Dark Knight follow up thread

[Vaerum]

Maybe change TBN to:
Cooldown 15 secs
Merges your shadow with the target, causing your shadow to take up to 25% of the damage taken for the next 7 seconds. Damage taken will cause mp to drain at a rate of 1mp pt for every 10 damage taken. (Well whatever ratio sets 3k mp to an equivalent amount of hp the shield would provide at lvl 80. Have the shield's mp to hp ratio scale according to some stat, perhaps max hp. Could even do flat ilvl, just something to ensure it keeps up)
Once the effect ends or the limit is reached, your shadow retreats back into you and cause your next edge/flood to deal extra damage according to how much was absorbed. Once again another ratio of x to y.
This way you still have to manage your MP to have your tankbuster mitigation up, if you pop it with less than 3k mp it might not absorb enough to save you. But now when you pop it it's going to be dps neutral no matter what, if it absorbs nothing it cost you nothing, if it absorbs only 10% of max damage, than you only spent a portion of your mana, not the whole 3k, and you still get a powered up flood or edge out of it, just not as strong as if the shield broke.
Later thought: Possibly have the damage bonus from the TBN's stack, so the DRK could game the buff a bit, building up to a larger edge/flood for priority situations. This would make maintaining darkside an actual thing, since you would want to let off the empowered edge/flood while still under the 10% buff from darkside, but would drop APM a bunch since you'd purposefully hold of on edge/flood in certain situations, and drk already feels boring in the rotation anyways.

[TheRealQuah]

And when there's literally no point in the instance capable of dealing 25% of the DRK's HP in 7 seconds short of the DRK jumping into avoidable AoEs?

Well if that's the case, then you don't need to use TBN and should spend that MP on Flood or Edge.

[Shurrikhan]

Well if that's the case, then you don't need to use TBN and should spend that MP on Flood or Edge.

It's not a matter of A vs. B. It's a matter of A was free, and now it's not, and thus you have only B. You're not newly trading out TBNs for EoS/FoS. You're just no longer getting viable access to your on-demand mitigation skill.

[Sancho_Nyanta]

The point is that every other tank can do something similar without using an ability that eats into your dps. It's the same as if heart of stone took ammo or if raw/nascent flash(glint) took a portion of the beast gauge (500 potency loss respectively for the sake of argument). Now imagine if the full value of that ability was not used and you're out the potency.

As it is now, the two jobs mentioned above have it as a gain no matter what. War has a self sustain out of it. Heart of stone is just free. So those jobs get the mitigation at no cost. TBN is neutral at best. It's a simple disadvantage.

All I want is good gameplay to be rewarded. If you jack up, fine, eat the 500 potency loss. But if you do it well then it's a gain and not neutral.. The idea that it's neutral or loss just sucks.

Do something similar without eating into DPS? Stares in Clemency

The thing is that you get so much more mitigation on TBN than HoS. This is why HoS is free and TBN is not. To really get the healing that would make NF heal as much as what TBN is mitigating, you have to line it up with your hardest hitting skills to get that kind of healing. This makes it more clunky to use than the on demand nature of TBN because if you don't line it up with your big hitting skills then the amount of health you are gaining is mediocre. Furthermore, if it would have killed you anyway then NF isn't going to help. This is admittedly a more uncommon scenario but if you or another party member has 1 or more vuln stacks then it can become a factor.


The gain that you are getting is the TBN shield itself for free not the E/FoS. A Defensive gain may not be enough of a gain to meet your criteria but the fact is that using TBN at the correct time DOES reward good gameplay even though it doesn't reward it the way that you want.

For most other things, like using it on auto attacks, using it to mitigate raid wides, using it to save a party member, you're punished with a 500 potency lost for a tiny bit of mitigation (since the full shield might not be used in these instances, and a use could be small but could save someone's life who might be sitting at 2k HP). Which, in the grand scheme of healing mapping, won't be impactful enough for your healers in terms of their damage gained to make up for the damage lost.

