DRK redesign details explained

[shao32]

I raised this issue in one of the first threads as soon as we saw the media tour info.

Once a DRK outgears content, breaking the shield will become less reliable and consistent. Either our DEF or HP is going to be too high to break the shield in the 7s it lasts, meaning we waste that much MP/potency, OR with the changes from the tank trait, incoming damage will be increased and the moments where we dont have TBN will hurt even more, especially since DRK's MP regen is going to be miserably slow *outside of Del/BW windows.

It's just a bad design choice.

indeed, right now my ilvl 400 gear make the shield being imposible to break at time on anythting thats not a TB, DRK it's the only one that his mitigation kit loose effectiveness, or better say get severely punished for being overgeared reducing you mitigation options to anything it's not a TB or a angry crow of adds with it's sad and it's going to be worse in 5.0

idk what they are thinking when they redesing DRK for SHB but the ppl that do it din't care much about the job.

[Ultimatecalibur]

indeed, right now my ilvl 400 gear make the shield being imposible to break at time on anythting thats not a TB, DRK it's the only one that his mitigation kit loose effectiveness, or better say get severely punished for being overgeared reducing you mitigation options to anything it's not a TB or a angry crow of adds with it's sad and it's going to be worse in 5.0

idk what they are thinking when they redesing DRK for SHB but the ppl that do it din't care much about the job.

At that point it might be a good idea to start looking at using TBN to protect others from mechanics rather than using it as a self mitigation cooldown. You might start out needing that 25% extra hp to do content but after a certain ilevel you will have that 25% max hp constantly and you can use TBN to protect the DpS and healers who are taking 25% damage from attacks than you are. A 25% hp shield will break more easily on them.

[TouchandFeel]

At that point it might be a good idea to start looking at using TBN to protect others from mechanics rather than using it as a self mitigation cooldown. You might start out needing that 25% extra hp to do content but after a certain ilevel you will have that 25% max hp constantly and you can use TBN to protect the DpS and healers who are taking 25% damage from attacks than you are. A 25% hp shield will break more easily on them.

The healers and dps should be taking way less damage than the tank regardless of the tank having the Tank Mastery trait or not.
If you are waiting to use it specifically on mechanics that will damage the dps/healers enough to break TBN, you are greatly diminishing its use.

TBN is designed to be used regularly, not held on to, only making slight adjustments to line it up with busters. That is why it gives Dark Arts to keep up Darkside, adding 30s to the duration. That is why the other tanks were given defensive and support abilities to be used approximately every 30s. It is because that is how often you should be using those abilities and TBN.

There being a potential design flaw that forces you to have to find ways to work around it and ending up losing personal defense, on a tank, or losing dps is not something that should happen and if it does occur needs to be dealt with immediately by the dev team. Besides it's not like adding a couple seconds to TBN's duration would be hard to do.

[Ultimatecalibur]

The healers and dps should be taking way less damage than the tank regardless of the tank having the Tank Mastery trait or not.
If you are waiting to use it specifically on mechanics that will damage the dps/healers enough to break TBN, you are greatly diminishing its use.

TBN is designed to be used regularly, not held on to, only making slight adjustments to line it up with busters. That is why it gives Dark Arts to keep up Darkside, adding 30s to the duration. That is why the other tanks were given defensive and support abilities to be used approximately every 30s. It is because that is how often you should be using those abilities and TBN.

Remember all tanks have shield others abilities and TBN is the Dark Knight's version of Intervention/Cover/Nascent Flash/Heart of Stone. The OT (and possibly even the MT) will like be expected to use these abilities nearly on cooldown to protect others in harder content. As TBN shields equal to 25% the targets max hp; a hit that would break a tank targeted TBN would need to be a lot stronger than an attack that hits a Healer or DpS. Raid wide damage will likely be enough to get those Dark Arts procs if you shield DpS/Healers.

A 100k tank targeted with TBN would need to hit by 31.25k unmitigated damage in 6s for the shield to break.
A 71k DpS/Healer targeted with TBN would need to take 17.75 damage in 6s for the shield to break.

A normal Raid wide is likely to break a DpS/Healer TBN while it wouldn't break a Tank TBN if both characters have the same ilevel.

[shao32]

At that point it might be a good idea to start looking at using TBN to protect others from mechanics rather than using it as a self mitigation cooldown. You might start out needing that 25% extra hp to do content but after a certain ilevel you will have that 25% max hp constantly and you can use TBN to protect the DpS and healers who are taking 25% damage from attacks than you are. A 25% hp shield will break more easily on them.

