Fixing Dark Knight, Properly

[Reynhart]

Darkside isn't a consideration, because its always on, so its potencies are balanced around it.

No, they're not. If you take a PLD and a DRK in tank stance, the 20% permanent damage buff is very significant.

PLD has a ludicrously potent DoT that provides a similar, constant pseudo buff. (The DoT ticks of GB are in the neighborhood of 20% of DRK's PPGCD, ergo, GB is essentially PLD's SE/DS).

And you don't count Bloodspiller in our rotation ? DA-BS has a higher potency than GB if you're under Grit, and you can easily use it as often as GB if you manage Blood Weapon properly. Blood Weapon that also increases our attack speed, thus increasing our potency/s. And what about Plunge or Carve & Spit ?
On top of that, DRK has the most forgiving rotation, precisely because it relies less on timed buffs, and can spend Dark Arts basically whenever it feels, as long as it doesn't overflow on MP.

I agree that DRK is a bit off, but it's definitely on the raid utility department, not on damage.

[SyzzleSpark]

not on damage.

DPS balance has nothing to do with this weaponskill or that buff. Its about the job and its kit as a whole. This isn't an argument worth having as there is ample evidence to the contrary on FFlogs, and not just on the max-tier padded runs, I'm talking from 100th percentile all the way down to 20th. Only at the most abysmally low levels of play do you see DRKs out-DPSing or even breaking even with the other tanks, likely due to players at that level doing things like using FoF on Holy Spirit instead of Requiescat, or hitting Fell Cleave every time they hit 50 Beast Gauge/paying no attention to Inner Release, etc. DPS statistics are low, but usage statistics are also low, which indicates there isn't a non-DPS incentive to bring DRK for a lot of people either.

This premise of "hey DRK's DPS isn't bad because these abilities have high potency" can't possibly be taken seriously.

[Crater]

I'm not so sure about that. RoH of Halone is a pretty big loss in potency, and missing the MP return for Riot Blade will probably prevent you one cast of Holy Spirit during your requiescat window, or worse, not trigger the damage buff. DRK also have an obscene enmity multiplier on DA-Power Slash, to the point where you frequently don't need any more enmity combo throughout the rest of the fight even when stance dancing. Considering any tank should do one enmity combo right at the start to let their DPS burst without any issue, it's not really a penalty.

No, but they have Darkside, a permanent (and now almost free) 20% damage boost. They're also the only tank that can increase the potency of their weapon skill, on top of having, on average, higher potencies that the other two tanks.

Apart from the lack of diversity in their weapon skills, I really don't think combos is where DRK get the short end.

Before I go into this, I need to make one thing very clear: The problem is not solely "DRK loses more potency by using enmity combos than the other tanks". The problem is that DRK also needs to generate more enmity from its combos, because it doesn't have passive enmity maintenance tools. Paladin has enmity multipliers and short cooldowns on both Shield Swipe and Circle of Scorn. Every 30-40 seconds or so, those two skills provide PLD with about as much enmity as the DA bonus on Power Slash.

Read that again, just to be sure - every 30-40 seconds, PLD gets the equivalent of a Power Slash DA, at zero DPS loss.

Warrior gets an even sweeter deal, and gets to use Onslaught twice in every IR/Berserk window. Berserked Onslaught all by itself gives almost as much enmity as a Power Slash DA, and they use twice, every two minutes, at the very least. Again, this is the optimal DPS rotation for these classes.



============ (Separator bar just for emphasis of that first part)

Onto the actual enmity loss.

First, losing the MP from Riot Blade is essentially a nonfactor on PLD, whereas losing the MP from Syphon Strike on DRK is almost exactly equivalent to a 70 potency DPS loss. The value of MP on PLD basically becomes zero after the PLD has secured enough MP to be able to use 5x Holy Spirit in their next Requiescat window - and that value doesn't increase again until PLD finds themself in a situation where they can either use extra Holy Spirits in lieu of a partial combo before a very long phase transition/downtime, or until PLD has enough extra MP to replace an entire 3-step combo with extra Holy Spirits.

Despite having that 'soft cap' on useful MP, PLD has multiple options to make up for losing out on a Riot Blade worth of MP. Sheltron, all by itself, tends to do the trick, and there's almost always an opportunity for 1-2 Sheltrons between Requiescat windows, even while off-tanking when there are no adds. PLD can also receive MP Refresh effects from the party, and can piggyback off of a BRD/MCH playing Refresh for the healers, or can request a Manashift from a Caster, or can even get an Ewer if an AST pulls one and has nothing better to do with it.

