Dark Knight under review: Feedback to the Developers and Community Team

[shao32]

Seems you wrote too much in a rush to see the context of my criticism. Do any of those comments I replied to imply that there would be some balance to removing the cost? By all means, if a tank is locked into tank stance a la defiance, then I may more inclined to agree. But flat out keeping grit/ShO as is, but with the removal of MP cost? Absurd.

more absurd is having WAR being able to avoid all the penaltys to get what you call overpowered, im started to belive if they want to keep the penaltys on stances and no hurt WAR fluidness they should remove unchained to keep that feel when you play WAR but dont being op on that sense.

[Hierro]

more absurd is having WAR being able to avoid all the penaltys to get what you call overpowered, im started to belive if they want to keep the penaltys on stances and no hurt WAR fluidness they should remove unchained to keep that feel when you play WAR but dont being op on that sense.

Wrong. If lethal damage is approaching and a WAR switches to defiance to mitigate it, the WAR's current HP would not be sufficient. The fact defiance is oGCD is balanced with that fact. However, if you want to bring up equilibrium as a work-around, then we have to face the fact that WAR requires another cooldown to achieve what the others already do with only one button. That's ignoring the fact that it's on a 60 second cooldown. The same applies to unchained, but being on a 90 second cooldown instead. Those tools could not be abused all the time to achieve what I'm trying to discourage.

[shao32]

snip

if lethal damage is approaching and WAR switches to mitigate it its complety depend of when you do it and how you healers react to it, if you use defiance and you healer manage to put at you an emergency cast heal with swiftcast before the hit lands the effect is inmediat and WAR enjoy the bonus without using any extra tool, but of course is more easy say you use defiance and you dont get bonus without including timing, how many time you have before the lethal damage come and extra factors to this argument.

the fact about why defiance-equilibrium-unchained its op or if you preffer too strong for being a thing is because even with cooldown this tools are too strong making you avoid every WAR penalty and use this tools in other ways the other 2 tanks cant, defensive strats include, while the other 2 face the penaltys and eat it no matter what they do, why will you use equilibrium anyway? for what? if you survive in deliverance you never go to defiance for the heal, in single bosses fights equilibrium have more value as removing the heal requeriment by using defiance that using it as a heal for anything, out side of that the skill is unused bcs you dont have the necesity to use defiance for anything except dungeons trash pulls.

WAR switch cost gauge and unchained tied to inner release make the combo balance compared to grit and shield but you guys have to complaing for it even when you spend 99,99% of the time on deliverance and now WAR is the pull tank again for unchained making it the default MT and unfairly enjoying adventages that the other 2 dont have, but if we ask to be at WAR levels we are so op right?

[Mycow8me]

Either way you look at it, going into defiance and equilibrium is basically trading TBN for instant access to more HP and equilibrium can crit for 20k+ while TBN is only around 12k HP shield currently. I literally cannot think of any other reason someone would go into defiance currently with your current mitigation kit, in that sense unchained having a 90 second cooldown isn't even something to worry about... Atleast you can acheive nearly dps stance damage in tank stance. Who's better off at that point? A drk using TBN at 75% hp or a war going into defiance and using equilibrium from 75% hp, hopefully the drk even has enough MP to use it. The whole "have to use another tool" point is moot when equilibrium is useless for anything other than the healing anyways. DRK usually has to apply TBN for 20% mitigation cooldowns like rampart and tank stance anyway cause it will leave you at near 0 HP if you dont and auto attack damage could kill you.

One of the reasons war's have it easy anyways is vengeance>Holm>repeat for tank busters. You guys don't even need anything else. I can't even think of a reason war would need its tank stance for anything short of emergency HP with equilibrium. Meanwhile if drk has no cooldowns left or its a physical buster, tank stance might be its only emergency access beyond TBN which isn't strong enough by itself in most cases. Our invincible is only as useful as our healers are able to cure through it. So tank stance and TBN for nearly half our MP in an emergency while losing DPS and a GCD. This all sounds very fair in a raid environment where DPS is key on tank as long as you can survive.

[Chrono_Rising]

Wrong. If lethal damage is approaching and a WAR switches to defiance to mitigate it, the WAR's current HP would not be sufficient. The fact defiance is oGCD is balanced with that fact. However, if you want to bring up equilibrium as a work-around, then we have to face the fact that WAR requires another cooldown to achieve what the others already do with only one button. That's ignoring the fact that it's on a 60 second cooldown. The same applies to unchained, but being on a 90 second cooldown instead. Those tools could not be abused all the time to achieve what I'm trying to discourage.

So I see this argument come up in so many places and it never really has context other than everything is on cooldown. To me this situation feels so artificial and contrived to make warrior have a disadvantage.

(1) everything is on cooldown.
Ok, so we have one of two options:
(a) You don't know the fight well enough to plan out your cooldowns.
Conclusion: clearly you didn't know the fight as well as you thought and shouldn't be out of tank stance yet in the first place.

