Dark Knight follow up thread

[MaraD_]

DRK definitely has its history with being "Clunky" but clunky doesnt simply mean "I dislike this thing".
To give an analogy thats not in game terms;
Think of a jigsaw puzzle.
Each piece fits together right, if its the correct piece. and if its the wrong piece, it doesnt fit. "CLUNKY" would be the creator of the puzzle making most of the jigsaw, and had a few missing pieces. They make some new pieces to fit the missing spots, but they arent quite a good fit. They can be jammed in, and sort of fit. And at quick glance, the image on them sorta fits, giving the general image the jigsaw was trying to show. (once completed)
That would be "clunky".
What is "not" clunky, are pieces that fit perfectly, but has horribly awful colors on them, badly clashing with the colors of the surrounding pieces.
If the piece fits, and the image still remains perfect, picking the pieces that happen to have too much purple on them, doesnt make them "clunky".

Unleash not using skill speed, while most tank gear had skill speed, is an example of clunky.
Having skills with long enough animations they clip the GCD, but their timer lines up to always clip, or clip most of the time, and waiting till the next GCD leads to a DPS loss, is clunky.
Having a oGCD which lowers the GCD so long animations clip even more... etc
Those all "work" but clearly werent fully polished like a well designed machine. They meet the bare minimum requirements.

Delirium, as stupid as it is, works perfectly as a lesser inner release.
It doesnt require you spam oGCDs like WAR, so you're free to use them, rather than save them, or save them if need be.
It doesnt clash with any other aspect of DRK.

BUT it does give DRK a lack of identity.

Its like when tanks were made in 2.0.
They didnt give tanks specialties, and they were just a bit of everything.
(Over time, they both added, and removed identities. I only mentioned this, to show how they started off with the mentality of, lets give them a little bit of everything, Rather than focus on one thing, and make them all work with eachother effectively.)
The exception being WARs infuriate+zerk+tank stance+equilibrium, which is probably the best example of abilities playing off eachother really well, and giving an identity.

I do agree DRK is all over the place with its mashed together attempt at "Mechanical/gameplay identity", clunky in certain places, and its aesthetic is even a bit jumbled around kinda. (I say kinda, because its job quests tend to make it pretty stable within the games world/lore)

DRKs blood weapon was a good candidate to be the "haste" tank, with a 2s GCD. Instead of a constant 10% dmg from dark side, a constant -20% GCD time would have been better. (adjust over all dmg accordingly)
Also, all tanks have 1 tank buster CD on short CD, 1 invulnerability CD, and 2 mid duration/CD mitigations.
Instead, they should have varied that up a bit.
The one with the shorted invuln (which should have been living dead) should have a short CD mitigation they can continuously use for just about everything.
Not having the extra mid type mitigations.
There should have been one which had to alternate between a bunch of longer CDs.
And one which alternated between a few middle length CDs.

There's other fields, but id be typing all day.
So anyways, I agree DRK was still disappointing for me, when compared to both HWs clever design, and SBs "speed" design (and I hated SB design)

EDIT: on a side note, something done to help separate the tanks is what I noticed. (thought was there, read this thread, thought it wasnt there, then double checked, and it is there)
PLD
buff for Magical spam
buffs for Physical spam

DRK
buff for GCD spam
buff for oGCD spam

WAR
buff for everything fits in this spam

all 3 have a "spam" window, but all 3 have a slightly different flavor in that window from the other.

EDIT#2 corrected the mistake on BW.