Tank Balance

[shao32]

snip

Thats only if you look at dps numbers and in phisical fights PLD was superior MT and they utility was and is still bastly superior, fight desings its what make it worse at the eyes of the players.

And no DRK dont meed just "minor" tweaks, dark passenger need to be fixed, shadow wall too, bloodspiller relation with TBN, plunge, blood price and grit per equal and we still have the problem of lack of phisical mitigation and trash utility while being the worst on dps.

[Kalocin]

The point remains that DRK is perfectly viable and just needs some minor tweaks, that SE isn't willing to do right now for whatever reasons, to be on par.

I think there needs to be a bit more than just viable, for thought, if a job did decent dps while only hitting a single button, can we can consider it viable, but is it good for job design? Probably not, and obviously this is an exaggeration but in regards to mechanics it's definitely worthy of discussion.
Likewise, this is especially noticeable when a lot of the Dark Knight issues aren't even related to its dps or ability to complete content but rather just a lack-thereof or simply confusing design decisions like Dark Passenger/Shadow Wall. The same can be said with Warriors now, they're the top tank DPS but the job's mechanics keep changing every patch and it's throwing people around wondering what's going on.

A lot of the tank issues aren't just about the DPS, and in Heavensward a lot of the Paladin issues weren't about DPS.

[Chrono_Rising]

Nice definition of "pretty fine" you got there. But we're going off-topic. The point remains that DRK is perfectly viable and just needs some minor tweaks, that SE isn't willing to do right now for whatever reasons, to be on par.

I think this just a semantics point. If they tweaked half our skill set to bring us up to par I think most would be happy. Lowering some mana costs (I'm looking at you dark passenger), lowering the cooldown on shadow wall, raising bloodspiller potency a small amount relative to soul eater combo, allowed Soul Eater to generate HP out of grit, increasing mana generation when not in grit, and other QoL adjustments like reducing animation lock on plunge, giving plunge a longer range, reducing the double weave. Those would all be very welcome changes. Each is a small tweak, there is just alot of them, so again I feel like the disagreement is one of semantics (large amount of small tweaks maybe?).

I also think a large amount of player frustration is caused by the developers telling players dark is fine and needs nothing after multiple threads to the contrary. I don't think that is unique to dark knight though, I think many jobs have been waiting for that discussion. Again, dark knight is viable, as you said, but at the same time it often times feels like it offers little of value for the amount of mitigation, utility, and damage that it puts out.

[aeoncs]

Thats only if you look at dps numbers and in phisical fights PLD was superior MT and they utility was and is still bastly superior, fight desings its what make it worse at the eyes of the players.

10-25% isn't "only", it's absolutely bonkers. As I said, Paladin was a superior tank in 10% of the fights, pretty much only Refurbisher and Cruise Chaser which is why PLD was actually good in Creator, while it downright sucked in most others and was always, without exception, a horrible OT. It had problems with job design, raid design and DPS. So yeah, being a decent tank in all scenarios > being a good MT in 10-20% of them; and that's assuming that DRK stays the way it is through all of Stormblood.

I think there needs to be a bit more than just viable, for thought, if a job did decent dps while only hitting a single button, can we can consider it viable, but is it good for job design? Probably not, and obviously this is an exaggeration but in regards to mechanics it's definitely worthy of discussion.
Likewise, this is especially noticeable when a lot of the Dark Knight issues aren't even related to its dps or ability to complete content but rather just a lack-thereof or simply confusing design decisions like Dark Passenger/Shadow Wall. The same can be said with Warriors now, they're the top tank DPS but the job's mechanics keep changing every patch and it's throwing people around wondering what's going on.

A lot of the tank issues aren't just about the DPS, and in Heavensward a lot of the Paladin issues weren't about DPS.

That's the thing, I never disagreed with that, did I? I argued against people calling DRK trash or useless, when it isn't. It definitely needs love in terms of job design, but that's a different matter and since I haven't played SB DRK at 70, I don't want to comment on matters I have no first-hand experience with.
But DPS was definitely a huge part of the problems the HW Paladin had. It pretty much had design problems that were as severe as some of the ones DRK is having now (e.g. Oaths breaking combos, Magic not being blockable etc.) on top of having considerably worse DPS and being reliant on raid/encounter design.

[Kalocin]

I also think a large amount of player frustration is caused by the developers telling players dark is fine and needs nothing after multiple threads to the contrary. I don't think that is unique to dark knight though, I think many jobs have been waiting for that discussion.

Part of the problem is not just being told fine but rather the player base seems confused as to what Dark Knights should be good with (Pld = Utility, War = Dps), especially now that Stormblood muddied the waters here. War has more utility while Drk seems lacking in identity and purpose.

[Ellyrion]

I'm pretty sure that SE did lots of testing etc, to make the class easier to play, but not to lower its dps
maybe you should just wait for it, do some parses and see for yourself instead of going hypocrite mode

I sincerely doubt they do as much testing as you think. If they did, we wouldn't see half the issues with class changes every patch.

WAR in SB - seemed pretty straightforward, even boring, at a glance. In reality, the rotations were fairly complicated to maximize your DPS output. If they had actually run sims and did thorough testing, they would have seen that the "obvious" rotation was sub-optimal. SE tends to rely on the community to do their analysis for them.

[Ayer2015]

But I love re-learning a Job every other patch! /sarcasm

I legit do.... no sarcasim

[Kazrah]

I sincerely doubt they do as much testing as you think. If they did, we wouldn't see half the issues with class changes every patch.

I think Yoshi described their testing system for jobs in two parts at max level, with one effectively being on a dummy and another in what was considered a "raid environment" to see how effective they were at maintaining performance under typical raid stresses and obstacles, leaving the majority of test results based on statistics drawn from those conclusions.

In the words of Mark Twain, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics". In this case, skills like Sustain were removed because the dev statistics showed it was rarely used at all, when if they had tested for something like open-area or solo gameplay, they would catch the importance of it that SMN players were well aware of before giving that ability the initial axe. There wasn't outrage because it was a popular spell being removed, but because there was no testing for the leveling process or circumstances such as solo content where support utility such as Sustain are more vital.

They're also drawing statistics from hired testers who may play the game differently (if they even play the finished product at all) from how the players may interpret a job to be played. Because of this, as long as there is little to no customer representation in the testing process to identify issues that dev testers may not pick up, then such issues will always occur. Even if there is any beta testing for players these days, there would seem to be an extreme under-representation of any data that could be yielded from it.

[RiyahArp]

The problem is lets assume the baseline of job balance is 50 points. This community generally freaks out when a job is at 47 or 53 points, despite that variation still enough to clear the hardest content in the game. Like for DRK, from all the salt you'd assume its fundamentally broken, but no it works really fine, its just a bit less optimal and a bit simpler than other tanks. You're not going to kick your raid bud from the shell over him liking DRK over WAR because it means its impossible to clear stuff otherwise.

Its the whole stupid fflogs culture that focuses on raw numbers and ranking, and it leads to constant seesawing job change. And apart from the whole "make everythign simpler," if you look at job balancing, its really banal stuff like tweaking moves about 10 or 20 potency, or increasing the duration of something a couple seconds.

[Ghastly]

I just want them to know that I love the warrior changes, specially changing berserk to inner release and how I can use inner release in defiance (this was the one thing I always wished for). Warrior is my main class and I'm really happy with the changes, thank you.
Hopefully they fix dark knight for 4.25..