Dark Knight: 5.0x Feedback Thread

[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.