My Thoughts on ShB Dark Knight: Likes, Dislikes, Proposed Changes

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Nobody missing speed from Blood Weapon here? Not really gonna judge, but I am surprised at least.

Or I missed it somewhere.

[Silkerin]

So, i guess of instead of creating a new thread about the changes i would love, i will just reply here and see the opinions about it. Also, liked most, if not all, of the ideas proposed by op.

First, the easier changes:

- Bloodweapon: Just a duration increase to 13s.

- Carve n Spit: like mentioned by op, just reduce its cd, if value adjustments are needed to be done, fine, but make it useable more frequently.

- TBN: a duration increase would help a lot of the issues, personally i would increase it to around 12s (when you get that crit adlo this never breaks, which will lead into the next change). Make it a priority in the shield order list to break. When it breaks OR expires, make it so it still give you dark arts to use with the flood and edge, but when it breaks, make it reward you a bit for using it well by giving you a bit of mp back, even 500 is fine, or, giving blood gauge is fine as well, but give something to reward the player properlçy, not just breaking even.


Second, the changes that would require to add properties to an action:

- Dark Mind: i personally never understood the point of making it "magic only", but, if it HAS to be that, make it a 10% magic damage reduction AND a 10% hp shield. I personally would prefer a straight 20% hp shield and no magic damage reduction. If cd has to be increased, just increase it, 90s might be fine.

- Abyssal Drain: the changes op mentioned were fantastic for this. My own spin on it would be a mix of Abyssal Drain, Salted Earth and the gone Sole Survivor, on activation it restores a bit of hp and mp to the user and also applies a HoT, on the damage part it deals the damage and applies a short dot, but it also does give a small heal by every enemy hit so it retains its original flavor.

- Living Dead: I agrre with what was posted in this thread, this is a simple addition to it, so it at least looks cooler, give it a cool aura, like the one from the hw trailer. AND, when you enter the walking dead state, it gives you a free living shadow to use without cost and reseting its current cd (would be cool if this was a mastery trait)

- Salted Earth: if Abyssal Drain changes were made, this action could be gone, if not, like mentioned in this thread, make this a area of HoT for the drk on top of the damage, if the cd of this skill is as long as it is, make it a decent HoT, but ideally it would have a shorter cd (60s).

- Dark Missionary: Remember the thing i wanted for Dark Mind? Basically an aoe version of it. 5% magic damage reduction and 5% hp shield (based of drk maybe?) to party members. Kinda like a mini version of the drk lb.

- Living Shadow: Make it restore mp for every hit it does, and also reduce drks damage taken by 5% maybe 10%, as if you and Fray are actually fighting together (this being more flavor than actual mitigation).

- Quietus and Bloodspiller: Increased potencies slightly and after every use of either of them the cd of Living Shadow is reduced.


More complex changes:

- Delirium: How about it being an action that moves the drk more towards the "soul/phantasm necromancer" field? we already have living shadow, and becoming somewhat undead, so it is already somewhere along that path. The action visuals calls phantoms of those who died for your cause/goal or who you helped find peace at the end of their life (say... like a certain energetic femroe, caring elezen, cold elezen, panda bunny etc, but all that just thematically, effects wise it is just a bunch of shapeless phantams with that aura effect Ardbert had when he was losing himself and with heavy dithering) to float around you (yet another aura effect). Now for what this skill actually does:
First, they will auto attack what you are targeting and use an aoe when you use an aoe move, each of these attacks recover a bit of your mp and fills the blood gauge slightly (I speak as if they were various attacks at once, but it all counts as only 1, just visually they look many);
Second, it retains the current Delirium effect of being able to spam Bloodspiller and Quietus (this has to be mantained, all tanks have a spammy skill and a way to spam it, so i think drk needs one too sadly);
Third, when used with blood gauge under 50 it buffs Quietus and Bloodspiller by 50? 100? potency;
Fourth, Duration increase to 12 or 11s (just so people with high latency can use this more confortably)
Fith, after the effect ends it transforms Soul Eater into the old Power Slash (the move that strikes with the sword and then shoots a beam from your hand), dealing more damage and self healing for more. When Power Slash is used mp is consumed. This lasts for 1 Power Slash.

[shao32]

Nobody missing speed from Blood Weapon here? Not really gonna judge, but I am surprised at least.

Or I missed it somewhere.

i miss it but idk how viable is the buff without reworking complety blood weapon and delirium, i personally ask for small changes that can be done mid expansion, a extensive rework seems unviable until 6.0 saddly.

[Kniteroad]

I want SKS increase back with blood wep. It could make the burst window feel so much better, and then you wouldn't need a bloodspiller or quietus potency increase as you'd be able to fit one or two more within delirium window.

an increase in duration in TBN would be nice for dungeons but for raids it isn't really necessary. I never have an issue with TBN breaking for extreme trials so far.