In addition to that, a significant portion of PLD's damage comes from persistent effects which are not impacted in the slightest by which combo they choose to use. Sword Oath's auto-attack ticks are the same strength regardless of whether you use Rage of Halone or Royal Authority, and Goring Blade ticks also continue at full strength regardless of which combo you use. Between those two effects, a PLD is adding somewhere in the ballpark of about 80 potency worth of damage to every GCD. And so the overall percentage of damage that a PLD loses to a Rage of Halone combo is much, much lower than what a DRK loses from Power Slash.

In terms of actual numbers, PLD loses 30 potency using Savage Blade instead of Riot Blade, 80 potency using RoH instead of RA (110 total, and Sword Oath/Goring Blade are unaffected, despite being stronger overall than Darkside). DRK loses 30 potency using Spinning Slash instead of Syphon Strike, 70 potency from losing the Syphon MP, and (somewhere in the ballpark of) 30 potency from losing the Souleater Blood generation (~130 total, or about 156 if you include Darkside).

The DPS loss of a DRK using Dark Arts on Power Slash is greater than the DPS loss of using Power Slash over Souleater to begin with, on top of what you're already losing.

Let's also not forget, just for the sake of completeness, that DRK has lower enmity modifiers on these skills than PLD does to begin with. Spinning Slash has a 5.25x modifier to Savage Blade's 6.3x, and Power Slash has a 5.5x modifier compared to Halone's 7x.


And the fact that Darkside is a permanent 20% buff compared to PLD having only partial FoF uptime is actually a point in PLD's favor in this respect. If a PLD needs to do some Rage of Halone combos to maintain enmity, they can use them during the combos where they don't have FoF running, which maximizes damage by putting boosts exclusively on their strongest combos, while getting their weakest combos out of the way during periods where they aren't running buffs - this is what I meant about DRK being unable to 'hide' their enmity combos in periods without a damage buff. You can't take Darkside away from your Power Slash combo and add extra Darkside to your next Souleater combo; you're just multiplying the DPS loss by Darkside's damage multiplier.




And just to fire a bullet into the head of the "DRK doesn't have it so bad on enmity" argument, let's take a look at what Warrior loses by using a Butcher's Block combo instead of Storm's Path:

- Warrior directly gains 20 potency (Skull Sunder is 200 to Maim's 190; Butcher's Block is 280 to Storm's Path's 270)
- Warrior gains 10 BG from Skull Sunder and 10 BG from Butcher's Block; Dark Knight gains 0 MP from Spinning Slash and 0 Blood from Power Slash
- The relative loss is only 10 BG, which is roughly equivalent to 50 potency. (+20 from our first point, -50 from BG loss = a 30 potency loss, compared to DRK's 130)
- The relative value of BG drops off slightly for WAR, because they generate enough of it that they can do 'perfect' IRs and Berserks and still have extra BG left over at the end, whereas the value of MP/Blood that DRK generates is once again constant.
- Warrior can very easily 'hide' a BB combo outside of their big Berserk buff windows; DRK is again unable to do that with any of their combos
- Skull Sunder and Butcher's Block have the same 6.3x and 7x enmity multipliers, respectively, that PLD has on their RoH combos, whereas DRK is once again behind at 5.25x and 5.5x
- Just to bring it up one more time: Warrior gets two Berserked Onslaughts in every IR window, in their optimal DPS rotation, both of which add a nearly equivalent amount of enmity as using DA on Power Slash, which is a massive potency loss.


DRK absolutely gets the short end of the stick with regards to their combos and their enmity generation - in fact they'd still be getting the short end of the stick under my proposed changes. All I'm seeking to do here is to mitigate those disadvantages so that they aren't so crippling to DRK while the other tanks get to just shrug off almost all enmity concerns.

[Mycow8me]

I really like Part III and most of part I. Blood price just needs to return MP based on how many mobs are on your enmity list, it could create a rare scenario in which they are not hitting you but are still on your list (Very rare) but fundamentally it will fix the core issue of marginal MP returns from single target tanking. 400MP or so and then it gets halved for each enemy on your enmity list or halved for every other enemy on the list (more forgiving on large group pulls) whatever SE thinks is more fair. Blood weapon makes doubleweaving without clipping impossible so either we need to not have to doubleweave or bloodweapon needs to boost dark arts affects instead of attack speed which would make much more sense in that its giving us MP to use dark arts more. The mp return needs to increase much more though.

Another edit: On the topic of Dark passenger, removing the blind affect actually lowers our mitigation for large pulls. One of the problems with using blind as a form of mitigation is it weakens the affect of bloodprice due to misses. Instead of blind it should be maybe a -5% flat attack power debuff on all the enemies it hits as seen from posts on other threads by the idea creators. In this way we are still being hit by all mobs for bloodprice MP returns and still receiving mitigation. It just makes sense.