Idk, single target dps/healer mechanics are balanced to his defense so i think TBN use on them will be proportionally equivalent to a personal/co-tank use so the issue will be the same.

i mean yes, TBN should be used to support you party when you are not actively tanking or you can save someone, but the duration and the strength of the shield limit a lot when and how we can use the shield without losing those 500p, a limit that become more severe depending of how overgeared we are, a thing that don't happen with the other tanks.

[TouchandFeel]

Remember all tanks have shield others abilities and TBN is the Dark Knight's version of Intervention/Cover/Nascent Flash/Heart of Stone. The OT (and possibly even the MT) will like be expected to use these abilities nearly on cooldown to protect others in harder content. As TBN shields equal to 25% the targets max hp; a hit that would break a tank targeted TBN would need to be a lot stronger than an attack that hits a Healer or DpS. Raid wide damage will likely be enough to get those Dark Arts procs if you shield DpS/Healers.

A 100k tank targeted with TBN would need to hit by 31.25k unmitigated damage in 6s for the shield to break.
A 71k DpS/Healer targeted with TBN would need to take 17.75 damage in 6s for the shield to break.

A normal Raid wide is likely to break a DpS/Healer TBN while it wouldn't break a Tank TBN if both characters have the same ilevel.

As I stated, if you are waiting on and relying on mechanics, like raid-wides, that will hit the dps or healers to break TBN then you are likely not using it as frequently as you should be (~ every 30s) and are not applying it where it provides the most benefit, on the MT.
During raid-wides, the dps and healers tend to be healed up using AoE heals and so throwing a TBN on one of them may result in the shield breaking but it basically nullifies the defensive gains of it since the out-going AoE heals will still revolve around the health of all the other party members, just resulting in the player that got the shield being over-healed. So you gain the benefit of it breaking and the DA proc but lose the defensive gains of the shield, at which point you might as well have just used a raw Flood or Edge instead.

That also doesn't take into account situations where the DRK is the MT or single tank situations like dungeons, which you will be running a lot of whether or not you feel that they "count".
Also, this will likely not be an issue in harder content like ShB savages since the incoming damage in those will probably be high enough that TBN will always break. This is in regards to all the other content, where the majority of players will spend the majority of their time, and a core and foundational ability for DRK potentially not working correctly there when we inevitably out-gear that content.

While what you are proposing would likely work to help guarantee that those TBNs break, it is still a sub-optimal workaround with discernible drawbacks for a problem that should simply not exist.

[Kyni]

Thank you for this post. I don`t know why people are complaining so much when DRK sounds like a really powerful job in ShB, remember that 3K mp = 500 potency oGCD (550 potency with 10% darkside buff) and there is almost no drawback to spend all your MP since there is no Dark Arts priority system anymore, in SB you get punished if you don`t have DA ready for your Carve and split, for example.

They are not complaining about DRK's power or that darkside is hard to keep up. Quite the opposite really, that it is too easy to keep up. The big problem is that after you spend your minutly allotment of ogcds, probably over the time of 10 seconds during trick attack, you will be stuck spamming the soul eater combo and the occasional bloodspiller ( 2-3 per minute) for the next 50 seconds, which is almost 2.0 PLD levels of boring.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Idk, single target dps/healer mechanics are balanced to his defense so i think TBN use on them will be proportionally equivalent to a personal/co-tank use so the issue will be the same.

They currently are, but SE may be implementing in DpS/Healer busters that the OT needs to deal with roughly every 30s in fights. Every tank will have an ally protector usable every 20s to 30s and I hope and expect that SE will design fights to take this into account.

i mean yes, TBN should be used to support you party when you are not actively tanking or you can save someone, but the duration and the strength of the shield limit a lot when and how we can use the shield without losing those 500p, a limit that become more severe depending of how overgeared we are, a thing that don't happen with the other tanks.

I think you are overestimating how difficult it will be to break the shield and forgetting that you can just switch back to edge/flood when you no longer need the mitigation. A fair amount of the troubles the media tour participants were having breaking it seemed to me had more to do with the 20% damage reduction from tank mastery than with the amount and duration. Most of the twitch streams are just not familiar with how tough tanks are intended to feel in tank stance.

As I stated, if you are waiting on and relying on mechanics, like raid-wides, that will hit the dps or healers to break TBN then you are likely not using it as frequently as you should be (~ every 30s) and are not applying it where it provides the most benefit, on the MT.

You are making a serious mistake here. Raid wides and Prey style mechanics (which tend to deal 25% or more of the dps/healers hp) likely will come up ever 30 secs and, unlike now, the MT will more likely not be the primary target of the OT's ally protector abilities. The always on 20% damage reduction going to make using Intervention/Cover/Heart of Stone/Nascent Flash/TBN as useful on the MT as it will be on anyone else. This isn't SB where TBN, Intervention and Cover were used to negate the penalty for not being in Tank stance.

