Dark Knight is playable, but BORING

[Dragonkat]

Honesty this is my opinion people need to stop baseing job "complexity" of dungeon and get there butts in raid content.

Please see my sig, and stop thinking being good at raid content means you know a class.

I'd say the people who understand i from the ground up having played it through all those dungeons you seem to poo poo know the class a whole helluva lot better then the people spending all day in the boringness of EX content, which honestly boils down to stand here for X and kill in X order if titainia was any indication. The exact same as any dungeon, the only difference is the dps check, and the twitch required to dodge the aoes in places like Eden 1 savage.

and these by the by are the people who are telling you it's boring, why it is, and none of this silly "do you even parse bro?" nonsense you're spouting is gonna change that.

A buster is a buster regardless of where it is. And those saying DRK is a one trick TBN pony are spot on. Without that skill which now only gives a DA instead of blood which had multiple options for use DRK lacks any synergy with it's kit, has become a stripped dumbed down WAR clone. And while functional in raids for it's dps and TBN use it's still boring as hell to play because there is nothing about the kit that works together now, and DA spam has been replaced with flood spam, great change that... Maybe if we also keep complaining loud enough Living dead will be made useful before the next spin on the what is delirium this time wheel? [/sarcasm]

The class has no identity anymore, everything that made DRK what it was and what made it fun (like AD and quietus spam to ping pong your mp and hp) is gone. It's a clunky slow playing skilless tank that may as well be called sword guy for all that's left of dark knight. It's disgraceful that shadowbringer's mascot class has gotten the treatment it has from the devs.

[RadicalPesto]

Please see my sig, and stop thinking being good at raid content means you know a class.

I'd say the people who understand i from the ground up having played it through all those dungeons you seem to poo poo know the class a whole helluva lot better then the people spending all day in the boringness of EX content, which honestly boils down to stand here for X and kill in X order if titainia was any indication. The exact same as any dungeon, the only difference is the dps check, and the twitch required to dodge the aoes in places like Eden 1 savage.

Raid content actually requires you to plan out your mitigation, use tank swaps, understand positioning, maximize uptime while performing mechanics and know when its best to use group mitigation skills like Dark Missionary. Dungeons can be successfully completed without any major issues without a single press of Reprisal, a single use of Dark Missionary, without any minding to maintaining your DPS uptime (and it doesn't matter if you say "go play a DPS instead", because "tanks and healers should optimize their DPS while performing their role" isn't an opinion, it's the fundamental design of FFXIV), with completely random or erratic usage of your mitigation skills, without using any interrupts, etc. In fact, given the aggro changes in Shadowbringers, you can feasibly complete every dungeon in the game as a tank while pressing a completely random assortment of AoE skills, since any damage will be enough to maintain aggro.

When you say things like this:

A buster is a buster regardless of where it is.

You indicate that you don't understand why people ask for balance and design to be done around Savage raids. A tank buster in a late Savage fight will instantly kill you if not mitigated properly, and will likely spiral out of control into a wipe unless your team manages to pull off a quick recovery. Not only that, because Savage fights are around 10 minutes long, you need to make sure you have good mitigation for every single tankbuster throughout the fight (which may require strategic tank swapping, to make use of both tank's mitigation toolkits), and these will at times hit hard enough to require the stacking of two mitigation buttons (TBN + Rampart, for example) just to ensure your basic survival. A buster in a dungeon will, if not mitigated, uh, hit you for half of your HP, which the healer will immediately restore with an off-gcd, and will require at most a single TBN to mitigate, and you will see two or three of them in a boss fight meaning there's no need to plan for running out of mitigation. Dungeon busters and Savage busters are such a completely different thing that Dungeon busters seem to largely exist to give you a way to actually break TBN sometimes, because they practically never represent a genuine threat to a tank's survival.

Almost every balance thread has somebody like you drop their anti-raider manifesto and think they're unique for not enjoying Savage content, and its always full of comments such as "why should the classes be balanced around Savage?" and the answer is this: Because the alternative would be to bring every single 4 person dungeon, normal mode raid and 24 person raid to a difficulty level comparable to Savage, a difficulty level where a class bringing Divine Veil, or interrupts, or strong mitigation skills, or the best DPS actually matters. You can't balance around content where out of 30 skills you can easily clear every fight pressing only 6, and that means you have to either balance around Savage and Ultimate, which require you to use either all or a majority of your skills, or make the entire game as difficult as Savage and Ultimate, and I guarantee you that absolutely nobody in their right mind wants that.

