Core Issues With 4.x Dark Knight

[Dio_Tiferet]

Summoners summon 3 should summon a Dark Knight instead of a Ifrit-Egi.

[Crater]

I think there's some merit to the idea of giving your tank stance some perks that work to mitigate the damage penalty.

The last time I really enjoyed playing Warrior was in 2.x, and that was largely because way back then, Defiance was actually a really good tank stance: Wrath stacks had a 2% Crit rate bonus each instead of the useless Parry bonus, Unchained had no non-Defiance equivalent, and Inner Beast was actually your strongest attack in either stance. With all that stuff added together, the actual DPS disparity between Defiance and non-Defiance was relatively small; closer to a 15% overall penalty even though Defiance reduced your damage by 25% at the time.

I think that at one point SE did try to consciously evoke some of that idea with Stormblood DRK. Blood Price being locked behind Grit makes it 'free' when you switch into it (and I think that most of DRK's 4.0 design work was done with the idea that Blood Price wouldn't be nerfed into oblivion), the Grit bonus to Syphon's MP recovery raises your effective average potency per weaponskill significantly, and (before they completely lost the plot and stopped trying) the initial version of Bloodspiller dealing the same damage in or out of Grit gave you access to your most powerful attack with no potency loss. Unfortunately, Blood Price got turned into useless garbage, Bloodspiller was given a Grit damage penalty because they couldn't be bothered to update the skill properly, and the Syphon Strike bonus is not enough to carry that concept all on its own. In addition to that, DRK arguably had the least penalized (albeit, yes, still very heavily penalized) stance swapping on Stormblood's launch, but even that little shred of dignity got blown up in the rush to make Warrior overpowered again.

Having said all that, though, I think the idea of giving damage perks to tank stances is a bit of an outdated notion. It was fun to play with in 2.x, because we all played the game a lot more cautiously back then, and tanking typically was actually done in tank stance, but that's been largely abandoned outside of early/blind progression or for players who aren't overly concerned with performance in the first place (and the game is better for it). "Having a good tank stance" these days is an incredibly fringe benefit, with about as much practical use as "having an AoE enmity skill that can be used at range", and shouldn't really be used to inform overall class design or class balance.

[Chrono_Rising]

No doubt there is merit, warrior has it right. Updated too fast lol. Agreed completely, I absolutely agree that there probably was this concept as described but you are right the connecting plot strings were severed and I don’t think tying them together is the correct solution.

[Reynhart]

Yes, and you quote it as 50, not 75. Yes it scales with skill speed, but the base potency is still 75.

Of course I did, since I specifficaly said "50 potency every 2.24 seconds". But yes, I should have said 56 potency. Again, wider gap.

Also you include the full 60 seconds for the sword oath buff, this may or may not actually work out since you might not auto when spamming holy spirit.

Holy Spirit has a shorther cast than your auto attacks, so you'll still do all your AA even when spamming HS.

The practice of turtle tanking is related to content, but if you feel the content needs to change to support this then this is a much bigger issue that just a little sole issue with dark knight.

DRK has its issue, sure. It's probably even worse than PLD was in HW, but I think most of it is related to how the jobs are designed vs the content. For example, the penalty regarding Oath and Beast gauge at 4.0 wouldn't have been a problem if bosses hit hard enough to discourage repeat stance swap. Giving TBN as the only new mitigation skill wouldn't be a problem if DPS wasn't that much more useful than mitigation. And even if stance dancing or tanking in DPS stance was kept, a turtle setup should offer some values, by redisrtibuting raid DPS between members (For example, healing a turtle should give healers significantly more time to DPS)

Even if you analysis was correct, and to be very clear it isn't, what does it prove except that maybe dark knight retains more damage in tank stance than paladin or warrior?

Nothing else

Does that mean we don't have dps issues?

No, but I never claimed that.

Do we not still have mitigation issues?

No, but I never claimed that.

Does it address how the class feels to play, or inconsistencies in its design?

Feeling is a very subjective point, I personally find it more fun to play than WAR.

Does it mean we have better selfsustain?

No, but I never claimed that.

Most importnantly: Does losing the least in activating tank stance mean groups want to take dark knight over a warrior or paladin who will dps more, mitigate more, and give the group higher defense through shields? Because to me, if this were even true and you analysis does not accurate reflect this, this seems like a fairly useless trophy to put on the dark knight shelf, and it looks pretty lonely.

No, it doesn't...it's almost as if someone clearly acknowledged that keeping your tank stance all the time was worthless...I can't remember who it was...

To be fair, even if Turtle DRK would deal more damage than Turtle PLD (Or Turtle WAR), since turtle tanking is basically an inefficient tactic in current content, it wouldn't do anything to make DRK "better".

