Drk: worst designed class

[NikolasCalypso]

Dark Knight is the worst tank ever, constantly spamming dark arts while war and pld don't need to buff before using skill.

Dark night has been my main since the start of heavensward. Dark Knight is unlike war or paladin the hardest job when playing optimal in Savage uwu content.

What I miss about Dark Knight is their self-healing capabilities. While they have soul eater (very little hp gain), I feel like the job compared to Warrior who can spam inner beast and gain 8.7k hp per hit and equilibrium that can go up to 25k hp (I tested this on my war, I can provide pictures if needed) and war does not suffer from switching from deliverance to defiance which makes it unfair in comparison with DRK. When we compare holmgang, it has a shorter cooldown compared to living dead. Living dead is just garbage for a DRK since they can barely self-heal in endgame content. Sure they got soul sacrifice giving some minor hp gain but it's simply not enough compared to war or paladins that can spam heals. The dark arts spam is also ridiculous and costs insane of mp usage to maximize the potential in terms of DPS. While we have blackest night shield, it still costs us a lot of mp and it's "nice" but nowhere near paladin and warrior.

I still love Dark Knight and won't ever stop playing it nor will I switch to gunblade if it becomes a tank class, but I definitely want to point out that Dark Knight needs a big change.

Sidenote: I miss scourge and the animation of shadowskin!

Man, I see a lot of people complain about DRK, but I don't see much actually wrong with it.

- Spamming dark arts is the lore/story of the job. I guess you missed that leveling up. This isn't objectively a bad design.
- Very little self heal/dps gain. Wrong. Highest HPS tank on the charts right now is DRK. Oh look, highest DPS tank is DRK as well.
- Living dead does its job just fine. Have you tried combining it with Sole Survivor for that 30% max HP heal + MP? Then throwing Blackest Night up with that MP?
- Everything costs insane amount of MP... again, part of the lore. You "attune with the darkness within you"... you don't use a bit of MP, you go balls deep.
- Blackest night costs a lot of MP and its "nice"... you're just repeating yourself now. Shielding yourself for 20% max HP (or a party member 10%) every 15 seconds is great. No other tank can do this.

Clearly, you don't like the job, but that doesn't make it bad, never mind the worst. DRK is about pouring everything you've got in to that next move, but being flexible with what that next move is, not have to build up a burst window and wait around for the next 2 minutes (looking at you WAR). The way they can convert resources (blood/mp/healing/shielding) gives them an interesting play style, and gives tons of flexibility, especially in AOE situations. I know rigid static raid teams aren't going to appreciate flexibility much, but it is well designed and does a great job.

[shao32]

snip.

Did you play DRK on HW? DRK get the worst expansion transition with stormblood by far, on HW DRK use dark arts a lot too but never was between almost every skill like now since dark arts was more deep and fun and never cause the double weaving problems the job suffers right now, so it's really a bad desing bcs cause more problems that solutions.

- Very little self heal/dps gain. Wrong. Highest HPS tank on the charts right now is DRK. Oh look, highest DPS tank is DRK as well.

It's not the highest HPS tank at all, WAR is it, storm path, equilibrium, inner beast, thrill of battle, I will love to see how you think sole survivor and grit soul eater can compete against that or clemency.
And no DRK is second on DPS barely over PLD on certain turns in alphascape, and it's even under 300 DPS compared to WAR on others, only in AS12 DRK is top.

- Living dead does its job just fine. Have you tried combining it with Sole Survivor for that 30% max HP heal + MP? Then throwing Blackest Night up with that MP?

Living dead is terrible compared to holmgang and hallowed, it's imposible combine the 15s of sole survivor with the 10 seconds of walking dead in practice and even that you will die since the 20% (not 30% bcs you need kill the target for that) inst enough to save you from the debuff bcs it's going to kill you if you don't heal the same amount of you Max HP, you depend complety on you healers to use this skill and don't die.

- Blackest night costs a lot of MP and its "nice"... you're just repeating yourself now. Shielding yourself for 20% max HP (or a party member 10%) every 15 seconds is great. No other tank can do this.

Inner beast and shelltron with the same ratio, I will grant you both are mitigation and no a shield but every tank have something comparable and it's the overall mitigation kit that's will matter, not just call for certain skill and say is fine, DRK kit is terrible until you get TBN since how baddly desing that on stormblood removing dark dance, foresight, and cutting the self heals make leveling DRK akward and unfun apart of other things like the blood gauge.

Clearly, you don't like the job, but that doesn't make it bad, never mind the worst. DRK is about pouring everything you've got in to that next move, but being flexible with what that next move is, not have to build up a burst window and wait around for the next 2 minutes (looking at you WAR). The way they can convert resources (blood/mp/healing/shielding) gives them an interesting play style, and gives tons of flexibility, especially in AOE situations. I know rigid static raid teams aren't going to appreciate flexibility much, but it is well designed and does a great job.

