. Similarly I hate tanking V1 for the opposite and wish our pld tanked that one. Were at the point where holmgang may not even trigger and just leaves me in dire need of a heal in the lower tiers.

During progression it was really nice. War in defiance is just indestructible. We can heal, we IB everything, more CDs than we can shake a stick at. But as soon as we got comfy and started pushing DPS to clear and dropping stance, it just became a whole new ball game. The loss of both tank stance+IB for virtually every damaging move hurts. A lot. -40%ish mitigation for nearly every move is just hugely painful while drk/pld just loose 20%. The loss of insta heal equilibrium on a short CD for both oh shit moments and recovery is lost. This leaves us with the basic CD suite that every tank has. We have functionally 1 more CD than pld/drk (ToB) but loose the always on (IB/Shelltron/TBN). I think people underestimate how much padding that constantly available mitigation gives. I like to compare it to: Imagine Tanking as Drk out of grit, but we take away TBN (lock behind grit) and give you ToB to replace it. You could also swap dark mind for Raw int, but that is a pro or con depending on the fight. That doesn't sound very appealing, but that's closer to war tanking in deliverance imo.

Its certainly doable, but think of it this way. War has 1 more CD. But when we have no CD available, that's it. Drk/Pld always have a near equivalent to rampart on demand to fall back on. They never 'dont' have a CD. That easily counters 1 CD deficit and (imo) the shorter timers for that reason. If we turtle tank, war has a very distinct advantage. Defiance war is really just silly tbh. But take that away and I find war to be quite rough as MT. But on that note, pld trumps all tanks in that category by a wide margin. Were really discussing the narrow gap betweemn 2nd/3rd, not closing the gap to 1st.

I also cant ignore that the game is more than savage. War just doing normal stuff by normal players can sit in defiance and be REALLY forgiving and EZ mode. When we talk about top level performance its practically a different game. Does the fact that war has an easy time tanking lower stuff factor into balance at high end speed run style raids? Should it? /shrug.

Originally Posted by Aana

I have run 'theoretical' models of uptime etc which others have done before comparing CDs. But that's right back to the theoretical. As you mentioned, hard data is rare as FF logs doesn't have a lot of war MTs. But I think that is telling in and of itself. But if that shows war's squishiness out of Defiance, or rather, shows Plds strength using its shield is hard to say. But even in Drk/War comps the Drk is largely the MT.

For my own experience, I ran as war in a war/drk combo for all of HW and start of SB. We then replaced the drk with another, less experienced drk who since changed to pld. TLDR: as I was the experienced tank I have been MT as war for 1/3 (2 we swap obviously) and we haven't beat 4 yet. I think war tanking V3 over Drk makes sense for reasons you've stated. Being able to use Raw Int as a tank buster CD makes life much easier. Similarly I hate tanking V1 for the opposite and wish our pld tanked that one. Were at the point where holmgang may not even trigger and just leaves me in dire need of a heal in the lower tiers.

During progression it was really nice. War in defiance is just indestructible. We can heal, we IB everything, more CDs than we can shake a stick at. But as soon as we got comfy and started pushing DPS to clear and dropping stance, it just became a whole new ball game. The loss of both tank stance+IB for virtually every damaging move hurts. A lot. -40%ish mitigation for nearly every move is just hugely painful while drk/pld just loose 20%. The loss of insta heal equilibrium on a short CD for both oh shit moments and recovery is lost. This leaves us with the basic CD suite that every tank has. We have functionally 1 more CD than pld/drk (ToB) but loose the always on (IB/Shelltron/TBN). I think people underestimate how much padding that constantly available mitigation gives. I like to compare it to: Imagine Tanking as Drk out of grit, but we take away TBN (lock behind grit) and give you ToB to replace it. You could also swap dark mind for Raw int, but that is a pro or con depending on the fight. That doesn't sound very appealing, but that's closer to war tanking in deliverance imo.

Its certainly doable, but think of it this way. War has 1 more CD. But when we have no CD available, that's it. Drk/Pld always have a near equivalent to rampart on demand to fall back on. They never 'dont' have a CD. That easily counters 1 CD deficit and (imo) the shorter timers for that reason. If we turtle tank, war has a very distinct advantage. Defiance war is really just silly tbh. But take that away and I find war to be quite rough as MT. But on that note, pld trumps all tanks in that category by a wide margin. Were really discussing the narrow gap betweemn 2nd/3rd, not closing the gap to 1st.

I also cant ignore that the game is more than savage. War just doing normal stuff by normal players can sit in defiance and be REALLY forgiving and EZ mode. When we talk about top level performance its practically a different game. Does the fact that war has an easy time tanking lower stuff factor into balance at high end speed run style raids? Should it? /shrug.

As far as V1S Warrior has an excellent defensive rotation because of the physical cleaves that come before the magical tank buster. Mitigating those two hits is a major boon to healers, and can be mitigated further by using rampart or vegeance shortly after the first one to catch the second cleave for free as well as the tank buster for bonus healer helping. thats good practice for both groups of runners. The new HP shields (which apply to warrior as mitigation) are a helpful addition for healers for the double roar mechanics and other such party wide damage, which depending on your CD rotation can be snap shot and turned into bonus shields at the end.

In Ex death the 16K autos and holmgang basically mean its cheese time for warrior, you can have mitigation up for everything HG the buster, then swap and have your cotank do the same, and then swap back to war and repeat, and this is without touching your new shields which are up for every fire phase again lowering raid wide healing and reducing party wide deaths. The shields are what make warrior really stand out over dark knight in neo.

The game is more than savage, but IMO these issues are a non issue outside of difficult content. Theres no real time where I felt 1 more thing would have saved me in a dungeon. However, on the note of "one more" mitigation I believe with the new shake it off we are at two more now, also if dark or paladin were to fall back into their tank stance, war presumably could do the same and gain access to a oGCD self heal as well as the third mitigation which is IB. The disparity becomes worse bringing tank stance into the conversation not better, IMO of course.

Originally Posted by Aana

...As you mentioned, hard data is rare as FF logs doesn't have a lot of war MTs. But I think that is telling in and of itself. But if that shows war's squishiness out of Defiance, or rather, shows Plds strength using its shield is hard to say. But even in Drk/War comps the Drk is largely the MT. ...

The final thing I will say about this post, is that warrior is thought of as the go to OT and these prejudices are likely from misunderstandings of wars kit. For all of HW people agreed that warrior was likely the better MT and OT, but paladin and dark knight relied on taking damage for their numbers, and war did not. Therefore to maximize dps warrior became the "OT" while pld and drk were viewed as the go to MT, and going back to Gordias, this was only true for the parties that didn't run double warrior. That was time before LB penalty. This idea has persisted into SB, but there is really no reason for it anymore. Just because the community runs warrior as OT still does not imply that they are an inferior MT, they just likely have held onto the old meta ideas.