[LegolasT]

Oh boy, the irony...
No dude - this, this right here, is how people complained about SB DRK "mindlessly spamming DA on everything all the time".

People who complain about current DRK are, for the most part, those who knew and liked the resource management and pooling and are dissatisfied with how that aspect of the job has been in fact diminished(as well as the considerably lowered APM required).

Before you needed to constantly manage your MP/Blood to avoid overcapping, while still keeping most of it for party buffs. Now the job is actually way more linear like PLD/GNB, because all cooldowns and the rate at which you gain MP have been made to naturally align with said buffs, requiring very little management. The way everything is calculated, you regenerate entire bar of MP within a minute, which aligns perfectly with emptying all that into Trick Attack for example.
It's not that noticeable without a NIN, but the other buffs you get to work with are on two and three minute cooldowns, so you still pretty much operate on that minute-to-minute basis, with not much else in between.

Moreover, SB removed all interaction between the two resources - you can no longer spend MP to gain Blood and vice versa, which really hurts the synergy within DRK's kit and further simplifies the management aspect.



It used to be "heavy" resource management. I'd say now it's more on the lighter side and that's the issue.



Except that was not actually the case. The whole TBN+BS vs DA issue was pretty complicated on the case-to-case basis, but overall it turned into being DPS-neutral over the course of the fight, as long as you didn't spam it literally on cd.
In fact you were more encouraged to use it on raidwides and even autos in between other cds, simply due to it being more likely to break than now and hurting you less if it didn't.

So what are your parces with DRK when it was the "heavier resource management" tank how much raid content did you complete? Have you complete o12s or if you didn't like DRK then how about a12s??? Have you doing in extremes?

[Satarn]

So what are your parces with DRK when it was the "heavier resource management" tank how much raid content did you complete? Have you complete o12s or if you didn't like DRK then how about a12s??? Have you doing in extremes?

Yes, I have cleared entire Alphascape on DRK in SB and had a blast with it. I look quite fondly to that tier, due to not just the busy resource management, but also how much neat optimization could be done with old Salted Earth due to boss positioning in majority of fights and how well defensive cooldowns worked after the 4.3 changes. DRK might've been overall weaker than other tanks back then, but damn, was it a good tier for them fun-wise, which makes it feel even worse to then lose that job in the expansion right after.

Also you might want to reconsider attempts at discrediting people based on logs, just saying...

[shao32]

DRK has much more heavy resource management on both HW and SB, thats just a fact, both versions of the job use to have more internal mechanics around you resources (MP drain, GCD manipulation, have to manage you resources to raid buffs since your buffs use to have higger uptime but diferen recast, resources spikes generation, ect ect) and this version of the job is really scripped like the rest of the tanks.

Every raid buff have 60s patterns of recast (60s,120s,180s) making blood weapon sync with all of them,making DRK a 60s burst bot like the rest, all raids buffs except TA have a minimun duration of 15s time enough to fit all what DRK need in that window, DRK don't manage anything, just build resources and trow everything on bloodweapon, having the capacity to just trow the 2 edges you can storage is not pretty diferent of a WAR trwowing fell cleaves/nascent chaos if they see a window, the only window that dont syn with blood weapon is brotherhood and edge don't get any buff from it so in resume the current DRK management is just a ilusion and nothing else, if you bloodweapon don't sync for whatever reason, party member dead, mechanic, party member messing a bit DRK would lose uptime since they wont be able to fit the extra resources of bloodweapon under such windows like any mortal job in the game that don't fit properly his buff window under X.

in resume as raid buff concern DRK just storage stuff and release everything every 60s just like PLD, the job just avoid overcapping a bit and thats a joke in his downtime, DRK is not so versatile as ppl want it to make it look.

[Toohon]

Well many may not agree with me after reading through this whole thread but
I for one actually enjoy this new change.

