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

Originally Posted by Syrellaris

And that is exactly where the problem is at ain't it? DPS is king? No, dps is part of the fight but should not be the go to for everything. There is multiple ways to balance fights around classes, it doesn't have to be purely dps. It takes a bit more effort sure, but at least it removes the issue of cookie cutter templates that we currently have. Each tank is pretty much the exact same thing, there is no uniqueness to any of em. Well besides how flashy some of the animations are.

Well I don't personally have a problem with it, it's how I came to enjoy the game. If I wanted a different meta I'd play a different game.

Originally Posted by Hruodig

Well I don't personally have a problem with it, it's how I came to enjoy the game. If I wanted a different meta I'd play a different game.

There isn't enough "good game" anywhere around to announce "I choose the game for the meta", pretty much you just came and fitted into a meta and now can't imagine something else.

Originally Posted by akisya

Currently, the tank balance is far worse than HW was among the tanks.

Didn't read the rest after this as this is simply false. In terms of damage, tanks are closer now than they were in HW. In terms of speed kill meta, drk being non-meta hardly hinders the party like paladin did in HW (with the lack of magic mitigation + int down).

Yes, drks need help, yes drks should do more dmg than plds, but no the balance is not worse than it was in HW lol

I suppose it depends on your point of view. As a PLD main who didn't run DRK past A2S, you might feel that the balance is a lot better now. Most DRK mains probably feel the opposite. But we're not talking about whether the "balance" is subjectively good for the job you're presently playing. We want to see a variety of strong comps. It keeps the game interesting.

To be honest, I don't really care to debate whether PLD had it worse in HW. Either way, the most glaring problem across both HW and SB is that we can't seem to find a tank balance in which PLD and DRK are simultaneously relevant. The core problem is actually identical, because it was never addressed, only sidestepped.

Originally Posted by Lyth

I suppose it depends on your point of view ... you might feel that the balance is a lot better now. Most DRK mains probably feel the opposite

This isn't Star Wars where we say Jedis are evil from a point of view. We use data. In terms of points relative to dps score, in creator warrior's were 2.3 points better than drk in terms of dps, and they were 8.6 better than pld (as an average for all bosses). In SB warriors are ranked 1.6 points better than pld, and 4.1 better than drk.

In short, the difference between the two worst tanks in creator was 6.3 in favor of drk, and in SB it is 2.5 in favor of pld. All this can be viewed in the statistics page.

For speed runs in creator, for top 20 fastest kills, there was 0 paladins in A9S, 0 in A10S, 1 in A11S, and 0 in A12S, and 1 in faust.

For speed runs in delta, for top 20 fastest kills, there is 1 dark for O1S, 6 in O2S, 2 in O3S, 7 in exfaust, and 6 in Neo.

EDIT: Being objective is important when wanting people to take you seriously with requests to change your class. "Balance is *far worse* now than in HW" is a false statement with the information available to us.

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.