During raid-wides, the dps and healers tend to be healed up using AoE heals and so throwing a TBN on one of them may result in the shield breaking but it basically nullifies the defensive gains of it since the out-going AoE heals will still revolve around the health of all the other party members, just resulting in the player that got the shield being over-healed. So you gain the benefit of it breaking and the DA proc but lose the defensive gains of the shield, at which point you might as well have just used a raw Flood or Edge instead.

Are you aware of a concept called "Better Safe than Sorry?" Using the TBN shield to ensure a DpS/Healer doesn't die to an attack and then following it up with a free Edge/Flood is better than just doing an Edge/Flood. Skilled usage of TBN will be a defensive gain and DpS neutral, poor use with be a DpS loss for a defensive gain and non-use will be DpS neutral.

That also doesn't take into account situations where the DRK is the MT or single tank situations like dungeons, which you will be running a lot of whether or not you feel that they "count".

Even when overgeared in Dungeons, boss tank busters still tend to do 50% or more of a tank in tank stance's hp and dps still get targeted by telegraphed attacks that will knock off 25%+ of their hp.

Fears of TBN not working right are likely overblown and will likely be non-fears once player mentalities change. Not working like it does in "no tank stance" SB is not the same as not working at all. TBN was used in a lot of situations it was not needed for due to Tanks taking 25% more damage than intended.

[shao32]

They currently are, but SE may be implementing in DpS/Healer busters that the OT needs to deal with roughly every 30s in fights. Every tank will have an ally protector usable every 20s to 30s and I hope and expect that SE will design fights to take this into account.

doubt it, i don't think we will see anything diferent compared to now, our tools are going to be mostly to help our co-tank, but time wll say.

I think you are overestimating how difficult it will be to break the shield and forgetting that you can just switch back to edge/flood when you no longer need the mitigation. A fair amount of the troubles the media tour participants were having breaking it seemed to me had more to do with the 20% damage reduction from tank mastery than with the amount and duration. Most of the twitch streams are just not familiar with how tough tanks are intended to feel in tank stance.

im aware TBN is dps neutral and if you don't need it you dont use it and use the new oGCD instead.

indeed it's soon to say but if we compared to the actual situation of TBN we can only expect the new TBN will need to depend more heavily of TB to work properly but it's soon to say, and since SE don't really care much about DRK problems i expect it to be a problem in the end but thats just me and i can of course be wrong, but probably i will not care since i will move to GNB if they don't fix the DRK gameplay.

[TouchandFeel]

snip

It's not so much a matter of "could" you get it to pop with your proposed "work around", I agreed with you that you likely could in the right situation, it's at what cost and at what frequency.

Let's first start with the foundation of how the ShB TBN/Dark Arts/Darkside interaction seems to be shaping up in regards to how it should function under optimal use.

The mathed out estimates that I have seen for DRK MP regain puts it at ~3000-4000 MP every ~25s-30s not including burst elements like Delirium or Blood Weapon, which means you could then consistently use TBN around every 20s-30s. This unsurprisingly lines up with the recast times of the low recast defensive abilities of the other tanks as well as the increased duration to Darkside from Flood/Edge. There is a reason for this and it was deliberate in it's design.
Tanks should not be sitting on their low recast defensives waiting for mechanics, they should be using them at regular intervals of ~25-30s to maximize their potential; DRK doubly so because that is most resource efficient way to maintain Darkside. The skill comes in with lining up those intervals with as little deviation and wasted uptime as possible with busters so that you can stack them with other defensive abilities.

Now if you look at DRK's MP pool, it will be capped like everyone else at 10,000 MP which equates to 3 TBNs, Edges or Floods with a 1000 MP cushion. So optimally when starting a fight from full MP you will weave a TBN and an Edge as soon as possible to get Darkside up immediately, get the TBN cycle going and to get the DA proc for another Edge to then take Darksides' duration up closer to the 60s max. You could do two Edges but that is objectively less beneficial since it's end result is the same dps-wise but without the shield. That then leaves you with one TBN or Edge in your pocket just in case which if pushing to be as optimal as possible, you would either throw out an immediate Living Shadow or sync it to the first raid buff window.
With the pace of MP regain already established and how often you should be using MP, that leaves you in a general equilibrium with a slow upward trend and spikes of MP regain every 60s and 90s from Blood Weapon (which appears to give an extra 600 MP per skill) and Delirium (likely another 600 mp per Bloodspiller) which should give you an extra ~2000-3000 MP or about one extra Edge with every 60s (pulling a bit from existing resources) and 90s increment which will likely be initially held on to to get your MP close to topped off to have 2 Edges available for buff burst periods. From there pretty much rinse and repeat; relying on your general MP regain from combos and the like to fuel TBNs so that they are going out at the regular interval and making sure your Darkside buff is being refreshed, and using the extra MP to store up extra Edge uses for burst.

