Dark Knight: 5.0x Feedback Thread

[Freyyy]

i consider the darkside rework making the mechanic so pasive while having a dedicated gauge with living shadow and TBN is a complety waste in every sense, it's a poor desing overall.

What nonsense is that ? The current Darkside is more active than it ever was... In SB it was just toggle and forget. In HW it used to drain your MP but it was still pretty much toggle and forget. Not losing it was solely based on achieving a very basic level of MP management... Just like how it is now, but instead you directly and actively give the buff to yourself and extend it by using an MP-spending ability. It's much more active than both SB and HW. Is it any harder or more complex ? Compared to SB Darkside, yes it is. Compared to HW, it's pretty much the same level of complexity, which is pretty low. Is it really that important ? I don't think so. Devs didn't need to create a new gauge for it but that's not a big deal. Darkside has never been the center of DRK's gameplay.

[DRKoftheAzure]

What nonsense is that ? The current Darkside is more active than it ever was... In SB it was just toggle and forget. In HW it used to drain your MP but it was still pretty much toggle and forget. Not losing it was solely based on achieving a very basic level of MP management... Just like how it is now, but instead you directly and actively give the buff to yourself and extend it by using an MP-spending ability. It's much more active than both SB and HW. Is it any harder or more complex ? Compared to SB Darkside, yes it is. Compared to HW, it's pretty much the same level of complexity, which is pretty low. Is it really that important ? I don't think so. Devs didn't need to create a new gauge for it but that's not a big deal. Darkside has never been the center of DRK's gameplay.

Compare it to DRG's Blood of the Dragon, and say it's still complex. I dare you.

[Freyyy]

Compare it to DRG's Blood of the Dragon, and say it's still complex. I dare you.

I said multiple times in my post that it wasn't complex and that it has never been because it's not the center of DRK's gameplay. What the hell even is this response ? Have you played DRG since SB ? BotD has nothing complex it's literally just toggle it on for free and do your rotation then everything automatically comes together with little to no thought process involved. In case you lose it (oh god), you can freely reapply it instantly because it has a very short CD. BotD used to be a bit complex in HW but not since SB.

HW Darkside allowed you to bank mana for future fights at the cost of its 12% damage bonus. This was common towards the ends of AoE pulls, when down to too few mobs for your AoEs to be worth its mana cost against so few, at which point you'd start readying for the next mass-pull by dropping Darkside and Syphon-comboing (be it into SE or Delirium). You could also drop it for any periods of pure downtime 3 or more server ticks long. Given that you ShB DRK essentially cannot drop it, it allows no such banking, and it encourages little to no downtime-awareness, I have no issues calling HW Darkside more complex or active than ShB's.

Yeah I should have accounted for that. It doesn't make for much more complexity though. It's just toggle it off when downtime is big enough (which wasn't that often) and toggle it back on when boss comes back. I'm not accounting for dungeons when I'm talking about job complexity either, but I guess you could since a majority of the playerbase doesn't do anything other than dungeons anyway.

It doesn't contradict the fact that ShB Darkside is still more active (active doesn't mean complex!) than both of its previous iterations since you get it by regularly pressing a button that deals damage and spends resource instead of just toggling it on at the start (and sometimes off and back on again in HW when downtime was sufficient during a fight). It also doesn't contradict the fact that Darkside has never been a complex mechanic to begin with so I don't see any reason why it should become so in ShB.

I'm pretty sure that's because of the gauge. If devs didn't decide to give it that fancy timer people wouldn't mind it at all. With that said, I would personally like it if they made it more complex because I like complex jobs (I've even posted suggestions on these forums for that prior to ShB's release), but I don't think that it's a groundbreakingly needed change. Other things are more important for DRK right now (like LD for example).

Sorry for the late answers to these, haven't been looking at the forums much these days.

[Shurrikhan]

It doesn't contradict the fact that ShB Darkside is still more active (active doesn't mean complex!) than both of its previous iterations since you get it by regularly pressing a button that deals damage and spends resource instead of just toggling it on at the start.

It used to use one button. Now it uses none. It remains a non-decision that has no means of failure except by forgetting to activate it at the start of the fight, which has since become... less punishing, if that's somehow a measure of anything. I fail to see any difference except that it lacks the aforementioned minor complexity you just admitted HW Darkside had and ShB Darkside does not.

That's not to say I wish to waste a button on it. I'd rather have ShB's Darkside design over SB's given that the latter was already a non-mechanic. But you're not going to convince me that ShB Darkside is somehow more "active" than HW DRK's by going from 'barely a mechanic' to 'something entirely autonomous'.

I would not be able to tell the difference between the mechanic being removed completely and potencies increased by 10% save that I could hold onto Edge of Shadow for one further GCD or server MP tick, whichever would come first.

I'd gladly point out that we could basically say the same for Enochian, Greased Lightning, and Blood of the Dragon save that they require further button-spam, but fellow non-mechanics don't make the one any better.

[RadicalPesto]

Compare it to DRG's Blood of the Dragon, and say it's still complex. I dare you.

Shadowbringers traits have turned Blood of the Dragon into basically a toggle with a duration identical to its cooldown, meaning that in the very unlikely case you drop it, it can be instantly reapplied.