[Chrono_Rising]

Of course I did, since I specifficaly said "50 potency every 2.24 seconds". But yes, I should have said 56 potency. Again, wider gap.

Read the tooltip, 75 potency scaled with autoattack or56 potency.

Regardless of the sword oath potency, your analysis doesn't actually reflect how tank stance interacts with skills, and your listed reasons for content issues again rely on the other two tanks penalties and not dark knights. Also, everyone can dps and do content both tanks and healers. It just requires teamwork. And given your above post it appears you recognize that the entire discussion you posted has nothing to do with the price of tea.

I don't think you are posting to do anything constructive at this point, as you are only commenting on autoattack potencies, and staying entirely silent about the fact that you completely ignore jobs having attacks which ignore their tank stance penalty despite assuming 100% tank stance uptime or glaring issues in their resource generation. I think you are just posting to argue. And I'm done wasting my time responding.

[Reynhart]

Read the tooltip, its 75 not 50.

Yeah, read the tooltip : Deals additional damage with a potency of 75 after each auto-attack. Damage affected by weapon delay.
Or do the math...
The current weapon delay of 2.24 change the effective potency of SwOath by the same calculation of auto-attacks. Why should I use a value that can't even be used in real situation, since no Sword has a 3s delay ?

In real situaiton, SwOath with a 2.24 gives 56 potency to the additionnal attack, not 75.

[MauvaisOeil]

Yeah, read the tooltip : Deals additional damage with a potency of 75 after each auto-attack. Damage affected by weapon delay.
Or do the math...
The current weapon delay of 2.24 change the effective potency of SwOath by the same calculation of auto-attacks. Why should I use a value that can't even be used in real situation, since no Sword has a 3s delay ?

In real situaiton, SwOath with a 2.24 gives 56 potency to the additionnal attack, not 75.

The bonus attack from SwOath is not calculated on the AA damage of the weapon, but on physical damage like a special attack.

[Chrono_Rising]

Back on topic...
Cursory overview of core issues as I see them:

*1. DPS
->Lowest sustained DPS, lowest burst DPS, no contribution to raid DPS, meaning having a DRK in your party is a 100% DPS loss assuming a given player can play WAR/PLD with an equal degree of skill or there is another player available that can do the same. Tank stance DPS is not a metric because it does not represent a measurable ceiling since sitting in tank stance for 100% of a fight (either by virtue of maintaining excessive mitigation that is not beneficial, or if mitigation is needed, by virtue of not utilizing swaps and thus giving both tanks equal DPS stance uptime) is essentially playing the job incorrectly, a situation around which we should not balance design decisions for any job or jobs, as that is how we got into this mess in the first place.

*2. Utility
->TBN as a utility is undertuned and cannot be accounted for by healers anymore than Parry investment could have been in 3.x
->A party is simply missing a massive amount of raid mitigation in the absence of either PLD or WAR.
->Tertiary or personal utilities (things like having high mobility, extra stuns, gap closers, CC, extra AoE or ranged DPS potential, etc.) were largely eradicated as a balancing metric between the tanks with the introduction of the CR ability system and new skills like Onslaught, essentially amounting to a healthy dose of homogenization.

3. Mitigation
->Reliance on defensive CDs tuned for spike damage to mitigate sustained damage.
->Piggy-backing off of the above, CDs are short in duration and mostly lengthy in recast.
->Mitigation outside of TBN is very poor, a symptom of balancing decisions intended to orbit TBN's design, which is problematic for reasons discussed in the resource management section.

4. Resource Management
->Blood gauge is poorly balanced by everything costing 50 gauge and no less.
->Conversion from Blood to Mana is on a 120s CD whereas the reverse conversion is on a 15s and entangled with a primary mitigation tool in TBN, meaning the choice is typically already made for us on our resource management via this ability as per whatever the current mitigation needs are at a given moment. In essence, in order to effectively utilize TBN at most basic level, we need to A. Need the mitigation, B. Have a surplus of mana, and C. have a shortage of Blood, which is FAR too many checkboxes to mark off every 15 seconds.
->Mana has been cemented as a standardized DPS resource whilst still being used to pay for mitigation; no other tank has this problem, in fact very few jobs in general have this problem.
->Blood gauge consumption is never a greater gain than an equivalent consumption of Mana, and occasionally is a loss, making "not capping out" the sole motivation for dumping the resource at all. The logic of its usage is circular.

*Mitigation and Resource Management are problems and are in many ways intertwined with DPS and Utility. However I have *'ed DPS and Utility due to these core issues representing a 100% loss to a group utilizing a DRK in lieu of either alternative, and therefore I believe these two areas are in the most dire need of addressing.

This is a really good and on topic post, I agree that the first two issues are our biggest priority for fixing. From a design perspective I think that our resource management and dps are so closely tied that they could probably be combined into a single issue, but I can also see why you would list them separately for clarity.