DRK's slower and more regulated MP regain along with the smaller MP pool means that the MP management and game-play will be much tighter and more regimented as opposed to the more disjointed and chaotic version we have now. There will be much less room to screw up or deviate. To be defensively on par with the other tanks DRK will need to use TBN every ~30s. To make sure they are maintaining their Darkside buff they need to use a Flood or Edge every ~30s. With the tighter MP management, they can't really do both as separate abilities consistently, there just isn't the resources, so in order to do so they need to get the Dark Arts procs from breaking TBN.

So now onto how this relates to your proposed work-around.

So we have established above the necessity of using TBN regularly and that it needs to break pretty consistently or DRK’s resources, defense or dps will suffer.

The MT will be the target of the most consistent and highest incoming damage with autos, busters and other mechanics. This is offset by the larger HP pool and the 20% damage reduction from the Tank Mastery trait.
Healers and DPS will have smaller HP pools and no constant damage reduction to speak of, but they will much more rarely be the target of attacks.

I personally feel that your estimate of raid-wides and prey-style mechanics that would do enough damage to break TBN coming up every ~30s to be very generous.
In addition, with many prey-style mechanics the random target tends to pass it off to another player, usually a tank, to soak it instead because the tank has better defenses and will lessen the total damage done, therefore requiring less healing. With the new trait, it will be even more optimal for prey-style mechanics to be passed to the OT since they will always have the 20% damage reduction. In many of the other instances of similar mechanics where the target can’t be passed off, they tend to be variants of stacking mechanics to spread the damage which basically just makes them raid-wides when executed properly.
So this leaves single-target attacks against a non-tank party member a small subset of potential mechanics which lessens the likeliness of such a mechanic happening every ~30s.
As I’ve said regarding using TBN on someone other than the MT in raid-wide situations, it’s not optimal and will likely just result in the shield going to waste from the target being over-healed by AoE heals. The adage of “better safe than sorry” doesn’t really apply here, yes a broken TBN will pretty much always be better than a raw Edge or Flood if you go by that standard, but you are still likely wasting the shield making it a roundabout way of spending 3000 MP for a Edge/Flood, the only thing you get in exchange is the feeling of a safety net which amounts to functionally nothing unless things were already going wrong. The only place you would likely need or make use of such a safety net is in prog which you won’t be over-geared for and therefore doesn’t apply here.
If you are using TBN in such a manner to give yourself the feeling of a safety net, you are actually making the DRK inferior to the other tanks in regards to mitigation and/or utility. Because the other tanks don’t have anything like a “needs to break” stipulation on their abilities, they will always place it where it will reduce the most damage as possible which will almost always be a tank, usually the MT. Choosing to intentionally provide less mitigation, or potentially wasting it with the raid-wide situation, just so you can guarantee the “needs to break” stipulation is met just doesn’t make sense.

Besides, the tanks have multiple other abilities to utilize for raid-wides with Reprisal and the job specific ones that can be rotated between the tanks so that even if the raid-wides were coming every ~30s it would be mitigated with a Reprisal and likely stacked with a job-specific resulting in ~15-25% reduction which would lessen the chance of TBN breaking from it, even on a DPS or Healer.

As far as dungeon tanking, busters are likely not going to be coming every ~30s, nor can you expect non-raid-wide telegraphed attacks with such a frequency. Even expecting one of each every 60s, perfectly spaced out so that one or the other happens every ~30s is questionable and far from guaranteed.

Again it’s not a matter of whether your proposed work around could work to help TBN break, and in the right circumstances it definitely could, it’s that based on DRK’s design it needs to use TBN at a high frequency to be defensively equitable to the other tanks and to keep up the Darkside buff while remaining optimal with it’s resource usage, and so can’t be beholden to saving it for specific mechanics since that would not match the needed frequency and shouldn’t be intentionally using it where it will mitigate functionally less to no damage just to guarantee that it breaks because that is obviously not optimal.
It’s not based on “player mentality” it’s based on looking at the DRK kit and what info we have through tool-tips and videos (all of which is of course subject to change), extrapolating the way DRK will end up functioning and applying that to the likely design of future content based on the pattern of design that has been established.

Heck, I’m not even in disagreement that it might not be a problem. With all the changes to tanks and looking at the healer changes and that it all points to potentially higher incoming damage, whether that will really be the case and how much it will change things in lieu of other changes, there are enough unknowns to leave the process of making predictions fairly muddied.

The thing I disagree with is that the proposed work around is something that would really be viable for all the reason laid out above. I actually really like that you looked for an “outside the box” solution, as many people don’t, I just don’t see this one working out.