Fixing Dark Knight, Properly

[SyzzleSpark]

By making TBN a straight up damage gain in that one circumstance, the rest of the design will only be seen as sub-optimal in its use. ... It's now sub-optimal.

You're so stuck on "optimal" when "optimal" was never part of the design decision in the OP, any more than Inner Beast, Defiance-Equilibrium, Clemency, or PoA are "optimal". In this game where DPS is synonymous with optimization by your own admission...

If it's a DPS gain, people are going to do it. That's just the way it works.

...sacrificing DPS for mitigation is obviously suboptimal.

Pointing out a self-evident and readily inferred element of an opposing argument as proof of its falsehood when that same element was part of the original premise does nothing to advance your own argument. Moving The Goalpost, Red Herring, Irrelevant Conclusion, idk which applies. Probably all of them.

The idea succeeds in its premise: TBN as it exists now (1 use per 15s) is no longer a DPS loss. Good. This is what people wanted. But... In addition, it gives a DRK the option to sacrifice DPS (by using increasingly DPS-inefficient casts of the ability) for more mitigation, an option that DRK currently does not have. The goal wasn't a mechanic that was universally optimal regardless of usage, the goal was to give DRK a choice between "optimal" and "potentially not dying". That's really all there is to it.

It also, as Crater mentioned in his reply to my first post, does this without laying a finger on Bloodspiller, thus avoiding the situation wherein too many of DRK's DPS eggs are in one basket a la WAR's Fell Cleave. I personally could go either way on this as I think costs could be cut to allow us more meaningful burst windows, but either way, the OP states its intentions pretty clearly and the changes meet the conditions of those intentions.

[Reynhart]

It's generally pretty agreed-upon that DRK gets the short end of the stick compared to the other tanks when it comes to their basic weaponskill combos. They have one fewer combo than the other two tanks, period, and they're the most heavily-penalized tank for using their enmity combo. And despite this, they're also more reliant on their combos for damage and enmity - DRK has no enmity-generating off-GCD like Circle of Scorn, Shield Swipe, or Onslaught

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.

DRK does not have a +damage cooldown on a timer like Berserk, Requiescat, or Fight or Flight that they can use to 'hide' low-DPS combos in, and DRK has no way to 'make up for' any lost damage from their enmity combo, the way that PLD can use Sheltron to recover MP they don't get from Riot Blade.

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.

[SyzzleSpark]

snip

RoH is a big loss, but after establishing enmity you have two oGCDs with modifiers that help you sustain it. DRK doesn't. Also bringing up DA Powerslash is kind of a loaded argument, as using that just makes the potency loss even bigger. In any discussion about balance you, for better or for worse, have to consider unoptimized and unorganized play just as much as top tier raiding. Enmity may be trivialized for some of us, but in dungeons and raid pugs it can still frequently boil down to you and you alone if you are paired with poor players.

Darkside isn't a consideration, because its always on, so its potencies are balanced around it. WAR has SE. 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). We're talking about things outside of things that are always running, things like Berserk, FoF, etc. DA is our per-GCD-basis form of this, but its not enough, and statistically our DPS is bottom tier and we don't bring anything to the raid that makes up for this, and certainly nothing that isn't 1-up'ed by the equivalents the other tanks possess.

[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.

[Crater]

The purpose of Despair, in your own words, is to provide Dark Knights a means of exchanging DPS for Mitigation on demand.

No. The purpose of the mechanic is to give DRK the ability to use their active mitigation skill more than once in quick succession, to deal with heavy incoming damage that also comes in quick succession. Paladin can do this with Sheltron; Warrior can do this with Inner Beast; both of those tanks are less reliant on their active mitigation tools than Dark Knight is. If Dark Knight is going to be as reliant on its active mitigation as it is - which is fine, and which I think is a good differentiator for the class - then it needs to have the ability to use its active mitigation in such a flexible way.

This purpose is firstly contradicted by introducing it as a mechanic that starts with a DPS gain. You are not sacrificing DPS for mitigation on demand. You're gaining DPS for utilizing Mitigation.

The fact that the initial, 0-Despair use of TBN is a clear-cut DPS advantage serves to encourage use of the skill, because at its current 2400/50 implementation, it's basically a break-even skill, which makes people reluctant to use it unless they need it (but make no mistake, they still use it). There's no contradiction here; this effect is intended to, first, encourage more use of the skill, and to make it a positive gain for the class when used on the 15-second soft cooldown, and secondly, to give the skill a starting point where Despair doesn't ramp up to the current 2400/50 level until its second use. Which leads us to...

Despair is meant as a counterbalance. It's to say "Hey, you need this mitigation, but now you're going to pay harder for it." You've already contradicted the point of it by rewarding the player with a DPS gain on the first hit, so it's inconsistent. By making TBN a straight up damage gain in that one circumstance, the rest of the design will only be seen as sub-optimal in its use. It won't matter that the second use within 15 seconds is just like it is now. It's now sub-optimal. And since TBN has such a short cooldown by comparison to other abilities, holding on to TBN to get the maximum damage with the best timed mitigation is a loss.

This is why Despair doesn't become a loss until the third consecutive use of the skill. At 2400/50, the skill is still used wherever people feel that they need the mitigation; the changes to the skill don't really work if the player is punished any time they have to use the skill twice in quick succession, but the changes to the skill become too powerful if they aren't punished for consecutive uses beyond the second.

This stuff about "nobody will ever use it twice because that's suboptimal" is absolute nonsense, sorry. It's just not how people play the game, even at a high level. It is, at best, true when a DRK is trying to optimize their own personal DPS, at the expense of the rest of their party. Consider that 3.x Warrior's best strategy for personal DPS optimization was to always alternate Storm's Eye and Butcher's Block. There were basically no good Warriors that actually did that, though, because it was an overall loss of DPS across the entire party to make the DRK/PLD pick up the slack to keep up with the needless OT enmity. The scale of the gain/loss in personal/party DPS here is of a similar scale - history indicates the opposite of what you're proposing.



Your standards of "If this isn't absolutely DPS-optimal, then it should not be in the game" are, similarly, absolutely laughable. Apply that standard to every other tank skill in the game, and you suddenly lose every single tank stance, Clemency, Equilibrium, Passage of Arms, Inner Beast, and... Wait, look. There aren't any Dark Knight abilities on that list besides the universal tank stance. That's weird - must be a coincidence.

[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.

[Kabooa]

This is why Despair doesn't become a loss until the third consecutive use of the skill.

Your standards of "If this isn't absolutely DPS-optimal, then it should not be in the game" are, similarly, absolutely laughable. Apply that standard to every other tank skill in the game, and you suddenly lose every single tank stance, Clemency, Equilibrium, Passage of Arms, Inner Beast, and... Wait, look. There aren't any Dark Knight abilities on that list besides the universal tank stance. That's weird - must be a coincidence.

It's a DPS loss at the second use -because the first use is a DPS gain-.

You only have to look at how people regard tenacity to see why this is a problem.

(For the record, people avoid almost all of those like the plague -unless they're going to die-.)

[SyzzleSpark]

It's a DPS loss at the second use -because the first use is a DPS gain-.

[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.