As much as we want them to, Yoshi said himself that he doesn't want to change the mechanics of living dead, as it is a aesthetic and thematic feature of the class.

I'm not crazy about SHB DRK as a whole, i personally find each iteration since SB release more and more boring and slower. The main issue i want fixed with the next patch is mana regen. when blood wep is on CD i find myself wanting for mana all the time and just spamming the same 3 buttons over and over. PLD has more mana regen with riot blade then DRK does with siphon strike and they aren't as mana dependent as DRK is.

And for the love of god just give us scourge back as it was.

[RadicalPesto]

Removing Salted Earth rather than reducing its cooldown significantly feels like a pretty bad change when Dark Knight already has a very low button count compared to Paladin and Gunbreaker to be honest. One of the big problems with the current iteration of the class is that off-gcds happen too infrequently to compensate for the long phases where you do nothing but spam souleater, and removing an entire off-gcd skill when it could just have its exceedingly long cooldown reduced would just contribute to that problem.

[Xan_Kriegor]

I fully agree with the general thoughts expressed by the OP. I have also found really interesting some of the suggestions such as the Living Dead rework and the removal of Salted Earth and its replacement for an ender to our Delirium burst. Carve and Spit working more as Spirits Within would be nice too. I think with the OP's suggestion DRK would really feel like a mix of PLD and WAR gameplay whereas nowadays we do feel a lot more like WAR.

People want something more unique to DRK and I understand them. However, at this point, I think it will be really difficult to bring something entirely new. They have limited resources to work around 17 jobs, and we all know that despite DRK having their issues there are jobs in worse place design-wise (AST, SCH, MNK for example). I think that DRK can take advantage of some mechanics from other jobs to make its own kit, with a lot of pieces inspired from other jobs, but feeling unique as a whole.

I also liked that you have mentioned the delay from TBN. It is really annoying. I do not think the increase in duration of TBN is necessary if that delay was reduced. Most of the scenarios were TBN did not pop were caused by a missed first hit due to the delay. Other than that, it is just a matter of using TBN wisely.

[Nedkel]

But DRK and GNB has the exact same amount of buttons that are being used as offensive tools.
DRK has less defensive CDs in comparison but only by 1.

[Xan_Kriegor]

Removing Salted Earth rather than reducing its cooldown significantly feels like a pretty bad change when Dark Knight already has a very low button count compared to Paladin and Gunbreaker to be honest. One of the big problems with the current iteration of the class is that off-gcds happen too infrequently to compensate for the long phases where you do nothing but spam souleater, and removing an entire off-gcd skill when it could just have its exceedingly long cooldown reduced would just contribute to that problem.

I do not think that we need a new oGCD. If SE gives us this, we will have to add another double weave in our burst phase inside Trick Attack, it will not solve the problem for our downtime.

Salted Earth is garbage right now, its effects can be embodied in other skills and it can be removed. Of course, removing Salted Earth would give us a new Skill slot (that could be an ender for Delirium burst as OP's suggested).

To solve the problem of the boring downtime DRK has right now the best solution is to reduce cooldown of Carve and Spit and maybe Abyssal Drain.

[TouchandFeel]

I concede that what your saying is true BUT the price for things in SB were 2400 mp and now they are 3000 mp across the board. 1000mp to 1200mp depending on the server tick is still on the low side without factoring in the increased cost of tbn and fos/eos in ShB. The issue is only exacerbated when you look at not getting the full usage out of BW. (Yes, I meant BW regarding the ping issues, not delirium, it has been corrected in the original post. Thanks for catching that).

I agree that the relative rate of MP gain to MP expenditure has decreased, slowing things down somewhat, but as you alluded to it is more a result of the cost of MP abilities going from 2400MP to 3000MP and the differences in Blood Weapon, Delirium and the removal of Quietus returning MP which only really applies to dungeon tanking.

As we have established while Syphon Strike itself has had it's MP gain reduced to 600MP from 1200MP, the natural regen compensates for that which results gaining virtually the same amount of MP as in Stormblood over the period of the combo. It actually could be argued that it is slightly better now since the natural MP regain keeps ticking regardless of if you are even attacking the boss, so you get to take advantage of it during downtime or when you have to disengage for mechanics.

That was the main point to that response, to clear up some general misconceptions regarding DRK MP gain from Syphon Strike, since pointing to Syphon and decrying DRK's MP gain has been a common refrain on the forums. You didn't draw such a conclusion, I just see it quite often being posted. If you look at just the MP gain from the ability it looks like it got cut in half, but if you look at it within the actual context of using the ability within a combo like you will be doing, it turns out to be about the same. A bit of a not seeing the forest for the trees situation going on.

