Thread: Try to predict Nerf/Buff/QoL of 4.2 Tank Edition

Why decrease max MP?

Four uses of DA/TBN is 9600 MP; DRK's current max of 9480 only needs a paltry 120MP to be perfectly divisible by 4.

I honestly don't know why people (myself included) don't complain more about how much of an obvious slap in the face that is. Imagine the stink Warriors would kick up if the Beast Gauge capped out at 95.

Originally Posted by Crater

Four uses of DA/TBN is 9600 MP; DRK's current max of 9480 only needs a paltry 120MP to be perfectly divisible by 4.

So you're saying Piety materia has some value for DRK?

On a more serious note, though, how much would the extra MP actually benefit DRK? Just trying to think about in my head I can see 1 extra GCD, most likely being used for bloodspiller, because it's going to free up needing the extra syphon. Or maybe the MP from syphon results in an extra DA. (genuinely not sure). At the very least it seems like another simple adjustment that would help boost their overall damage.

Well an extra 120 MP doesn't really do much to improve overall theoretical performance (DRK theorycrafting tends to kind of assume 100% resource efficiency which really wouldn't be meaningfully affected by 120 MP), and you typically don't ever cap MP or Blood the way that you do BG or PLD MP because the resource generation is too complicated to do it that way.

It's just a QoL thing in the sense that it's kind of stupid for DRK's max MP to be 3.95 casts of DA/TBN instead of 4.

Raising Dark Knight's MP cap wouldn't change its dps by very much since it would literally only give either 1 or 2 extra dark arts over the course of the encounter. Changing our MP regeneration however could give many more dark arts and actually raise our dps significantly.

Ah. Wasn't sure. Seems like it would help more than that, like when they reduced the gauge cost for activating unchained/inner release on war, but maybe not.

Reducing costs would have a nice effect in that it is like increasing our resource generation. Just a flat cap increase from 9480 to 9600 does surprisingly little.

Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Ah. Wasn't sure. Seems like it would help more than that, like when they reduced the gauge cost for activating unchained/inner release on war, but maybe not.

It would help more than people are giving it credit for, I think - it just wouldn't affect things from an on-paper, theorycrafting perspective.

It isn't really apparent while you play the class, but that missing 120 MP never really comes back to you: Syphon Strike restores MP in 1200 MP increments, meaning that every two Syphon Strikes is another DA, but you don't have any 'extra' that make up for the 120 MP deficiency. Blood Weapon restores MP in 480 MP increments, which also divides cleanly into 2400 (480 * 5 = 2400), so there's no extra to make up for the 120 MP deficit there, either.

It would be more obvious if DRK was designed in a way where you ever actually build your MP all the way back up to 9480, but that missing 120 MP really does just mean that you always do one fewer DA than you're supposed to.

Originally Posted by Crater

It would help more than people are giving it credit for, I think - it just wouldn't affect things from an on-paper, theorycrafting perspective.

It isn't really apparent while you play the class, but that missing 120 MP never really comes back to you: Syphon Strike restores MP in 1200 MP increments, meaning that every two Syphon Strikes is another DA, but you don't have any 'extra' that make up for the 120 MP deficiency. Blood Weapon restores MP in 480 MP increments, which also divides cleanly into 2400 (480 * 5 = 2400), so there's no extra to make up for the 120 MP deficit there, either.

It would be more obvious if DRK was designed in a way where you ever actually build your MP all the way back up to 9480, but that missing 120 MP really does just mean that you always do one fewer DA than you're supposed to.

1 tick of blood price at 70 is worth 120 mana.

1 extra dark arts in our rotation is either really strong in a very short duration fight (the kind that lasts less than a minute) to not worth very much in a long fight. Where as something like a dark arts costing 2000 mana means every 5 dark arts we get a "free" one compared to the old system and has the benefit of helping dark knights dps no matter the duration.