Fixing Dark Knight, Properly

[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.