Dark Knight: 5.0x Feedback Thread

[DRKoftheAzure]

I guess i'll chime in. I started when Shadowbringers launched, so the only DRK i've experienced is 5.0 one. This probably has been said by many other people, but anyway here are my thoughts on the class from 30 to 70.

So, low level dungeons. Unleash and your 1, 2, 3. That's it, and a lot of jobs are not fun to play at low levels, but spamming one button gets old. Then you get Edge and Flood. Which is still kinda depends on your 1,2,3, and occasionally Blood Weapon.

50+. Salted Earth and Abyssal Drain needs some rework, i thik. Those recast timers are atrocious.
Salted Earth - 300 potency over 15 seconds AoE DoT on 90 seconds recast timer. What a steal. I understand, that it's thematically an inverse Asylum, but that does not really makes it better. Abysal Drain is simply undertuned. It's an instant get some health back, but the amount healed is kinda small and that 1 minute recast is terrible.

I quite like TBN and when timed properly it is amazing. What i noticed that it seems there's some delay before i see the shield icon on myself and it actually taking effect. I.e. i see tank buster being cast, i pop TBN, but for some reason even tho i see TBN icon on me, it does not absorb the damage and i eat full damage. So i kinda has to pre-cast it at times.

Delirium. This is more or less your short burst window and that's more or less it.

Living Dead. Eeeeeeeeh.

I think there are some things that could be improved, but overall it gets job done.

A new player not liking the Shadowbringers version of Dark Knight...? I was told all of the new players liked the Shadowbringers Dark Knight...

[Flay_wind]

A new player not liking the Shadowbringers version of Dark Knight...? I was told all of the new players liked the Shadowbringers Dark Knight...

I like the class, does not mean that there are no problems with it here and there. It's quite easy to play, which might be not a bad thing, but the more i play, the more i notice how scripted things are in general.

[jetfire117]

I like the class, does not mean that there are no problems with it here and there. It's quite easy to play, which might be not a bad thing, but the more i play, the more i notice how scripted things are in general.

I feel like that's an issue will all the tanks at the moment. But I guess that's what happens when you have to appeal to the larger part of the playerbase.

[Satarn]

I feel like that's an issue will all the tanks at the moment. But I guess that's what happens when you have to appeal to the larger part of the playerbase.

With four separate jobs in the role, there's no reason to cater them all to that same playerbase though. We've got enough tanks to share.

There's absolutely no problem with having some jobs be more straight-forward and relaxed. It becomes an issue when - like you said - it's all of them.

[DRKoftheAzure]

I like the class, does not mean that there are no problems with it here and there. It's quite easy to play, which might be not a bad thing, but the more i play, the more i notice how scripted things are in general.

Fair point. Though I will say that it is too easy to play personally.


And currently the main problem for both Dark Knight and Warrior DPS rotation-wise is "playing whack-a-mole" with your damage dealing cooldowns.


Defensively speaking all tanks need a better identity which can be solved by taking what is own unique buff that gives them an edge over the other tank but has some synergy with the other tanks(Gunbreaker lacks this sort of thing defensivly speaking but that might be for another thread for someone else to point out and talk about if they end up beating me to the punch).


And as for buff management between fights Darkside and Storm's Eye are basically there to grief the tanks for not doing big pulls(Heavensward and Stormblood iterations of Darkside was not perfect and were probably overtuned on the drawback side of things, but Stormblood Darkside was more or less better, because it no longer passively drain MP to keep it active).

[SacrificialToast]

So, now that I've played DRK at level 80 for a little while, I think I have a grasp on why the job doesn't feel quite right. This is mostly about the feel of the class, rather than any hard numbers, but I have an idea on how to make things better without fundamentally altering anything.

Basically, the main problem is the total lack of any internal synergy. None of your skills affect each other, so you don't care when you press them. This leads to you just playing whack-a-mole with your cooldowns. I think the best place to add in some synergy isn't with the cooldowns, but with the Darkside buff. Currently it's just a flat 10% damage increase with 100% uptime, and you never have to care about it unless things have gone very wrong. I think it'd be better served as a more powerful buff with less uptime. Say (just throwing some numbers out here) every time you use Edge/Flood, you get +30% damage for 5 seconds. Then you have incentive to use your good stuff during your small Darkside windows. You can leave the duration stacking up to double so you can chain them effectively and use it for all of Delirium. This also has a small bonus effect of introducing MP management as a concept at level 30 rather than level 70. You don't wanna just spam them, because the duration only goes up to 10s max.