BotD is in practice just as simple and lacking in interaction as Darkside is, specially now that Life of the Dragon also starts as a 30s timer instead of copying your remaining BotD duration.

[Shurrikhan]

What nonsense is that ? The current Darkside is more active than it ever was... In SB it was just toggle and forget. In HW it used to drain your MP but it was still pretty much toggle and forget. Not losing it was solely based on achieving a very basic level of MP management... Just like how it is now, but instead you directly and actively give the buff to yourself and extend it by using an MP-spending ability. It's much more active than both SB and HW. Is it any harder or more complex ? Compared to SB Darkside, yes it is. Compared to HW, it's pretty much the same level of complexity, which is pretty low. Is it really that important ? I don't think so. Devs didn't need to create a new gauge for it but that's not a big deal. Darkside has never been the center of DRK's gameplay.

HW Darkside allowed you to bank mana for future fights at the cost of its 12% damage bonus. This was common towards the ends of AoE pulls, when down to too few mobs for your AoEs to be worth its mana cost against so few, at which point you'd start readying for the next mass-pull by dropping Darkside and Syphon-comboing (be it into SE or Delirium). You could also drop it for any periods of pure downtime 3 or more server ticks long. Given that you ShB DRK essentially cannot drop it, it allows no such banking, and it encourages little to no downtime-awareness, I have no issues calling HW Darkside more complex or active than ShB's.

[shao32]

What nonsense is that ? The current Darkside is more active than it ever was... In SB it was just toggle and forget. In HW it used to drain your MP but it was still pretty much toggle and forget. Not losing it was solely based on achieving a very basic level of MP management... Just like how it is now, but instead you directly and actively give the buff to yourself and extend it by using an MP-spending ability. It's much more active than both SB and HW. Is it any harder or more complex ? Compared to SB Darkside, yes it is. Compared to HW, it's pretty much the same level of complexity, which is pretty low. Is it really that important ? I don't think so. Devs didn't need to create a new gauge for it but that's not a big deal. Darkside has never been the center of DRK's gameplay.

Active? After the first edge I forget about darkside exist since how redundant the mechanic has become, the difference of current darkside and a trait that boost you damage is zero since it's impossible to fade off, the large amount of time each egde/flood adds make it impossible, HW darkside was way more interactive thant this bcs you entire gameplay was around the MP generated and drain by darkside, and SB while actually becoming pretty redundant saddly still you can play with it in downtimes, in SHB it's jus a gauge number that you don't even bother to look bcs you have a surplus of darkside time, there is no planing around the timer, there is no interaction with other skills, it's just a flat 10% damage up that only a donkey will let fade off.

I will compared current darkside to HW one more closely ok?

In HW you turn it on, adds damage to all you skills and drain you MP in the process, if you run out of MP you lose it and you have to reapply the skill, simple right? The MP economy was affected by darkside, allows the execution of several skills of you set and prevent get mp from external sources, so if you lose darkside you can't execute several essential skills and lose the damage buff but you can recover MP naturally and from others.

SHB darkside, adds a 10% damage buff to everything, every edge/flood adds 30s, that's it, a generic flat damage buff that you don't bother to timing.

On both case you have to keep it but in HW Darkside interact with how you manage the job in many aspects, the second one no bcs of the surplus of edge and time make any edge/flood planing usage around darkside inexistent and the lack of any secondary effects to you skills just make it boring overall.

See the difference? In the past you have to keep attention to darkside and the effects of the skill to have a optimal management of the buff, current one no, you depend more of TA to plan you MP usage that darkside aka the gauge is pretty but useless, WAR will have more usage of a gauge like that for eye that DRK

[Sancho_Nyanta]

To be fair though they removed the ability of all jobs to get MP from external sources by removing said sources (except for potions). So really the only thing missing from the HW version of DS is the locking of certain skills, almost all of which have been removed anyway (with the arguable exception of Flood since it is basically Dark Passenger) and the continuous MP drain but really once you got use to it then you wouldn't really pay close attention to that either.

While I do admit that it isn't exactly like the HW version, you do have to agree that this version of DS is far closer to the HW version than what we've had in the past.

[shao32]

I can't consider it closer to HW, it have way less effects that the old versions, it's literally just a generic buff damage and nothing more and the mechanic is broken to a point you don't care about it, you just focus on don't overcap MP and darkside come alone without have to worry about so you literally don't care about it, I see it as a lame version of SB that you activate and don't care about it that HW you plan other stuff around the buff uptime.

Indeed the blocking MP is no longer necesary but old darkside prevent you gain MP with natural tics and this one just let you gain MP for some reason.

[Reynhart]

While I do admit that it isn't exactly like the HW version, you do have to agree that this version of DS is far closer to the HW version than what we've had in the past.

For me, the main mechanic of HW's DarkSide is "Do I have enough MP left to spend it on other skills while not letting Darkside drop ?". In that regard, since you can't spend MP on anything not Darkside related and you gain much more MP than what you need to reapply it before the timer run off, this mechanic is basically non existant, making it closer to a simple toggle in real combat.