Proposed Dark Knight Changes

[Emiin]

I don't often log onto the OF, but when I do it's because I see misguided posts like this one. Let's start at the beginning.

Dark Knight's current problems are that it is boring and repetitive to play

I always enjoy posts that start like this because they're completely subjective and assume that it is objective. To some, it's boring. To some, it's fluid and engaging. Completely subjective and it should not be part of any argument.

with fewer and lesser defensive options than the other two tanks, little to no self-sustain, and very little opportunity for burst or any sort of interesting or fun optimization of its damage.

Defensive options have been changed, with a focus on using The Blackest Night for filler in between. When comparing tanks and removing cross-classes, we have these options.

Dark Knight
Shadow Wall
Dark Mind
The Blackest Night

Warrior
Vengeance
Raw Intuition
Thrill of Battle
Inner Beast

Paladin
Sentinel
Bulwark
Cover
Sheltron

A Dark Knight's toolkit is enhanced and focuses on The Blackest Night, which benefits from it's incredibly short cooldown. Considering you get so many more Blackest Nights as active mitigation than the other tanks, it is considerably even, if not better, in damage intake.

Dark Mind's usefulness on only-magic damage is not inherently a good argument, as pretty much all fights are designed around magic damage except for O7S. In this argument, you can also delete Raw Intuition from O6S, and list Warrior as potentially the worst tank in O6S for mitigation purposes. Dark Knight, however, still has The Blackest Night.

Self Sustain

I have a feeling you don't know what this word means. Dark Knight's damage is the second in terms of burst potential compared to warrior, and above Paladin in terms of pooling and raid buff focus. Self-sustain means that it can do it's own thing, and not suffer much without outside assistance. This is incredibly true in the case of Dark Knight

Comparing the three tanks in a Burst Potential vacuum

Comparing Dark Knight pretending the DRK is completely ignoring all raid buffs.

It's self sustain is incredibly efficient. And again, your comment on interesting should not be included in any sort of argument.

Now to preview your suggested actions, or what I'd like to call them, Samurai renames.

Dark Arts
MP cost increased by 50%

Most of your suggested changes have a reference to the removal of Dark Arts, applying it to only Bloodspiller or Carve and Spit, which was not mentioned. In this case, we can simply rename it to Hissatsu: Kaiten, as it only affects minor parts of your toolkit.

Souleater
Remove Dark Arts effect, remove HP restoration, now gives a 10% attack speed buff that lasts 30s (so it would be used for every fourth combo, like Storm's Eye), also increases blood by 20

This is called Shifu, and the entire purpose of the Hakaze > Shifu > Kasha combo. Coincidentally, the combo also gives the Samurai 20 total Kenki (5 + 5 + 10). Interesting pattern we're seeing here. Your suggested Bloodspiller and Power Slash combos are also increasing by 20 blood gauge.

Dark Passenger
Remove Dark Arts effect, now single target, cooldown reduced to 1s, MP cost removed, potency changed to be the same as the Dark Arts bonus potency (currently 140), now costs 50 blood to use

In response to this I'm simply going to quote the description for another Samurai skill.

Hissatsu: Shinten : lvl 62 Samurai (1 second cooldown)
Delivers an attack with a potency of 300.
Kenki Gauge Cost: 25

Quietus
Remove Dark Arts effect, now an oGCD weaponskill with a cooldown of 1s, still costs 50 blood to use and regens MP per hit as before, potency nerfed to be less than Dark Passenger

Jesus, buddy. You're bad at this. Round 5 or so of Samurai abilities.

Hissatsu: Kyuten : lvl 64 Samurai (1 second cooldown)
Delivers an attack with a potency of 150 to all nearby enemies.
Kenki Gauge Cost: 25

Delirium
Remove old effect, remove blood cost, now increases the potency of blood gauge actions and Dark Arts bonus potency for GCD actions by 100%, duration of 12s

Finally, something original! Or at least, almost. It's a crappy version of Berserk. In fact, it's basically Inner Release in its current form. And since you gutted most all of the class to having such minimal burst potential due to the high cost on Blood abilities and Dark Arts being nearly worthless and only being useful for Midare Setsusaiga, if you time your Delirium window incorrectly you get maybe 2 Shintens and one Kaiten.