If you are using TBN on autos/raid wides then you deserve to be punished for doing so. You have Rampart for autos and you have Dark Missionary for Raid Wides. TBN isn't meant to be used for those scenarios all willy nilly unless you're sure that it'll pop, like if your group took Frost rune for extra DPS and you TBN the MT for the following unavoidable AOE. Using TBN to save someone not only saved your Healer a GCD/MP to rez the person but also saved that person's GCDs from being wasted on rezing and getting into the fight. How is the sacrifice of your DPS not worth the gain of DPS from your healer and whomever you saved? It is just like using Clemency on another person to save them. It isn't optimal and they're sacrificing DPS but is this example really all that different? I can't say that I've ever seen someone tell the Pld that they shouldn't use Clemency in this way because, in the grand scheme of healing mapping, (it) won't be impactful enough for your healers in terms of their damage gained to make up for the damage lost.

[Danelo]

Do something similar without eating into DPS? Stares in Clemency

Nice try. Clemency is a self sustain and if you wanted to compare to the DRK kit it would be AD. A fair comparison to TBN would be Shelton. I don't have pld leveled but last I check Shelton was off the gauge (like all of their defensive utilities which have cost) and damage off mp, except clemency which I imagine is why you used it as a stand in for the false comparison. Besides, clemency has been a dps loss for a long while in most circumstances and is not used outside of solo content with rare exception. It's a side note that the pld isn't built around clemency the way DRK is built around TBN as a core feature so it's a poor comparison for that reason as well.

I would take the free ability over the defensive cd tied to your damage resource. The number of times hos won't save you but TBN will is tiny. In those cases you will more than likely invul if you have it up or move your cd map around. Generally though it's all going to do the same except one is free (ergo a dps gain bc it's not tied to your damage) and the other in not free and dps neutral at its best and a loss if the shield fails to pop.

[Nedkel]

SE should consider reducing MP cost of all skills to 2500 instead of 3000 and make all MP ticks of delirium restor 600 mp like all other MP restoration skills do.

[Sancho_Nyanta]

SE should consider reducing MP cost of all skills to 2500 instead of 3000 and make all MP ticks of delirium restor 600 mp like all other MP restoration skills do.

Now these are some changes that I can really get behind.

[Inuk9]

TBN is great in concept but has some flaws. The punishment is too much for a missclick, no other tank gets punished so hard as DRK, maybe a WAR using infuriate during Inner release is a second close but that is a job mechanic mistake and not a timing mistake.

As you get stronger, it is harder to pop TBN, your iLV increases and the encounters become more unpredictable, some (me included) like to open with TBN to get maximum profit from blood weapon from the very first GCD on the fight, now the bosses autos are enough to pop TBN but in 5.1 maybe will not be anymore...

[Sancho_Nyanta]

I end up finding this kind of thought process a bit strange. When we are over geared for content and it becomes a joke then just don't use TBN. Use the MP for E/FoS. At that point we will be so over geared that we won't be needing to use TBN.

[TouchandFeel]

I end up finding this kind of thought process a bit strange. When we are over geared for content and it becomes a joke then just don't use TBN. Use the MP for E/FoS. At that point we will be so over geared that we won't be needing to use TBN.

We may not "need" it but it's defense is still something we would benefit from and considering that no other tank potentially loses their frequent use defensive ability due to basic gear/stat progression, it is an issue that needs to be considered.

I don't support removing the MP cost and scrapping Dark Arts like others are calling for but a solution to avoid the ever moving target that gear progression and having TBN break frequently enough creates needs a solution and preferably one that is unaffected by stat scaling.

Increasing the duration is a fix but only a band-aid one. It will either need to keep getting extended as we gear up, be set so long that it will always break no matter what, or it will work fine until we hit a stat threshold and then it doesn't.

I know I mentioned this in a different thread, but that is why I proposed having a small duration increase but then also allowing the DRK to break the shield themselves by pressing TBN again while the shield is still active. That keeps the aspect of not being able to get the full defensive benefit of the shield since it would get broken before all it's HP was exhausted but potentially removes the "loss" aspect as long as the DRK breaks it in time. This actually maintains some level of interactivity and skill to not losing the DA proc moreso than just increasing the duration to the point where it is guaranteed to break. It also is a safeguard against stat scaling since the DRK is in control of it breaking, only allowing them as much defense as what can be fit in the duration. This maintains the strength of the shield in current/relevant content but scales it back similar to the way % mitigation naturally scales back with older content that we out-gear, keeping it more in-line with the other tank frequent use defensives.