Now, the biggest problem with this kind of system that I see is that if your TBN doesn't break, it goes from being a moderate DPS loss to a devastating one. There are a couple ways you could address this. The easiest one would just be to make it really easy to break. Increase the duration so that it's almost certainly going to be broken just from auto-attacks. More interestingly, you could double down on the mechanic of timing the shield right, and have casting TBN give you a Darkside buff on its own, in addition to the current Dark Arts proc. This way, properly using the shield would actually be a DPS gain, rather than DPS neutral, and not breaking it would only be the same loss you currently have (relative to just casting Edge/Flood instead). You'd also be encouraged to toss it around while offtanking so you can get a nice boost out of it.

[Shurrikhan]

So, now that I've played DRK at level 80 for a little while, I think I have a grasp on why the job doesn't feel quite right. This is mostly about the feel of the class, rather than any hard numbers, but I have an idea on how to make things better without fundamentally altering anything.

Basically, the main problem is the total lack of any internal synergy. None of your skills affect each other, so you don't care when you press them. This leads to you just playing whack-a-mole with your cooldowns. I think the best place to add in some synergy isn't with the cooldowns, but with the Darkside buff. Currently it's just a flat 10% damage increase with 100% uptime, and you never have to care about it unless things have gone very wrong. I think it'd be better served as a more powerful buff with less uptime. Say (just throwing some numbers out here) every time you use Edge/Flood, you get +30% damage for 5 seconds. Then you have incentive to use your good stuff during your small Darkside windows. You can leave the duration stacking up to double so you can chain them effectively and use it for all of Delirium. This also has a small bonus effect of introducing MP management as a concept at level 30 rather than level 70. You don't wanna just spam them, because the duration only goes up to 10s max.

Now, the biggest problem with this kind of system that I see is that if your TBN doesn't break, it goes from being a moderate DPS loss to a devastating one. There are a couple ways you could address this. The easiest one would just be to make it really easy to break. Increase the duration so that it's almost certainly going to be broken just from auto-attacks. More interestingly, you could double down on the mechanic of timing the shield right, and have casting TBN give you a Darkside buff on its own, in addition to the current Dark Arts proc. This way, properly using the shield would actually be a DPS gain, rather than DPS neutral, and not breaking it would only be the same loss you currently have (relative to just casting Edge/Flood instead). You'd also be encouraged to toss it around while offtanking so you can get a nice boost out of it.

Interesting. I'm not sure I'd like the gameplay tightened to quite that extent, but it's compelling food for thought, at the very least.

I can easily imagine, for instance, that MP spent (or %barrier consumed in TBN's case) = some proportionate duration of Darkside, wherein your damage (and/or maybe even defense, if we ever wished to hazard unique mitigation again) is buffed, but at that point your every GCD would be scripted down to a tee, as you'd want to have a certain amount of combo progress and X Bloodspillers ready to go with every EoS and you'd be effectively barred from using any oGCD out of the DS window, often including chained EoS uses. We'd go from the loosest and subtlest tank design to the, if experienced negatively, the most oppressive.

I'm reiterating from a prior post at this point, but I feel that ShB's design issues fall very similarly to SB's coming from HW. When we went from HW to SB, we lost significant variety in our oGCD spenders, along with certain skills which sort of 'punctuated' our rotation (e.g. Scourge). Rather than retuning these skills a bit to make their varying options more frequently viable, those options were simply removed. There were, therefore, fewer of what we could call "DRK" decisions or "DRK" moments. SB at least offered us some new bits of ridiculous in turn, like Blood Weapon-Quietus, but for the most part the transition from HW to SB was felt as a noticeable loss because of the diminished count and variety of iconic actions. I think that is the same issue ShB now struggles with. Your Darkside window idea could be a huge boon, but I fear that if something like that were given as quite nearly the sole mechanic by which we give import to our other actions, most players would find it a change for the worse rather than an improvement.

[InfiniDragon]

A new player not liking the Shadowbringers version of Dark Knight...? I was told all of the new players liked the Shadowbringers Dark Knight...

I like the class, does not mean that there are no problems with it here and there. It's quite easy to play, which might be not a bad thing, but the more i play, the more i notice how scripted things are in general.

LOL the backfire.

On topic, the more I play DRK the more the true problem spot for me with it is Blood Weapon. That window to hit 5 WS sucks compared to Delirium and it should be addressed first.

[DRKoftheAzure]

Bumping this to the front to see if there might be a 5.x Feedback thread from Chrono_Rising

[Cabalabob]

Bumping this to the front to see if there might be a 5.x Feedback thread from Chrono_Rising

Nothing has changed since Shadowbringers launch. They increased the sentinel equivalent duration across the board and made reprisal AoE. Nothing specific for DRK has happened so all the complaints still stand.