Now in regards to the increased cost of MP abilities versus the rate of MP gain, I don't think it is too bad overall. It is definitely a bit slower than before, but not nearly to the level that you see some people saying it is. From what I have seen so far in random groups, many more average level of play DRKs are likely to not use TBN and Edge as often as they could/should and end up overcapping MP during the heat of battle.

I think that the feeling of being MP starved that people are expressing stem from a number of things.

First is that they got used to some of the ridiculous, and tbh broken, periods of MP gain that DRK used to have, such as Blood Weapon -> TBN/Quietus/DA+AD, where you were literally overflowing with MP. They are lumping in situations like this with their overarching memory of MP gain on DRK and it skews the perception of the situation as a whole.

Second is that there are more pronounced periods of being low on MP due to the rework making DRK more burst-centric.
Before DRK's kit had small periods of psuedo-burst from increased resource gain which didn't make players feel "MP starved" because a large part of the dps gains were based around an excess of incoming MP.
With DRK's kit now revolving more around the burst period of Delirium, the situation has changed. The burst is no longer based around resource gain and instead around the repeated use of a hard-hitting attack, so we no longer have that feeling of gaining a lot of MP to offset what we will be using during the burst period making it feel more like a drop in resources rather than a trade-off. This is exacerbated by the now greater emphasis to pool resources for burst and then burn them during that period, resulting in more pronounced peaks of MP gained and pooled between and right before a burst period and more pronounced troughs after we burned most of our MP during the burst. It is these troughs that people are experiencing which makes them feel as though they are MP starved. Then on top of that, DRK's main resource ability, Blood Weapon, was likely used before Delirium to top up on resources to feed into the burst period, so it is not available after to fill back up.

During the media-tour and what I recall seeing during the first couple of days in early-access (could be remembering incorrectly), Blood Spiller under Delirium was returning 500MP per hit which really helped that feeling of being dry of MP after Delirium because you would gain just over 3000MP during Delirium from BS and natural regen, leaving you back at the bottom end of where you wanted your MP pool to be and not potentially behind and having to catch up. With the gain now being 200MP, you aren't really getting enough back during Delirium to properly cushion the loss of resources during that period so you end up coming out the other end feeling really low on and drained of resources.

So to summarize, it's not really what many are pointing to like the lower MP gain from Syphon that is creating this feeling of being MP starved on DRK but actually a number of other factors; such as looking at past aspects of DRK with rose-tinted glasses while not really scratching below the surface of the way the current DRK works, and the greater emphasis on stronger and more defined periods of burst under Delirium.

That does still leave us with the elephant in the room, the period after Delirium where you have exhausted most of your resources and oGCDs, leaving you with little you can do to break up cycling your Soul Eater combo. This post-Delirium period arguably, and I agree to a point, just feels bad and I support some form of changes to alleviate the issue. Pretty much I boil it down to two contributing factors that create the situation, a dearth of MP generation during Delirium and the long recast of many oGCDs.

I already tried to cover the long recast of oGCDs in my initial proposals, reducing the recast of Carve and Spit and Abyssal Drain to 30s each so that they will be available again far more quickly.

As for the MP gain during Delirium, I think it would be a good idea to increase the MP generation during that period in either of two ways.
The first way would be to just increase the MP gain from Blood Spiller under Delirium back up to 500MP per hit.
The second way would be taking into account the proposed change I made in my original post where I suggested the addition of a Confiteor-like ability that I called Malediction. The MP gain from that could be fairly high, so that you would get a burst of MP when ending Delirium. For example, if Malediction were to give you 1800MP, in addition to the natural MP regen and the MP from Blood Spillers, you would gain around 3200MP during Delirium which seems like a nice place to land.

In addition to that, if DRK still needed a little more MP gain, I think that increasing the gain from Carve and Spit would be a good place to slot that in. Easy, straightforward, much more simple to control and balance, and it would make Carve and Spit feel even more impactful when used.

[TouchandFeel]

I also liked that you have mentioned the delay from TBN. It is really annoying. I do not think the increase in duration of TBN is necessary if that delay was reduced. Most of the scenarios were TBN did not popped were caused by a missed first hit due to the delay. Other than that, it is just a matter of using TBN wisely.

I'm actually surprised that I haven't seen it being mentioned here on the English forums. I've seen it pop up a few times on the Japanese forums. Fixing the delay could indeed make it so an increased duration may not be necessary since most times it doesn't break for me, it always seems like one or two more hits would have broken it. Hard to say for sure and would be something that could require reevaluation if the delay gets addressed.