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

Many people talk about TBN as if it's something you can always break on demand. That's probably true when you use your (10%) ally bubble, as it's something like a 5k barrier.

Your 20% barrier will only break on specific points in a fight, like cleaves. This is one of the reasons why a duration extension is a bad idea. It encourages TBN's use on autos, rather than specifically on big hits.

If the barrier was 20% regardless of target and the duration was fixed at 5s, you could easily make it a dps gain as a reward for knowing the cleave timings of the fight. Right now, you could shield every big hit on your co-tank with it (and it's extremely fun to), but you probably don't want to for potency reasons.

I think TBN probably -should- be encouraged on auto-attacks. The nature of the shield is such that it becomes more effective inversely with the strength of the incoming damage (up until the point where it fails to break), and so that's actually one of its strongest points, except for having a duration shorter than the maximum time between two auto attacks.

If anything, TBN's biggest failure is that it's actually not as strong as it should be against the big hits and tankbusters, usually forcing the use of a secondary cooldown to safely survive (DRK's 3.x toolkit of Foresight, Dark Dance, and Reprisal would actually be tremendously useful in that regard).

Since TBN is a DPS loss, on average, increasing the duration wouldn't encourage further use. It would only make it more forgiving, which I think is fair considering Paladins can use Intervention and Sheltron without losing any DPS.

Increasing the mitigation on the second target would be a fair way to justify increasing the net potency gain on TBN. My only concern with that though, is that it would further tip the scale in favor of off-tanking as a Dark Knight, when if anything they should make main tanking more rewarding.

The difference being that Infuriate costs nothing to use. It's just a free 50 Gauge. The Blood you gain when TBN breaks is offset by the 2400 MP you spend to use it. If TBN didn't cost MP, then yeah, we'd have a problem of people trying to break it on auto-attacks for a DPS gain. But as it is, that's not a problem. There's no reason to use outside of busters and periods of high sustained damage.

Again, I'll reiterate that auto attacks hit too hard in these fights to not attempt to TBN whatever is possible, especially if one even dreams of dropping Grit for any reason. Dark Knight has too little in between to mitigate spikes of damage from all angles to not rely on it. To "leave TBN alone" would imply a huge increase in active mitigation tools elsewhere to stay relevant if fights continue to be designed this way.

Why not leave BS cost as is but increase the potency of DA BS (like DA adds 160/180 pot instead of 140) this way it's a priority over the rest which I feel DRK could use because right now you just dump your DA on whatever.