I have played as DRK main since HW all the way through and have recently come back to ffxiv after a long long break playing GW2 to play ShB
My opinion is only after tasting the first few levels of ShB DRK but I have played HW and SB as DRK vigorously

My issue with the old HW and SB DRK was that it was very boring to play (my opinion ofcourse) as I found that :
HW DRK had only 1 2 3 combo and 1 2 soul eater combo as a real source of attack and the rest would have really long cooldowns
SB brought in the blood gauge but still it wasn't enough attacks to really make it much fun .. for me atleast

ShB has added some nice skills in addition to the attacks we can use not to mention finally getting a combo to our aoe skill

My only issue with the new DRK would be that Darkside is now no longer a active skill on its own but must be paired in with the new attack skills

But I do enjoy the challenge, keeping my mana up while dishing out as much damage and also keeping dark side up is quite fun for me

[DRKoftheAzure]

HW DRK had only 1 2 3 combo and 1 2 soul eater combo as a real source of attack and the rest would have really long cooldowns

Counter argument on the combos; Aggro combo which is 1 Hard Slash-2A Spinning Slash-3 Power Slash which could generate more aggro if you used Dark Arts(which all tanks had aggro combos in Heavensward), 1 Hard Slash-2B Syphon Strike-3A Souleater which was on of your alternate combo paths but was more DPS combo path if you used Dark Arts(all tanks had 3 combo paths to choose from based on specific situations or were mandatory for certain boss mechanics) and 1 Hard Slash-2B Syphon Strike-3B Delirium which was not only other DPS combo you could alternate between if you had no MP for Dark Arts, but also inflicted INT down debuff(I am one of those people who gets the most enjoyment out of rotating between my combo paths).

Stormblood did see a rework of Delirium but I still got some enjoyment out of rotating between Power Slash combo and Souleater combo.

Shadowbringers was just the worst expansion for Dark Knight period, because Dark Knight lost so much going into the expansion that it's basically Warrior with a Greatsword(Warrior was also made even more boring by just removing more cool looking skills and given stuff that people complained about in Stormblood with skills sharing a recast timer to make it's "balanced")...

[Satarn]

My issue with the old HW and SB DRK was that it was very boring to play (my opinion ofcourse) as I found that :
HW DRK had only 1 2 3 combo and 1 2 soul eater combo as a real source of attack and the rest would have really long cooldowns
SB brought in the blood gauge but still it wasn't enough attacks to really make it much fun .. for me atleast

ShB has added some nice skills in addition to the attacks we can use not to mention finally getting a combo to our aoe skill

My only issue with the new DRK would be that Darkside is now no longer a active skill on its own but must be paired in with the new attack skills

But I do enjoy the challenge, keeping my mana up while dishing out as much damage and also keeping dark side up is quite fun for me

You are of course entitled to your opinions and you'll enjoy what you enjoy, but that said, I have no idea how could you arrive to conclusion that SHB DRK is the one with the most skill variety and especially that HW cds were "too long", when SHB increased the timers.

While HW DRK didn't have Bloodspiller, you had Delirium and Scourge, so that's already more gcds even completely disregarding the enmity combo.
For ogcds you had Reprisal, Low Blow, Dark Passenger(which at the time was still useful in single target, unlike SB DP or Flood now). Salted Earth and Blood Weapon also both had much lower cooldowns than they have in SHB.

Edge of Shadow can't exactly be counted as a new skill, as it's a direct replacement for Dark Arts with less frequent usage(due to new MP rates).
Flood is kind of in between DA and Passenger, so I'd count it as half-a-skill lost rather than one gained(since we lost first half of DP in SB, by making it more-or-less AoE-only).
Living Shadow is completely new, but at 120 second recast, it's the very definition of "really long cooldown".
Abyssal Drain has been turned into an ogcd, but it's so much more forgettable now than when it was a spell and 60 seconds is not exactly short either.

MP pooling has always been there and now it's actually much simpler and nearly scripted, once you actually understand how the MP rates interact with party buffs.
Darkside upkeep is an illusion, because it will stay up as long as you just spend MP at all twice per minute.
One more thing people bring up is TBN, but that was also an SB addition and - just like MP management - had more complexity and choice to it back then.

Neither HW nor SB DRK were perfect, but so far majority of things people say they enjoy in SHB version, were already present in the past, but with more complexity and synergy to them.

[Duskane]

Delirium has had a different effect every expansion
i bet next will do the same

[shao32]

Delirium has had a different effect every expansion
i bet next will do the same

i hope so or they complety remove it and let it die, this version of delirium is trash.