Dark Knight Media Tour Feedback

[Chrono_Rising]

Based on the information released from the media tour I’m am feeling the planned Shadowbringers’ version of Dark Knight will ultimately fall flat and quickly. I would like to summarize some of the complaints from Stormblood’s version of Dark Knight as an organizational tool and how it appears to be addressed in current gameplay along with suggestions.

Complaints
“Dark Knight is the only tank with two combos. One of those two combos we never use.”

As a whole tanks have been avoiding using an aggro combo, I support the decision to remove these from the game. The problem is that it leaves us with the same old problem. Spamming 1-2-3 is not interesting in of itself, but having to manage resources is interesting. The solution to this is to add more engagement to the resource management (see next comments).

Complaints
“Dark Arts is too spammy and offers no variety, I would like other oGCDs that have an impact on my gameplay.”
“Darkside has no impact on our gameplay, being a 100% buff is just toggle on and be done with it.”

This is actually nearly solved but is still a problem. It is still a problem because darkside might as well be a 100% uptime buff based on the current skills my only choice in spending my mana is to press a button which does damage and extends my darkside.

This could be easily remedied by adding 2 more buttons which deal more damage to single target and multiple targets, when compared to Edge of Shadow and Flood of Shadow respectively, but do not refresh darkside. This adds to our gameplay and allows us to play with our timers and manage our self buffs much like ninja managing their Huton.

Also worth considering: Dark Arts Effects added to skills. Right now this sounded like a proc for using our mana spenders for free, which seems like a break even for TBN. However, adding additional effects based on what we choose to spend our dark arts effect on would also be an area to capitalize on. Dark Arts effects which add dots, cause a skill to direct hit, lower a cooldown timer, or something could be interesting.

In particular, having a dark arts effect affect our shadow would also solve another problem, namely that the shadow doesn’t seem to have any interaction with us. Summoning the shadow for longer, increasing its crit rate, summoning it with a darkside bonus, giving it a haste bonus to hit more frequently are all areas which would give us at least some gameplay element which interacts with the living shadow would be appreciated and more engaging than simply summoning it and have it do random things.

Complaints
“Dark Knight is missing synergy in some of its skills and cooldown timers, specifically blood weapon timing and carve and spit and plunge.”

In Shadowbringers, our cooldown timers on abilities seem to match up nicely with a 30 second base. But Blood Weapon no longer appears to have an interaction with abilities. This is an interesting area of internal synergy that I hope you consider restoring before 5.0. In a similar vein, the haste effect was actually fairly enjoyable and I hope that it returns.

Blood Weapon is another one of those interesting area’s for a dark arts effect, being able to spend that effect on blood weapon to make it last longer/give added bonuses would add yet another area of interaction that looks to be missing in the current build.

Complaint about the current build and solution
Many of us play dark knight because it is faster paced. Right now we have had our resource accumulation nerfed lowering our oGCD use, our haste buff removed, and a universal increase in cooldown time on our oGCD abilities. This is going to hurt our cast per minute, I think the current build goes too far in lowering this and I hope that we can seem some of these decisions reversed.

[DRKoftheAzure]

In a previous thread I shared my thoughts but thought of more things to fix because of how much of the "Not-Final build of job balance but really is Final Build of job balance" DRK just did not sit well with me...

As for what I would fix;