The desing philosophy and how do his role compared to the other 2 are two different things, on HW DRK have this same desing philosophy but with much much better flow, sinergy and special traits to bring to the party like reprisal and old int down from delirium, this is a mess, a barely working mess and the performance of DRK on raids can't be say it's well desinged and do a great work, the job do his duty in raw numbers but have triple flaws and punish you mistakes much more harder, offering less to the party for much more work compared to PLD and WAR thanks to the role skills that take what makes DRK unique and the mechanics around those skills.

Keep in mind DRK was by far the most popular tank job in HW with lot of downs on Alexander despite WAR being OP and now it's barely played on SB, you can like it and be happy but it's no longer the true DRK we get on HW and it's normal ppl complaint about it.

[Drakkaelus]

- Spamming dark arts is the lore/story of the job. I guess you missed that leveling up. This isn't objectively a bad design.

What part of the story involved anyone endlessly spamming Dark Arts?

[Chrono_Rising]

If anything I would have thought dark arts casts would have enhanced our "attunement" to the darkside based on the first quest.

Class specific things I would like to see:
Our physical oGCDs are on multiples of 30 second cooldowns, but blood weapon is on a 40 second rotation. I would like to see the kind of synergy other jobs have with their buffs and oGCDs where our oGCDs line up with our personal buffs.

Remove the cost from Delirium, I like the idea of extending blood weapon, and I feel this should be traited to just be a thing at this point, but 50 blood for 8 seconds of extend blood weapon doesn't feel quite strong enough. I would love to see more of this type of "enhancing" type play, but we need either better benefits or less costs.

More engaging single target play. Dark Knight against multiple targets feels great, but this almost never happens in a raid setting. When pulling a large number of enemies the dynamic trade offs between our mana and blood gauges to reduce damage and restore HP while dealing damage feels active and fun in dungeons, and I wish something similar could be done in single target play.

[DamianTenbe]

Dark Arts animation is too long.
Unleash is too weak.
Dark passage costs too much mana and does too little dmg.
Dark mind should mitigate all kind of dmg
Rework walking dead.
Give us reliable self healing skill for critical moments.
Shadow Wall cd is too long.
The blackest Night should be working party wide.
There is too many aoe focused abilities in the kit, change some for more needed ones.
Blood price unreliable vs 1 enemy, needs change.
Make blood weapon to be aviable during tank stance.
Tank stance should be available with no mana cost.
Drk is underperforming. Soul eater life gain is insignificant to be taken into account. It won't save your life after using walking dead nor won't it make healer be happy about it. Give the drk dot back pls.

[DamianTenbe]

I'm posting on mobile so I'm sorry for splitting my post into 2 parts.
What made drk less viable tank? Here is why imo:
Majority part of the drk kit has been turned into cross role abilities.
Reprisal does no dmg and is no longer exclusive for drk.
Every time you parried you had your low blow cd refreshed providing some nice bonus dmg when main tanking and it synergised well with anticipation. Unleash has recived far too many nerfs. Give it some nice potencies back pls. Shadow wall cd is too long! The extra 10% dmg reduction isnt worth it. Drk has lost some fun and unique animations like Shadow skin, equilibrium that does no dmg now.
Dark mind is bad in its design and it shouldn't force you to predict the type of dmg you will receive. Sure there is raw intuition in war kit but war has so many dmg mitigation skills aviable that this is no issue. What do you think? Am I wrong ?

[Hierro]

I feel like many people forget the reasons why changes were made to DRK as such. People praise the whole "retaliation" aspect of DRK, but forget that very point forced DRK into the MT role for optimal damage. HW DRK damage was far too RNG reliant and had too much distraction with having to keep track of procs. The way I see it, SB streamlined DRK and did a good job at doing so.

I do think DRK can use little changes here and there, like some of the ideas Chrono's mentioned before. I know I liked this one idea of increasing passive blood gain via BW to 50 from some odd number like 46. But I don't think this class is badly designed, nowhere near close to it.

as an interesting aside, I looked up some of the top parses for tanks on A12S. Warriors seem to average around 500 HPS in terms of sustain, but I found a DRK who broke 6.1k DPS while healing 700 HPS through liberal usage of TBN. The high usage makes them an outlier, but shows that you can indeed heal significantly more than WAR without impeding on your DPS.

[Lyth]

Most of the Stormblood changes were the result of removing the MP drain from Darkside. Prior to this, MP generation was in a natural state of balance between Darkside and Syphon. You had a relatively slow rise in MP over time, but you also needed to have some MP in reserve for abilities like Dark Passenger and Carve and Spit. Dark Arts was still important, but it tended to come into play during periods of higher MP generation, like Blood Weapon and Blood Price.

Removing the MP drain from Darkside created several issues. First, the MP generation from Syphon was unopposed. Second, you have the addition of the new Delirium which is essentially massive MP dumps. Also, with the removal of Dark Passenger as a viable single target ability, you suddenly have an extra 2 DA worth of MP every minute.