Woops I used the wrong words for a second you had me so confused.

Blood Weapon
Remove attack speed boost, now increases blood by 10 for every weaponskill executed under its effect instead of the prior blood gain effect, still restores MP per hit

Suggesting the duration remains, you're getting only 7-8 GCDs within the window, for a total of 70-80 blood, and around 4800 mana, useful for 1 Dark Arts. You've turned this ability completely useless. I'm impressed.

Blood Price
Now increases blood by 10 for every instance of damage taken under its effect instead of the prior blood gain effect, still restores MP per instance of damage taken

Slightly original, but the issue remains that it is simply a worse version of Blood Weapon, and probably still locked to Grit. Useless.

Shadow Wall
Cooldown reduced to 120s

Living Dead
Cooldown reduced to 180s

Sole Survivor
Now additionally has a Dark Arts effect: grants a large HP regen over its duration

Grit
MP cost reduced or removed, additional oGCD action added that turns it off (the action to turn it on would still be a GCD though)

Everyone continuously forgets that The Blackest Night exists. More importantly, they fail to understand that it is meant to shore the gap between the extra one cooldown the other tanks have. Shadow Wall is fine as it is. Living Dead is fine as it is, as it serves a completely different purpose than Holmgang or Hallowed Ground, as far as damage receipt and healing requirements. As a former progression healer, I much prefer Living Dead to Holmgang, every time.

Sole Survivor's button is an issue, but not in the method you prescribe. The regen would be incredibly difficult to properly tune, to the point of it's either useless, overpowered, or minimal to the point of why bother spending your precious Dark Arts mana on it - you already get so little.

The Grit change is completely meaningless. The mana cost is fine considering how much mana a Dark Knight naturally regens. If queued properly, removing Grit is a non-issue. Stop fat-fingering.

-------

Instead of re-quoting the rest of your disaster of a summary, I'll summarize what your new decisions will *actually* do.

1. You've turned Dark Knight into a horrible Samurai with less gauge generation and lower burst potential.
2. The issues you've stated with Dark Arts are completely miniscule to non-existent with proper planning. Since you love samurai so much, I compared them in a higher end raid, with a Dark Knight barely hitting more Dark Arts than Shinten. You've reduced the actual amount of button usage in favor of a slightly faster overall GCD.
3. Both Blood Weapon and Delirium have become non-entities in your "build," if you could call it that. Blood weapon barely generates 1 "Dark Passenger" and 1 "Dark Arts" with your redesign. It's' essentially a non-cooldown, to the point of abysmal.

Every time I see one of these posts I'm inclined to ignore it, but I couldn't this time. It's just...too dumb. Too poorly thought out. Too...SAMURAI. You rebuilt Samurai. Good job I'll call Yoshi-P on the line and tell him you rebuilt Samurai but worse.

[shao32]

Shadow Wall, Living Dead,Grit.

while you make a good post i have to disagree with this,you need to understand why this skills are bad by desing compared to our tank brothers kits.

shadow wall need something to make it unique and not be the worst of the 3 for no reason.

living dead its hard to manage compared to the other 2, you can say you enjoy 10 seconds without dying but thats just false in real combat, you know what the boss will do in any moment so the "benefics" of living dead such as 10 seconds of durability are reduce to the 2-3 seconds the boss cast the TB or -insert shared mechanic here-, wait to remove the walking dead to enjoy the inmortal status its just silly and worthless, you cant keep you healers looking at you debuff time plus dealing with mechanics for just 1-2 free cast when is more easy heal you and let the regens deal they work after that, i dont think the actual status of living can be compared as equal to holmgang and hallowed ground.

and you dont understand at all why grit cost its awful, its not about the mana you generate to turn it on, is the potency you loose on wasting that MP on grit, MP is DRK main DPS resource, so grit mana should be reduce to the minimun or remove to make the skill less punishing to use.

