Anyone else think DRK needs a whole rework, not a buff?

[Kazzoey]

While I'm not complaining about the DPS since I don't play it in meta content, my issue lies in the lack of DRK's theme or role in the tank department. Can anyone explain to me the unique design of what DRK does so well that the other tanks can't? What is the point of this job even existing right now for the sake of just being a third tank? It's been my issue since DRK first came out that, while it has an awesome visual theme, it appears to lack a gameplay theme/role. For example,

Paladins: Off healing, Support, consistantly high mitigation
Warriors: Heavy duty burst damage/mitigation, highly offensive
Dark Knight: .......... used to be a magic tank?, fast rotations

I can easily explain what you do as a PLD and a WAR, but DRK is a little on the difficult side to summarize into a specific or unique play style to entice people for it's gameplay and not it's visual design. Even if SE buffs DRK, then once again, why would you bring WAR if a DRK has higher DPS? I'm seeing far more people pushing for higher damage lines rather than filling in a role that the other two can't fulfill already. To fix Dark Knight, I think it would be more logical to give it a unique trait to build it's gameplay around and rebalance it from there so it's less about DPS comparisons, wouldn't it?

Finding a theme:
Perhaps instead of being a stance shifting DPS class, it could play with tradition Dark Knight concepts such as compromising himself while bolstering the party, compromising the party to bolster himself, and playing with life and death (HP values) to help bypass certain mechanics in ways only a DRK can.

Gameplay examples:
-Dark Arts could be a conversion tool that swaps MP costs with HP costs and higher burst damage output by depleting MP then converting to burst down using your own HP as the mana pool.
-Sole Survivor could work as a single target status you apply to a party member that compromises their defenses or healing effects, while adding an HP/MP rejen to the DRK or some sort of positive status effect.
-Allowing for "Ultimates" such as a greatly enhanced Dark Passenger/Bloodspiller/Abyssal Drain that eat up 80% of your MP (Or can be converted to HP with Dark Arts).
-Changing Living Dead/Walking Dead to casting a positive party buff, such as a full party Blackest Knight, upon death. That way you can get your party support, but at the DRK's expense. You could even use those "Ultimates" in a Dark Arts conversion to intentionally suicide and force the DRK into Walking Dead (Their god mode ability).
-Possibly eating up a (safe) party member's HP to do a powerful HP recovery so that they might be able to use those ultimates at their leisure without fear of dying by quickly healing afterwards.

Those are just some ideas and I'm not saying that they are perfect by any means, heck I'm sure a lot of healers would be pretty flustered if they saw a DRK in the party and opens up a bigger door for trolls, but what I'm getting at is that the job needs more variables to tweak for balancing since all they can offer (To my knowledge) is more damage, which Warrior already claims the throne for. If Paladin got another DPS nerf for whatever reason, while not as enticing as it currently is, I'm pretty sure it would still have a role in meta content due to the mitigation and support with their Cover, Clemency, Veil, PoA, and Intervention to help bypass certain mechanics.

Sorry for adding on to the pile of DRK threads, but I felt people get too bottlenecked into DPS charting for their class balancing and wanted to offer a (hopefully) newer point of view on the topic. Once again, not saying that the ideas I put up there are the greatest, but what do you guys think? Should DRK get a full thematic rework or just simply buff it? I find that it will be harder and harder to find it's balance in the future when more tanks come out if all this class offers is flat mitigation and damage.

[Kabooa]

I think all three tanks could use a bit more depth to them, but yes, I'd favor a grounds up redesign for Dark Knight as well.

[Rhais]

Yes, I would agree as well, I think too much of the complaints about DRK have focused only on the balance issues with the job, which even if adjusted will not make the poor design of SB DRK any more enticing.

[Chrono_Rising]

I support a dark knight rework, but I don't see the developers doing this until 5.0 if at all. In the mean time dark knight needs a buff to relevance. Trying my own hand at redesign (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...design-For-Fun). I would also like to see an update to our combo system, I think Crater once did a thread which asked for a combo system more akin to a monk "form" which would be nice over the current 2 combo system. (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...night-Properly)

I think for clarity it would be nice to analyze what dark knight should be doing, what is your dark knight? Here is mine:

1. Sacrifice for power - this is the most common theme giving up your HP for power
2. Enfeeblement- Inflicting status ailments on enemies to cripple them and/or their defense
3. Resource Drain - most incarnations feature some type of resource gain

These three themes have been recurring through the games.

I can understand why we sacrifice MP instead of HP in this game. Imagine healing your tank spamming away 20-25% of their HP every 3 seconds. In my opinion Dark Arts needs to do abit more here as a conversion tool. Personally I would like to see it apply further resource drains on our target, or partially refund its cost with resources.

As far as enfeeblement goes, the dev team has taken it all away. With it they took part of our identitiy. Salted earth is now the only claim to this theme.

We certainly drain resources, but we drain relatively few, and some resource drain is locked behind one stance (HP).

Paladins: Off healing, Support, consistantly high mitigation
Warriors: Heavy duty burst damage/mitigation, highly offensive

Warrior is actually close in mitigation to paladin, and really shines in its self healing department. Paladin is also relatively close to Warrior when it comes to damage. Warrior and paladin also absorb resources from enemies. People have posted in the past about how the tanks cover too many bases. When all is said and done the tanks really step on each others toes when it comes to what they do, except paladin having a huge amount of utility not on any other class. There is room for dark knight, theme 1 and 2 are not on any tank right now either, but in general I think the tanks need a trim to what they do.

