Thread: 4.11+ DRK Suggestions/Balance Changes from a "Hardcore" Player

Originally Posted by Claire_Pendragon

...Mainly mitigation, as we now see 2 tanks with raid wide mitigation...

I agree with you fully on everything you said, Claire. It is for this reason dark knights do need assistance. In fact, my DRK and I are currently holding the global #1 spot for pld/drk combined tank dps and still we are having the drk switch to warrior, specifically because a higher dps potential is possible there and now shake it off helping healer DPS out (with potential LB building cheese happening as well).

But if we are going to be honest, there will always be a tank that needs assistance, and the non meta speed kill one will be making posts on the forums.

The problem with using normalised values is that they are normalised relative to the highest dps job. There are three issues with this. Firstly, the gap between tanks and dps has increased since HW, due in part to changes to how our gear scales, so each point of difference represents a bigger discrepancy. Secondly, every job does more dps than it did in HW, so again, each point of difference represents a bigger discrepancy. Third, the normalization (i.e. the divisor) depends on the percentile that you're looking at (i.e. it's inconsistent, and you have to say specifically which percentile data the normalisation was done at).

It's like saying DRK does x% less damage, except that it's even more misleading, because you're dividing by an even bigger number (i.e. from the top dps job, rather than a tank) to make the dps discrepancy seem smaller than it actually is.

I think you misunderstood. It's a question of how you represent your data. If the top dps job (lets say SAM) does 5800 on a fight, then one point on the normalised scale is worth about 60 dps. If the top dps job at a different percentile (let's say MNK) does 1800, then one point on the normalised scale is worth about 18 dps. So even if you look at the same fight, on the same tier, the normalisation scale varies based off of percentile. In fact, the normalisation of each job varies with percentile, so it's actually meaningless to say "job X has a score of Y". Does a 3 point difference represent 54 dps, or does it represent 180 dps? It depends on the percentile. If you can't even use normalised values to assess a single job, on a single fight (because it varies with percentile and the top dps done by any job at that percentile), then imagine trying to compare two different jobs, in two different tiers, in two different expansions. Good luck with that.

As far as speedkills go, some players just have their preferences, either because they really like a given job, or because they have invested a lot of time training on it. Even in HW, you could outplay a more powerful job if you wanted to with tighter uptime and overall better play. I'm not asking who the twenty best players are. But that doesn't mean that the right player on the right job couldn't push those numbers even further. The problem that I'm seeing is that there's enough of a difference at the moment that more good players are starting to switch off of DRK because of the incentives than the ones sticking to their guns (or greatswords, as it were.)

Originally Posted by Lyth

I think you misunderstood...

You're right, I did, because I assumed you knew what you were talking about. The actual DPS count does not matter in the slightest when comparing classes of different expansions to see if balance is better or worse. If in patch 7.0 pld could do 77k dps and the drk could do 78k dps, that would be a difference of 1000 DPS, and if we have them both be identical in terms of percentage score, that would make them completely balanced despite the large "disparity" of 1k dps in this expansion. It's why we use percentages.

When ranking based off the highest dps, if warrior does 68% of that in both creator and delta, we can go ahead and assume that warrior is the standard and use that to determine how close the other tanks are.

Go a step further and actually see how the other tanks compare if warrior was 100% on the DPS scale, and you find that DRK is 96% of a warrior's DPS and PLD is 86.6% of a warrior's DPS as of creator, and in SB pld is 98% of a warrior's dps and drk is 94% of that same warrior.

Again, it's not relative to one number. If it was, then it wouldn't make a difference. The scale itself depends on both the fight as well as the specific percentile that you are looking at. You can cherry pick whichever percentile you like, and your 3 normalised points means something completely different. The normalisation process is percentile and fight specific, and it changes the scale. There is no point in comparing two different numbers under two different normalisation processes.

Originally Posted by Lyth

Again, it's not relative to one number...

Then let's use every savage fight in creator and SB, assuming a 95 percentile skill level, since you don't want to use the average of all of them combined into one meaningless statistical number.

A9S
Drk: 97%
Pld: 82.8%

A10S
Drk: 97%
Pld: 88.2%

A11S
Drk: 100% (warrior is actually 99% here)
Pld: 93%

A12
Drk: 98%
Pld: 86.9%

See a trend? Now here's Delta:

O1S
Pld: 98%
Drk: 92.7%

O2S
Pld: 100% (tied with warrior)
Drk: 92.7%

O3S
Pld: 96%
Drk: 94.3%

Neo
Pld: 97%
Drk: 95.2%


These are the fights people are concerned with when discussing that drks are the weakest. All of these numbers are in comparison each tank's performance in each savage fight in comparison to who performs the best. These are the numbers that matter. It gets averaged into what I had listed in my earlier post, but since you wanted to see every individual fight... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Originally Posted by Zykor

These are the fights people are concerned with when discussing that drks are the weakest. All of these numbers are in comparison each tank's performance in each savage fight in comparison to who performs the best. These are the numbers that matter. It gets averaged into what I had listed in my earlier post, but since you wanted to see every individual fight... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wouldn't it be more accurate to use Alexander 1-4?

Fact of the matter is that expansions are pretty hard resets, and even though Omega is 'level 70' content compared to 60, Omega 1-4 is still entry tier and thus should be compared to Alexander 1-4.