[Bec]

snip

TBN makes up for the CD loss (thought I would argue that it makes leveling DRK a nightmare lol)

LD is kinda odd but it really isn't hard to work around the healing portion, two offgcds will basically cover it, you just have to plan it better

[shao32]

TBN makes up for the CD loss (thought I would argue that it makes leveling DRK a nightmare lol)

LD is kinda odd but it really isn't hard to work around the healing portion, two offgcds will basically cover it, you just have to plan it better

its not a question about TBN fill the hole of dont have a extra CD, its a bout how shadow wall is so poor at it is right now, if we want to talk about equitative effect of the 3 big CD, sentinel and vengeance should have 180 sec recast with they actual effects and shadow wall have to be 120 sec recast, the skill will dont have any special effect but the strong point will be the lower recast, just a example of how should be.

TBN dont cover the fluff mitigation and its not strong enough to be alone so our phisical mitigation is still poor, but thats mostly bcs dark mind is magic exclusive, and dark mind is not as good either, the skill is strong per see but only at the cost of DPS, if not the skill will work as a weaker rampart with TBN and you will survive with is the point loosing what make it strong.

LD make accidents, i saw my self and other DRK die bcs you miss 10-100 hp without notice, nightmares of exdeath thunders come to me, and the skill is pretty useless is solo situations, excep you target is at 1% and those 10 seconds will help you to kill it the skill will kill you after that no matter what you do, pretty weird mostly DRK lore works alone at being pariahs.

[Launched]

its not a question about TBN fill the hole of dont have a extra CD, its a bout how shadow wall is so poor at it is right now, if we want to talk about equitative effect of the 3 big CD, sentinel and vengeance should have 180 sec recast with they actual effects and shadow wall have to be 120 sec recast, the skill will dont have any special effect but the strong point will be the lower recast, just a example of how should be.

TBN dont cover the fluff mitigation and its not strong enough to be alone so our phisical mitigation is still poor, but thats mostly bcs dark mind is magic exclusive, and dark mind is not as good either, the skill is strong per see but only at the cost of DPS, if not the skill will work as a weaker rampart with TBN and you will survive with is the point loosing what make it strong.

LD make accidents, i saw my self and other DRK die bcs you miss 10-100 hp without notice, nightmares of exdeath thunders come to me, and the skill is pretty useless is solo situations, excep you target is at 1% and those 10 seconds will help you to kill it the skill will kill you after that no matter what you do, pretty weird mostly DRK lore works alone at being pariahs.

Vengeance should be better than Sentinel and Shadow Wall because PLD/DRK can combine Sheltron/TBN with all their cooldowns. You're not just going to mitigate for 30% when you use Shadow Wall, you're also going to reduce the damage by another 12k+. If WAR wants to do that it has to use another 90s+ cooldown or enter tank stance.

TBN does cover fluff damage. A 12k TBN covers roughly the same amount of damage as a Rampart on 6 10k autoattacks, it just does it up front instead of over 20 seconds. Having that available every 15s is far better than you give it credit for. It's also pretty much dps neutral as long as you slightly know the fight. Using it often isn't a huge dps loss that makes it not worth using.

Living Dead is fine. Blame the healer if they don't notice that the debuff didn't disappear, not the skill. I've had a DRK in my group for all of Stormblood and it really isn't hard to deal with. It's a skill that should be planned just like Holmgang, healers should have skills ready to deal with both of them easily.

[shao32]

snip

the number of skills WAR have under so low recast make it have always 2-3 up for fluff damage, there is no reason for vengeance being at 120 seconds when WAR is swiming on many options, you dont even use inner beast bcs the rest of you kit cover by a mile you defensive needs.

and TBN is a poor skill for fluff damage, to use it properly and dont waste it you need to know every skill the boss cast in combat and the perfect timing to make the AA break it, the shield its only 7 sec, the duration barely cover the time you need to break it with AA on single target whitout having in mind other factor, using it 15 times complety replace a natural bloodspillers so its a decent dps when is going far from that.

living dead is not fine not bcs the mechanic can or cant be deal with, is not fine bcs is annoying and have a record of accidents for that, the lack of capability of dealt with walking death by ourself is a big part of the problem making living dead just be a pretty nice coffing before die when you are alone.