-Add HP restore on hit on Blood Weapon along with haste effect (unless they buff Darkside to have Haste effect) and duration is 15 seconds
-Bring back Spinning Slash and Power Slash and they still have the same combo tree as before, but they now have 50% chance to proc Dark Arts(yes this combo must the same potency as Souleater combo and generates the same amount of Blood Gauge as Souleater combo)
-Buff Syphon Strike with HP regen and Souleater with MP refresh and they both give health shields to DRK and they make the Dark Arts proc chance 100% or the next 50% proc is 100% when you finish Souleater combo
-Make "Darkside" basically "Blood of the Dragon" in terms of activation and duration
-Bring back Dark Dance and it upgrades into Dark Mind
-Unleash combos into Queitus which then combos into Stalwart Soul(which means remove Blood Gauge cost from Queitus)
-Have Superbolide effect activate when Walking Dead falls off(give the healers a little more wiggle room and yes recast may have to be increased to 7 min instead of being 5 min cooldown)
-Abyssal Drain changes the properties of the AoE combo above into line AoE combo and increased potency(Unleash becomes Dread Spikes which combos into Dark Passenger which combos into Flood of Dread unless something else comes to mind that sounds cooler but this may cause Abyssal Drain to cost Blood Gauge because of this suggested change)
-Bring back Sole Survivor and add a trait to where it increases targets damage dealt by 5% and a second trait to where if the first target dies the effect spreads to other targets and resets duration on all other targets if another target dies but recovery is 50% weaker than the first target
-Remove any and all procs from The Blackest Night
-Increase the effectiveness of Dark Missionary to 25% if just magic damage
-Living Shadow timer should be based on Darkside timer(basically DRK's version of Life of the Dragon)


That might help DRK a bit.. Also I don't know how to fix Delirium...

[Lyth]

There are multiple issues here. But the single biggest one is: the devs are just paying lipservice to player feedback.

Dark Knight Feedback Thread
Dark Knight Identity Issues

Identity
DRK has an identity problem. Every iteration of DRK has less of an identity than the previous one. The reason for this is that we're treating WAR and PLD as "extremes" and everything else gets thrown in the middle (Gunbreaker falls prey to this too, except that it hasn't been through an expansion yet for it to be gutted).

You have to change this philosophy if you want to fix anything.

Even setting aside gameplay issues, this new version of DRK has no soul. I think the very first line in that feedback thread was: DRK is fun because it's fast. The devs have taken that away now, presumably to make Gunbreaker work without stepping on the design space of their ever so precious 1.0 tanks.

Thematically, the only thing that DRK has going for it is the fact that it's weak against physical attacks. That's an identity, I guess. It's pretty. But empty.

And to be honest, now that you've mostly cut out the job specific quests, you can't even say that DRK has the best lore/storyline going for it. So there's little to no reason to play this version.

Partial Homogenisation
There's a lot of similarities between the tanks now, because the devs listened to the mantra of "let every tank be capable of doing everything". But it's all partial homogenisation, which was the very thing that was warned against. And the differences are almost universally skewed towards WAR.

We've flagged problems with tank invulns for the past four years. The devs have ignored it, except to make Holmgang stronger this expansion, despite the fact that it is hands down the most powerful tank cooldown, and is primarily responsible for making tankbuster mechanics trivial these past few expansions.

There are a few threads dedicated to this subject already. All tanks are "similar" in the fact that they have invulns. But Living Dead is a bad version of Holmgang, and Superbolide is bad version of Hallowed Ground. When you make jobs very similar, it's the differences that break the jobs. And both DRK and GNB suffer from being "in the middle".

You can pretty much go through DRK's kit, find its analog on another job, and see that it's better. It's very obvious when you look at utility side-by-side, but it's also obvious in things like Delirium (aka Dark Inner Release).

Comparison of Tank Utility

The level 80 ability could have been interesting, but as someone on reddit very cleverly pointed out, it's just a glorified DoT. And the delays involved are going to be an additional level of clunk on an already clunky job.

Conclusions
Given how the Stormblood media tour went, I have little to no faith in this. DRK looked like it had problems in that media tour. Myself and many others went with the "give it a shot" philosophy. The nerfs to DRK were even harder in the final cut. And once they had our pre-order money, they didn't even acknowledge that any sort of a problem even existed on DRK for another year and a half.

I'm not entertaining any such delusions this time around. I don't believe in this dev team. And there's clearly a focus on making certain jobs hold a privileged spot in the design space. I'm going to give GNB a shot, mostly because there are some friends that I'd like to keep in touch with. But the devs have failed their playerbase. I wish the them all the best with this World of WARcraft.

I'll leave you with this, which Yoshi-p put up back in 2014 on the reasons why 1.0 failed.
Yoshi-P: GDC Conference Slide
But don't worry, it'll all be fixed in a later patch. Please look forward to it.