However, I strongly disagree with damage being a defining role for a tank, no tank should be "the damage" tank they all need to do about the same damage at the end of the day. The "damage" tank is too large a crown for only one class to wear it as a tank.

[Kazzoey]

@Chrono_Rising
That's true, but once again people are getting bottlenecked into adding too many potency buffs, which are just temporary bandaids over a much bigger issue that's only going to keep getting worse. Of course they won't go with a rework until 5.0 but personally I think we'd all be doing better to request an overhaul for 5.0 more so than the mountains of temporary potency buffs we currently have. Also I already stated my themes in the OP. lol.

[Chrono_Rising]

@Chrono_Rising
That's true, but once again people are getting bottlenecked into adding too many potency buffs, which are just temporary bandaids over a much bigger issue that's only going to keep getting worse. Of course they won't go with a rework until 5.0 but personally I think we'd all be doing better to request an overhaul for 5.0 more so than the mountains of temporary potency buffs we currently have. Also I already stated my themes in the OP. lol.

There is no reason to not ask for both buffs and a rework for 5.0. Paladin received buffs every patch until their rework in 4.0. They have said before that it is easy to change things like potency or timers and it is apparently difficult to change effects. Both are necessary, give us our band aid, and fix it for 5.0. Given what SE has said about potency and timers versus effects, the only thing Dark Knight could do right now is damage. There is definitely room in the tanking ideas for Dark Knight, an enfeeblement/status/drain tank could certainly work in this game, though it would take care to develop.

If they went with your theme of dipping into HP pools as a tank they would seriously need to consider allowing dark knight moves to restore HP. I'm not saying this cannot be done, but I think it will cause issues with healers and dark knights dropping faster than other tanks. However, perhaps they could add something to our tank stance that counts as say 10% mitigation, 10% HP up and an HP drain effect.

In general I think going with HP draining effects on the dark knight will cause more issues with the tank than it will solve (if we are allowed to dip into our own HP pool), though I think it is an interesting idea.

I don't think the idea of self sacrifice to bolster the team defense will work when both paladin and warrior can do this for free.

Personally I would rather see them move in the direction of enfeeblement and more resource drain over dipping into dark knights HP pool instead of their mana pool. I think some of your ideas reflect as well. Sole survivor would work well as a HP/MP/TP refresh activated by hitting a target, but allow it to work on everyone. Functionally it would be different from the shielding of warrior and paladin, but would give a nice way of dealing with raid damage that also pairs well with the raid shields.

I would love for the dev team to put serious thought and effort into giving dark knight a more lore driven experience, there is definitely room for it in the tanking concepts they have so far. But seeing as it took 4 months to fix the effect on shake it off, I don't see this happening in the short term even though it is the preferable solution.

[Rhais]

I don't really see a rework till 5.0 either, but it's what the job needs at this point. The whole blood gauge, what you spend it on and how you gain it, is a dull uninspired mechanic. It feels tacked on just for the sake of giving the job a neat looking graphic like the rest of them. Dark Arts, a previously interesting idea for a job mechanic has been reduced to little more then having to hit 2 keys to do a GCD attack instead of one. The job's actions list is littered with poorly designed, underwhelming abilities. Tweaking numbers may make the job more competitive with the other tanks, but it's not going to make it's flawed mechanics/abilities fun to use.

[Cabalabob]

Depends what you mean by rework. I think people actually like the core concept of current DRK, they just don’t like that it excels at nothing or brings nothing to the team that the other tanks don’t. It needs buffs across the board to the point it might as well be a rework, but I don’t think the core of the job needs to change.

Personally I’d like to see Dark arts and mp have more of an effect on DRKs performance, so even without tank stance they’d be a strong tank.

I’d like to see Dark arts be taken to more extreme lengths, so when using it on dps skills you’ll do more dps than any tank, when using it on mitigation you’ll be more defensive than any tank and so on. But the skills without Dark arts would be mediocre so if you focus too hard on one area the others will suffer meaning the DRK will have to strike a balance with what it’s spending mp on.

Grit being made more of a fallback if you mismanage your mp. Kind of like how warriors spend all their time in deliverance unless things get too tough. Grit should be changed to cost tp instead of mp to reflect this change. When you’re out of mp (which in the DRK lore is actually your access to darkness) you’re mustering your own strength to do your job adequately without the darkness.

[Venoshock]

I just want HW dark knight back, that was the shit. So much fun to play and like if you was good at the class it'll show and pay off, if you were bad, it'll show too. Separates the good players from bad which is a good thing .

[Lilseph]

At this point, since we need to DA almost everything, may as well turn into a buff that drains your MP overtime like the old Darkside, but at a faster rate. I'd name it "Night Stance", which gives you the "Dark Arts" effect. While the buff is up, all the moves that previously required DA, will be automatically buffed. This would address the need to press DA for everything. You can toggle it off and on for the sake of preserving your mana. While the stance is up, you can still remover MP from Syphon Strike, Blood Weapon, Blood Price, Delirium and Quietus.