DRK redesign details explained

[TouchandFeel]

The test characters were all in their level 80 artifact gear and therefore were more than likely overgeared for any dungeons they synced into unless it was the expansions final/expert dungeons.

Ah yes that is true, but it still does give us a good potential look at the situation DRKs could find themselves in when they start to outgear the content they are participating in, which as I pointed out previously happens quite regularly and is pretty much a guaranteed at certain points such as going straight into the expansion with our current gear and once the endgame gear grind gets going.

From what we can extrapolate from the DRK abilities, how they interact and how they compare to equivalents on other tanks; TBN usage and DRK's overall dps seems designed around TBN regularly popping with perhaps some infrequent screw ups. If something as consistent as outgearing the content by a good degree breaks that design by greatly lowering the frequency of TBN popping it really throws a wrench in how DRK is supposed to play and perform.

Now this may not be the case and things could be fine even when overgeared, but based on what we have seen it seems a likely problem.
Luckily the potential easiest and most effective solution takes no effort to implement and has little to no chance of breaking balance and really only helps guarantee that TBN functions as designed, the fix being to just simply increase the duration of the shield by 2 or so seconds. The power potential of the shield is still determined by how big it is since it is a set cap of mitigated hp, it just alleviates the potentially inevitable issue of it not breaking like it is supposed to.

[Tint]

Text

Thanks for the math :O

So that means you can keep Darkside up and can safely use TBN one time a minute.

And when it does not break you are risking to drop Darkside when you use TBN a second time in that minute. Not to mention the dps-loss of the missing Dark Arts procc(s).

[TouchandFeel]

Thanks for the math :O

So that means you can keep Darkside up and can safely use TBN one time a minute.

And when it does not break you are risking to drop Darkside when you use TBN a second time in that minute. Not to mention the dps-loss of the missing Dark Arts procc(s).

You will be wanting to use TBN every 20s-30s for it to remain fairly equitable to the frequent use defensive abilities of the other tanks. This lines up almost exactly with the frequency of Edge/Flood in order to maintain Darkside. This was obviously intentionally designed to be like that. This points to the resource management for DRK being much tighter to optimize and potentially more punishing if you mess up. It also points to TBN needing to be used pretty much as often as you can get it out and that TBNs needs to break regularly to proc Dark Arts and then give you an Edge Flood to maintain Darkside and keep the cycle going.

[Inuk9]

For those fearful of Dark Knight having MP problems consider this:

• Dark Knight needs a minimum of 6k MP (2x Edge/Flood) per minute to maintain Darkside and a minimum of 12k to use TBN on cooldown
• Natural MP regen seems to give 200 MP every 3 sec for 4k MP per minute
• Blood Weapon should give 1k every minute over 5 gcds.
• Delirium burst should give 1k every 90 sec. This is roughly 667 MP every minute.
• Every Souleater combo gives 600 mp over 3 gcds with 2 Bloodspillers every 5 combos. This is 3k over a ~40 sec rotation.
• Carve and Spit gives some amount MP every minute.

With a proper rotation Dark Knight should be getting roughly 9k+ MP every minute. This isn't the use TBN on cooldown it could be but it should mean 3+ TBN per minute average.



The test characters were all in their level 80 artifact gear and therefore were more than likely overgeared for any dungeons they synced into unless it was the expansions final/expert dungeons.

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.

[WhyAmIHere]

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.

Ehhh.
This is one of the things I dislike about 5.0 DRK. "Just burn through all your MP it's whatever" is fine, but now TBN has become less of an on-demand mitigation, and now something you use to proc your darkside extenders first, mitigation second.

[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.

[Bhearil]

If thats the case really hope they buff the BN duration, its been reported by people that is hard the break aside mass mobs aoe/heavy hits and the more gear the harder will be

[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.