[shao32]

yeah, all i can say is thanks Yoshi p to make DRK so generic and literaly worse, i guess it was so hard give us a upgraded version of HW gameplay, im switching to GNB please looking forwad to it Yoshi p.

[Izsha]

Am I the only person that actually is hyped to play the new Drk? I'm having trouble deciding if I'm going to level it 1st or second.

Obviously if you are still praying for a return of HW drk with the ogcd fast paced game play, you will he disappointed. they decided to just make that style gunbreaker and took drk a different direction. That style is still there, it's just on gun now. But I'm legit hyped to play new drk. It finally has an aesthetic that fits the job imo. Hyper speed great sword guy always seemed weird to me tbh, it much better suits gunbreaker.

My.only realcomplaint is the inner release copy paste. Inner release (ungabunga version, not original) was a bad idea for war. It's a bad idea on drk. Se heard drks wanted more burst and answered with the lamest way to burst. So much more potential wasted.

[Araxes]

All of this looks much like personal opinions, not a general Feeling of the Community. Most people are beyond hyped for the new Dark knight and it will porbably be the most played Tank at the start of the Addon beside Gunbreaker. Warriors will be few simply because they didnt get anything new. The animations and skills they got are all recycled from old skills or 3.0 PvP.

Paladins: yeah well Paladins are just Boring. The whole Class or Jobfantasy behind it is boring and it didnt help that Paladins were FORCED and YES i mean FORCED to play offtank the entirety of stormblood because of enmity issues.
So i think Dark knight will be overplayed till the hype died down a bit.

I assume it will look like this regarding tanknumbers: DRK, GNB, WAR, PLD

[Dalmacus]

All of this looks much like personal opinions, not a general Feeling of the Community. Most people are beyond hyped for the new Dark knight and it will porbably be the most played Tank at the start of the Addon beside Gunbreaker. Warriors will be few simply because they didnt get anything new.

Err what. Are those people's personal opinion not part of the community too? Most of the people here who put out argument about DRK has played for 4 years since HW. I mean look at delirium for DRK it's the only skill among the 2 other tanks that has TOTALLY changed for 2 TIMES!! The devs do not know what to do with that skill at all.

[Chrono_Rising]

All of this looks much like personal opinions, not a general Feeling of the Community. Most people are beyond hyped for the new Dark knight and it will porbably be the most played Tank at the start of the Addon beside Gunbreaker. Warriors will be few simply because they didnt get anything new. The animations and skills they got are all recycled from old skills or 3.0 PvP.

When people begin to connect that EoS and FoS are actually just buffed versions of Dark arts and Dark Passanger and can maintain Darkside without thinking about it by just not overcapping mana, I think people will realize that this dark knight is basically Stormblood dark knight slowed down with a new dot called living shadow. Its all flash no content.

Paladins: yeah well Paladins are just Boring. The whole Class or Jobfantasy behind it is boring and it didnt help that Paladins were FORCED and YES i mean FORCED to play offtank the entirety of stormblood because of enmity issues.
So i think Dark knight will be overplayed till the hype died down a bit.

It was not the pulling tank but it could MT fine, it just had the most utility in the OT role.

I assume it will look like this regarding tanknumbers: DRK, GNB, WAR, PLD

These numbers are not final, and also based on calculations, and Emiin doing spreadsheets for all the tanks, but right now it does not appear to be in this order at all. But numbers are not the point of my post, the point of my post is playstyle.

This thread:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4998555
and
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...he-DRK-changes.

Seem to be picking up on some of these playstyle elements.

[Izsha]

I believe hes talking about player numbers prediction based on hype not dps numbers.

Speaking of dps numbers

[Chrono_Rising]

I believe hes talking about player numbers prediction based on hype not dps numbers.

Speaking of dps numbers

Took a look at the dark knight numbers and notes, there are several overestimates, and some of them are noted just below the body of the post but not corrected in the calculations. Take with a massive grain of salt and of course everything is subject to change.