What do you think about us generating less mana in dps stance over grit?

[SyzzleSpark]

From a design perspective I think that our resource management and dps are so closely tied that they could probably be combined into a single issue, but I can also see why you would list them separately for clarity.

So, in my opinion, DPS issues can be addressed by simple math and crunching the numbers. Its a numeric deficit. There is an incongruency between DPS<=>Mana due to the latter's usage by defensive abilities, and an incongruency between Mana<=>Blood due to potency values and huge discrepancies in opportunity to dump and/or convert these resources, which makes fixing resource management a bit more involved. TBN is a big smoking gun here. I guess the reason I wanted to list them separately is because I believe one can be completely fixed without touching the other and vice versa. You could trim costs and returns across the board, remove effects from certain abilities and apply them to others, and lower the CD/effects of things like Delirium and make Resource management much more fun, active, and enjoyable without actually netting an overall DPS gain.

Basically DPS can be fixed by raising or lowering numbers (like potencies or costs, respectively), whereas resource management can be fixed by simply rearranging/redistributing numbers, if that makes any sense.

That being said you could obviously introduce changes that would fix both in the same fell swoop, but at this point I'm considering every possible avenue and layout of potential changes and how they could be implemented with minimal unforeseen consequences, and I think the distinction between DPS and resource management in that context is actually of considerable importance.

What do you think about us generating less mana in dps stance over grit?

I don't think that we actually do, overall, considering the massive return of Blood Weapon. In 15s out of Grit with BW of spamming Syphon-Souleater we gain roughly 8500 mana, whereas in the same amount of time in Grit with BP and Syphons, we see something more like 5500 (roughly, again).

The additional mana from Grit-Syphon is only about 2/5ths of the overall gain from BW in a similar timeframe (BW/BP's 15s duration), which means that to be balanced in ST, BP would have to make up that remaining 3/5ths in the same window, which, HAhahaha... it isn't even remotely close to doing. In Heavensward, this is PRECISELY how it was balanced. If BP were brought up to about 720 mana per tick (rendering it equivalent to HW BP, about 1.5x a BW tick), then you would gain about 3600 mana in a 15s window, which combined with the 4800 mana from Grit Syphon, would equal out to about the gains from BW+Syphon out of Grit. Interestingly, without the buff to Syphon, HW BP didn't do this either. If you made BP proportionate to its HW values and also kept the SB Grit Syphon buff, THEN (and only then) our mana generation in Grit would be equivalent to our mana generation out of Grit. But obviously, SE has no idea how to balance this in AoE.

At this point I'm all for them just cutting the crap and making BP a vanilla refresh, which would instantaneously fix this problem, or perhaps applying the Mana return in much the same way as the Blood, where we get, say, 120 mana per instance of damage taken, and 500-600 per server tick. It honestly frustrates me in a very real, IRL sense to realize how obvious the solutions are to people PAYING for the game, but not to the people getting PAID for the game.

That being said, its a bad decision on SE's part as it robs them of a single controlled variable that is constant between stances. Any changes to Syphon or BW/BP or even Delirium now warrant an equal and opposing change to eachother which just opens up more points of failure or details that SE could miss when making adjustments (and miss them they almost assuredly will...)

[Chrono_Rising]

I don't think that we actually do, overall, considering the massive return of Blood Weapon. In 15s out of Grit with BW of spamming Syphon-Souleater we gain roughly 8500 mana, whereas in the same amount of time in Grit with BP and Syphons, we see something more like 5500 (roughly, again).

The additional mana from Grit-Syphon is only about 2/5ths of the overall gain from BW in a similar timeframe (BW/BP's 15s duration), which means that to be balanced in ST, BP would have to make up that remaining 3/5ths in the same window, which, HAhahaha... it isn't even remotely close to doing. In Heavensward, this is PRECISELY how it was balanced. If BP were brought up to about 720 mana per tick (rendering it equivalent to HW BP, about 1.5x a BW tick), then you would gain about 3600 mana in a 15s window, which combined with the 4800 mana from Grit Syphon, would equal out to about the gains from BW+Syphon out of Grit. Interestingly, without the buff to Syphon, HW BP didn't do this either. If you made BP proportionate to its HW values and also kept the SB Grit Syphon buff, THEN (and only then) our mana generation in Grit would be equivalent to our mana generation out of Grit. But obviously, SE has no idea how to balance this in AoE.

Looking at a 15 second window BW will hands down beat SS and BP, no contest. But over the full 40 second interval of the cooldown Siphon Strike and Blood weapon return about the same amount of mana, with blood price just being extra, or am I looking at this the wrong way?

Clearly it is very desireable to have all that mana front loaded, I'm not debating that; I tend to feel dark knight's issues stem from not being able to dark arts enough, so I tend to be a little biased towards resources.