Just my thoughts. Solid ideas though.

Edit: Ill post again with my thoughts on parts IV and V later today.

[MagiusNecros]

TBN is only a loss if the shield doesn't break as far as I am concerned. And I imagine TBN is probably the most exciting thing about DRK considering everything else is fucking awful.

[DaulBan]

I feel like a lot of these posts could be shored up by saying 'make tbn cost 1/2 a DA and make DP cost 1/2 a DA' and, I don't know, make Darkside 24% if you want some extra damage.

[Awful]

I love the proposed changes other than Bloodspiller, just doing more damage instead of what changes you opted for other than that amazing and I hope SE reads these threads as there's some amazing ideas.

[Souleater13]

This thread is a perfect example of what goes wrong. A person posts their ideas on the topic of dark knight's tool kit which i also agree needs adjustments but then turns into a pointless debate on 100 potency this, 1200 mp that.
I feel the skills need function adjustments first and foremost, the numbers should be worked out secondarily.


Part 1:
it would be interesting to try the OPs idea here, however i must comment on aoe skills.
Personally i dont like having unleash and abyssal both spam able at high levels.
i would like to see DRK get a trait the level abyssal is earned that turns unleash into an oGCD that once used is morphed into a one time use of Scourge that absorbs hp with dmg dealt.

Part 2:
agree on sole survival needs to be more useful.
regarding the connection between Delirium, blood weapon and price.
i would like to see Delirium become a weapon skill again that is oGCD and adds lower amounts of mp and slightly extend time to blood weapon and price so that it may be used way more often(almost spam able) so you are "fighting" to keep the buffs going longer.

Part 3:
agree with all mentioned here

Part 4:
I really like the shadow wall idea here.
I like dark mind getting the option treatment the way shadow wall did but perhaps something different with the Dark Arts version only because its almost too similar to the other tanks. What if it made the magic damage taken be shared evenly with nearby party members. or for the party buff take, makes magic dmg received by nearby party members become a dot instead burst for the duration.

The Blackest Night:
Could use adjustment not sure what is mentioned is it though.

with the changes mentioned it appears DRKs would be over filled with mp and while reading this thread earlier it is mentioned that we could be safe adding another skill.
Soul Enslavement: a oGCD ability. drains mp while active, the way Darkside used to but at a faster rate. while this is active souleater can be used with full effect without combos. or something on that idea that is balanced

[Chrono_Rising]

@Crater I like your ideas, especially about stance based combos. I am even hopeful for something of an effect tree which could go along with this and following a dark enfeeblement lore, for example:

Power Slash
Spinning Slash combo bonus: Increased emnity
Siphon Strike combo bonus: Scourage dot damage applied

Soul Eater
Spinning Slash combo bonus: physical damage down 10% (to balance dark mind being magic based)
Siphon strike combo bonus: HP Restore

Basically depending on our path through the skill tree we could change the effects of our abilities by comboing in a different way. By focusing on enfeeblement and drains we can stay true to dark knight lore without having button bloat and still increasing our rotation complexity.

I also like your section on offensive buffs, but I tend to agree with others that if we offer a party dps utility that we will be unbalance with respect to the other two. I would prefer a stronger personal buff from delirium, like double damage/resource regeneration or double dark arts potencies. Sole survivor is still tricky but I think it could play a role in being even a personal refresh based on our damage.

Lastly, if you want to take away our (and I use this in the loosest possible way) safety net of living dead, I would rather see it be at least a huge defensive buff, much bigger than 50%, more like 80% to 90% damage reduction for 20 seconds. Personally, I would like to see living dead become Dark Pact: reduces HP to 1 all damage taken by dark knight becomes HP restored duration of 15 seconds.

[SplittingSkies]

Sole survivor is still tricky but I think it could play a role in being even a personal refresh based on our damage.

I believe someone on another thread had a neat idea for what Sole Survivor could be: Works the same as a MCH's Wildfire, where it compiles the damage taken on the target for the duration its up and returns a % of the damage back to us as HP. Could also work for MP, but personally i'm more drawn to the HP return idea and using Crater's ideas on top of that, we would have skills/abilities that would provide us with ample MP return anyway.

Also, I wouldn't mind having a TA effect on it instead and it doesn't even have to be 10% could be 5% or work like a BRDs Foe requiem and give 3%. But I understand the element of tank balance is important and will only treat it as a fantasy, a guy can dream right?