(b) Things went south, so south you felt you needed to turtle up with cooldowns and decided to not enter tank stance. Now you are faced with a tank buster, have no mitigation, and its on such short notice that you have just enough time to press defiance before being smashed.
Conclusion: You were taken by surprise, maybe through no fault of your own, but didn't know the fight well enough to think about upcoming tank busters to be able to mitigate on the fly. Again, I feel this points to the question of if you should be out of tank stance yet, clearly you should have been in it much sooner.

(2) In either case why didn't we swap with our cotank for them to use their mitigation on the tankbuster? Again, the only conclusion here seems to be that we don't know the fight well enough that we should have swapped for an upcoming tank buster.

(3) Next, tank stance would have saved you on dark knight or paladin, but not on warrior. But would it have?
Depends on how short a window we are talking about.
(a) You had enough time to get into defiance but not enough time to equilibrium. Assuming we are activating tank stance this late it should be pointed out Paladin and Dark Knight have not entered stance yet. No one survives in this example.

(b) You had enough time to use tank stance and equilibrium but not the next GCD, but decided not to use equilibrium. Well sorry that is not the fault of the job though, you didn't do your job. Sure you have to press two buttons to survive, but hey dark knights need to pair dark mind and TBN for almost every buster so they share your pain. If this is your sticking point the conclusion is switch to paladin. Also, Dark Knight and Paladin die in this example. But they could have used tank stance earlier! So could have warrior and then they could have gotten healed and not needed to press two buttons.

(c) Enough time passes that everyone gets into tank stance. Well everyone lives \o/.

(d) You did tank stance and equilibrium but it didn't heal back enough HP that you had your full HP buffer. This is where warrior actually is at a disadvantage.


The number of times I have found myself in the above situations? Fairly few if ever, but I play safe until I know what I'm doing.

Consider how many things had to go wrong in order for the above to have happened:
(1) Party had to mess up enough distracting healers from healing the tank
(2) You had to have been taking enough damage that you needed to pop every cooldown to live
(3) You went into a tank buster and forget to swap with your cotank/messed up the swap
(4) Did not have an incoming heal from the healers heading into tank buster/activated your tank stance too late so the heal went off before tank stance.
(5) Have used equilibrium earlier for some reason/it doesn't heal for enough to give you the HP buffer you need.

This is such a contrived example, we need to go 5 mess ups deep to be unrecoverable for the warrior. This isn't something we should be balancing for.

[Xenosan]

That's not really a cost when you would only activate as a cooldown. If you blew your CDs for whatever reason and a tank buster is coming up, there would be no real cost. You just activate grit, take the mitigated tank buster, and turn it off. At best, you'd only lose a GCD for -20% less damage, but for what is gained (unlimited ways to mitigate any tank buster), it's far too overpowered.

imo this is true from ARR as the reference point. But @SB lvl 70, with the amount of defense & recovery skills spread across healers and tanks & offtanks, I think not so much. People are still going to avoid as much DPS negligence as possible (and dropped GCD is the worst perpetrator).

But in lieu of reducing cost, the other direction could be to justify the harsh cost of both Grit and Shield Oath, like they fixed with WAR more recently.

Give these stances more depth: adding additional effects to more skills, for example (BloodPrice not being such garbage another), where player action is a factor (CD management).

More tree branching design like they got right for WAR this iteration. Some progress on either front I'd enjoy.

[Mycow8me]

Ironically enough Hp restore skills can still save you between the cast for a buster skill ending and being hit by it. If you use a mitigation skill after a cast for a tankbuster ends, it won't mitigate it, I've had this happen on war, but Equilibrium just before tank buster can literally save you while popping a mitigation cooldown too late wont. Every now and then on DRK I've been late with a TBN and it goes right through it if used after a cast bar ends. RIP greedy gcds.

[Mycow8me]

In some cases more hp is better due to compounded mitigation. Tank stance and rampart is not 40% mitigation. Its 100*.8 then another*.8 for a total of 64% damage received. However tank stance and tbn is 80% damage and 12k shield so in reality using tank stance for mitigation is a last resort on dark knight even if it was made free with a 10 sec cooldown similar to war. In that sense its still a dps loss but atleast becomes useful in an emergency and low mp. Otherwise a cooldown and tbn is still best choice. Why does it have to be so punishing for pld and drk to change stance?

[Dio_Tiferet]

Have we discussed yet about how BIS crafted acc's are a indirect nerf towards TBN?

[HyperiusUltima]

Have we discussed yet about how BIS crafted acc's are a indirect nerf towards TBN?

That's kinda irrelevant since the Vitality difference can be made up through melding if need be(though I'd imagine anyone tanking worth their salt doesn't meld Vitality except for world firsts), and even then it's rather miniscule in the grand picture. The one thing I still wish they'd do in regards to Tank Accessories is just make Crafted Accessories lower stats overall than Raid Gear so that you have to make up with Pentamelds.