DRK Suggestion for more damage and skill ceiling

[FallenWings]

As stated, paladin has sheltron shield swipe synergy, Warrior has counter attacks on vengeance. The place where damage for mitigating is missing is on dark knight.

My point is that it needs to be a more central theme on the tanks rather than a single casual side effect. Dark Knight holds TBN as damage for mitigating potentially and is an actual clear bonus in Grit.

It's just a numbers thing to make that happen but it needs to be done more.

[Chrono_Rising]

My point is that it needs to be a more central theme on the tanks rather than a single casual side effect.

I'll agree that it is more clear for the potential of this on dark knight. My point is that it already is a theme and it started on warrior and is essentially missing on dark knight with the removal of our dark dance and reprisal. Vengeance was originally introduced with a counter attack, yes its primary use is mitigation now but this isn't just some side effect (fun fact the counter attack initially was the entire point, 2.1 buffed this to include damage down). Paladin continues this use with tools like sheltron and cover, cover your target and bulwark them to try and proc your shield swipe twice as off tank. And sheltron can be used in aoe situations as off tank or when not actively tanking to proc the skill which would not otherwise proc, you can also get your sheltron uses to force your shield swipe procs when actively tanking to optimize your usage and damage. My point is that this has alot more uses than one might initially expect than just a "side effect".

Dark Knight holds TBN as damage for mitigating potentially and is an actual clear bonus in Grit.

I'm also responding to this in the context of:

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WAR's equivalent being Innerbeast or Fell Cleave and Unchained or Infuriate are genuine hard losses and pigeon hole WAR into Deliverance onri.

As a concept I enjoy the idea of TBN alot in which excellent mitigation = more effective DPS = obvious value increase. But it is difficult to balance unless the other tanks also enjoy that concept.
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This isn't unique, bloodspiller out of grit is still stronger than bloodspiller in grit even with the bonus potency, its not as dramatic of a loss as Fell Cleave vs. Inner Beast. In tank stance for dark knight the best single target use of mana is TBN for bloodspiller. For Warrior in tank stance the best single target use for gauge is Inner Beast. As far as damage go, both are better off not using tank stance. The major difference is that Warrior's skills get stronger leaving tank stance, while dark knight loses potency and its best source of damage switches (outside of very specific conditions) to dark arts.

Staying in tank stance, Inner beast in tank stance is a dps gain over your combo, always has been. The issue with Inner beast is that it isn't the best thing you could do with the gauge when it comes to damage, and as I pointed out in my post warriors are encouraged to use their short duration cooldowns to circumvent needing on demand mitigation almost entirely. But it still remains Inner beast is designed to be mitigation and damage it even ignores the damage penalty of the tank stance, its just not as good as fell cleave and so it isn't something warriors look to spend 50 gauge on. Unless you use warrior to prog through turns, in which case you might use Inner Beast in addition to the short cooldowns to be brick wall of defense.

It's just a numbers thing to make that happen but it needs to be done more.

I agree, but again my point is that the only place it isn't really happening is on dark knight, or it is happening in a less desirable stance when you may not necessarily be looking to maximize your damage/still comes up short of dropping tank stance. Dark Knight use to have this with dark dance parry into reprisal, but those days are long gone. If TBN is to be our new way of mitigating and dealing damage I welcome it, but again in this numbers game the devs have put dark knight at the disadvantage as the tuning does not match this as a replacement for the 3.x reprisal system. The reason for this tuning (or at least the only good reason I can come up with) is that out of Grit Dark Knight's Bloodspiller is tuned to be approximately the equivalent of a dark arts as a potency gain over our combo, it is intended to break even so that using TBN does not become a mitigation, damage source, and utility.

TL;DR TBN is yet another example of break even design that is putting dark knight behind when the equivalents on the other tanks provide damage value for mitigating.

[Sylvain]

I want the animation.

Then you don't want "Scourge" back, you want something that looks like it.

I can understand wanting the animation back, and if they were to rework it into a brand new skill I would be happy.
But this is not the reason the poster proposed, he wants Scourge back for its dps, and this is a lame reason because dps can be tuned in many ways.

[Xenosan]

Salted Earth is DRK's most powerful oGCD and also is the only one without a Dark Arts effect. But DRK is already swimming in too many DA effects where the gain/loss of which used measures out to a wash, adding another isn't a real solution. So like AST/SCH/WAR, I'd like to see a recast reduction Job Trait. "Salted Earth recast reduced by 5 seconds when Dark Arts is executed."

This gives an additional powerup to Dark Arts. Salted Earth has a 45 seconds recast with 21 second duration, this trait would create the result priority: if DRK can fit five DAs within a Salted Earth duration, Salted Earth action will come off cooldown just as the bubble is about to fade. It's tied to Dark Arts, but doesn't cost you a Dark Arts+Action as a trade.

IMO best way to give DoT management to DRK. It's magical damage, AOE, correlated to Dark Arts, everything peculiar of DRK identity. It makes a lot more sense than Hyper Speed on AST.

[Derio]

I want scourage back. People say we are trying to avoid skill bloat. Look at PLD and WAR # of skills compared to DRK. They outnumber us by a good amount so I am pretty sure bringing back scourage and dark dance wouldnt hurt.