The devs' solution to keep up with this MP excess was to replace the MP drain of Darkside with Dark Arts uses. But in order to keep up with demand, you now had to be able to use it on Syphon as well as Souleater. So if you want to use Dark Arts on an oGCD, it's a forced double weave. If you want to use any regular oGCD, it's also probably a double weave, because you need to constantly use Dark Arts to avoid capping.

I see people occasionally mention that Dark Arts gives you flexibility to "burst when you want." This shows a complete and utter lack of understanding of how the job works. Your MP bar is not big enough relative to the MP cost of Dark Arts to store up extra uses for a rainy day. You use it, or lose it. Burst is not burst. You don't dps harder. You dps longer.

All in all, it was a series of incredibly bad decisions.

If you want to fix it, the first thing that you need to look at is MP generation. Right now, all our MP generation happens on Syphon as one big block. Why? On WAR, they had the common sense to space it out. It's not like all your abilities generate no gauge until you hit Maim, at which point you have 30 extra gauge. Spread it out so that everything generates a small amount of MP. That way, you avoid having these massive MP dumps.

Delirium is another problem here. I'm not sure why the blood cost is there at all. IR had a much smaller resource cost to use at the start of this expansion and it was removed, despite it being a thousand-fold more powerful. But if your goal is to build off of Blood Weapon, it's done in completely the wrong way. What are we going to do with all this MP? We're not going to spend it faster. It's just going to take longer to burn through.

Instead of focusing on Delirium's MP generation, they should have focused on speed. There's a natural limit at which speed boosts are effective, of course. The faster your GCD, the less room you have for double weaving. But there are other ways to do "fast". Have actions hit twice. Shorten the recasts of oGCDs such that they come up very quickly while the window is active. Make it actually feel like it has an impact, instead of being just a longer Blood Weapon.

On the MP expenditure side of things, you need more ways for people to spend it. Carve and Spit should have the MP cost built in. Dark Passenger should be something that you actually want to use in single target.

And as for Dark Arts itself? In a perfectly balanced system, you'd have enough resource spending oGCDs such that Dark Arts didn't need to be constantly used. But I suppose that the easiest solution is to have it last for the full 10 seconds, boost any abilities used while it is active, and just replace MP generation with blood generation. Use Dark Arts, your MP generation stops, and your Blood generation starts.

Also, this bit about TBN being equivalent to self-healing is nonsense. Pick an older fight to solo and try to "self-sustain" yourself using just TBN. There's no way of recovering lost health, so if the fight drags on for long enough, you're going to die. It's like saying that Hallowed represents an infinite amount of self-healing.

[Hierro]

Also, this bit about TBN being equivalent to self-healing is nonsense. Pick an older fight to solo and try to "self-sustain" yourself using just TBN. There's no way of recovering lost health, so if the fight drags on for long enough, you're going to die. It's like saying that Hallowed represents an infinite amount of self-healing.

An older fight? Are we going to talk about relevant situations or not? It doesn't make sense to use "soloing old content" as valid criteria for self healing when the only valuable context is for the sake of giving healers an easier time in relevant content.

[Insanecell]

I feel like many people forget the reasons why changes were made to DRK as such. People praise the whole "retaliation" aspect of DRK, but forget that very point forced DRK into the MT role for optimal damage. HW DRK damage was far too RNG reliant and had too much distraction with having to keep track of procs. The way I see it, SB streamlined DRK and did a good job at doing so.

I do think DRK can use little changes here and there, like some of the ideas Chrono's mentioned before. I know I liked this one idea of increasing passive blood gain via BW to 50 from some odd number like 46. But I don't think this class is badly designed, nowhere near close to it.

as an interesting aside, I looked up some of the top parses for tanks on A12S. Warriors seem to average around 500 HPS in terms of sustain, but I found a DRK who broke 6.1k DPS while healing 700 HPS through liberal usage of TBN. The high usage makes them an outlier, but shows that you can indeed heal significantly more than WAR without impeding on your DPS.

Laziness is what I call it. Square couldnt do the work to reconcile the kit. Simple changes too. Rework DD to parry x number of attacks. Preserves the retalitory feel of drk but without the pure rng. Got rid of the mp drain instead of putting mp costs on the weaponskills while in Darkside. Keeps the feeling of fighting your mp while giving more control to players instead of a steady tick. Reworking DA to fundamentally change attacks instead of potency increases. Create Runic as a trait to allow spell parrying so we can have said retailitory play style on pure magic fights. Dont create rip offs of warrior actions let warrior be the big man on the block with fell cleave. A third combo, thought removing combos would be considered a bad thing considering in HW they had to create two for pld.

Shame its happened twice in a row for me, and apologies for the stream of consciousness. Blizzard gutted what I enjoyed about blood death knight on WoW as well. Same thing too. Drks still decent and blood dk is amazingly op in bfa, but both are just not fun. Well at least I found Red Mage. Can bounce between the two classes. I wanna get back into raiding instead of waiting for tanking to be fun again.