Dark knight, the past, the present and the future of the job.

[shao32]

Im gonna be blunt today, DRK have a severe problem of gameplay identity that not only affect the job himself but WAR too, combined with questionable designs and the lack properly designed mechanics the job right now stand in a limbo where don't have a own path and it's just to simple to offer anything interesting outside of TBN, so i have decided to recopilate a list of current DRK problems and analyze one by one the different aspects of the job gameplay in order to give proper feedback, lets beging:

- DRK gameplay problems:

• Lack of gameplay identity, the job it's way to similar to others in the same role (WAR and some degree PLD).
  
• Lack of skill variety in both single target and AOE situations, the job work repeating the same combo and the same MP skill over and over again combined with same skill spam windows every 90s.
  
• Lack of interactivity betwen skills/mechanics making the job don't having any deep whatsoever.
  
• Blood weapon lacking impact and presenting problems to land 5 hits under his duration
  
• Entire mechanics literally copied from other jobs (blackblood system and Delirium).
  
• Meaningless mechanics that offer nothing gameplay wise (Darkside, living shadow and they gauge).
  
• Excesive amounts of downtime betwen use all your oGCD windows causing pacing problems and slow gameplay feeling.
  
• Questionable learning procces of several skills making the leveling process dull reducing some aspects of the job gameplay to be a mere spam 1 buttom to almost level 70.

Now is time to analyze step by step what is a DRK gameplay wise and how all this problerms can be handle for the future DRK.



- 1.X Darkside, MP economy and the pacing of the job.

1.1 The MP economy and the pacing of the job

DRK has been historically in this game a job that constantly manage his resources making his gameplay a constant use of oGCD by result of that, granting him a fast paced gameplay where the player was constantly doing something in a fair rate on Heavensward and in a bit overwelming rate in Stormblood.

In Shadowbringers DRK no longer manage his resources the way the did before, the nerfs on MP generation and the excesive cost on all his MP skills has transformed his fluid MP economy in to a load and shoot that have raised the problem of the 45-50s of downtime without any kind of oGCD (not counting mitigation skills) with the exception of Salted earth during that period transforming the sustained gameplay of DRK in to a burst one for no reason removing almost complety that facet of the job forever, combined with the nerfs on Bloodweapon making the skill unrewarding and frustating to use when you don't fit 5 GCD on it make this aspect of the job severely dull, a shame consider that the TBN proc changes will serve as a excepcional QoL for a sustained HW/SB MP economy gameplay.

Other problem of the current MP system is the lack of MP options in both single target and aoe situations being Edge of shadow the only real option in ST and Flood of shadow for AOE.


1.2 Darkside and his gauge

Darkside is a mess right now, the entire mechanic offer nothing to the player gameplay wise and the addition of his gauge is complety unnecesary, the mechanic himself stay on auto mode and the player don't have to worry about it at all outside of the first hit raising the question ¿why wasn't made a trait instead?.

The related skills to this mechanic Edge/Flood of shadow could have been a nice addition to the job if the mechanic has been properly designed adding the deep the job desperately needs, but right now all this has been a waste of resources and dev time for having in the end a trait and a gauge we complety ignore.


1.3 Sugestions

In order to restore DRK gameplay identity here i will make a few sugestion that will add deep and complexity without raising much the dificult of the job.

• Reactivate the MP economy, revert all Blood weapon changes, increase the amount of MP generated in both numbers and sources across the kit in order to restore the resource management identity of the job.
  
• Reduce the MP cost of all MP skill to 2000 (instead of 3000) minimun to allow a comfortable management of the MP and prevent it to become to hard to manage and ajust the potency to acomodate such changes.
  
• Remove the "Additional Effect: Grants Darkside, increasing damage dealt by 10%,Duration: 30s, Extends Darkside duration by 30s to a maximum of 60s." from Edge of shadow (explained in "goals of this changes" below).
  
• Consider readding dark arts to add variety on MP usage

- Goals of this changes

By removing the Darkside from Edge of shadow we instantly add variety in the MP usage making the player use Flood of shadow to add Darkside time to the job, combined with a reactivation of the MP economy and granting a constant supply of MP to use all over the rotation the Darkside will have a meaning gameplay wise making the player use Flood when they need Darkside time and Edge of shadow when they don't, combined with reduced cost to make it more accesible to manage it will restore the MP management identity of the job, re-adding Dark arts could add more deep here back.(Please note this changes aim to have a HW related MP generation and usage of the MP skills, not to make another dark arts spam meme on every GCD).



-2.X Blackblood system, Living shadow and the burst of the job.

2.1 Blackblood system and related skills.

Im gonna be very blunt here, Blackblood is a cheeky copy of Rage system from WAR hurting a lot not only DRK gameplay identity but WAR's one too for no reason, it's simple and unrewarding and at contrary that WAR Rage system Blackblood is complety disconected from the rest of the kit adding no deep and complexity whatsoever and acting more like a filler that anything else and this part of DRK gameplay needs to be revised and reconsiderated extensively.

In SB despite still having the same base Blackblood have pretty much diferent usages and control of the resource generation, mostly thanks to Delirum and the resource exchange it use to have with TBN, right now Delirium is a copy of Inner release without crits, Bloodspiller is Fell cleave and Quietus is Decimate, the only unique skill DRK have here living shadow doesn't add anything gameplay to make an impact in differentiate DRK from WAR here when it should.


2.2 Living shadow and his section on Darkside gauge

Living shadow it's a missed opportunity, could have being something more than a dot (damage over time)that can change targets, his addition to the kit it's complety lazy and his representation on the Darkside gauge complety unneeded, and adds nothing gameplay wise to the job contributing further on how useless Darkside gauge is right now, the skill needs his contribution to the gameplay re-evaluted.


2.3 The burst of the job

The dps part of the job has been historicaly sustained but is true in SB due the interpretation of certain ranking web the comunity asked for more burst damage to the job, now the conception of having burst damage has been erased a lot due again changes on certain ranking web, but im not going to argue about removing the busrt from the job.

What im going to say is the burst has been poorly implemented to the job hurting a lot his gameplay identity, not only it cost him his resource management identity when they nerfed the MP economy and make the job trow all his oGCD under raid buffs, it cost him the changes on Blackblood making it a WAR copy there for no reason.

A wasted opportunity, the burst of the job could have been properly placed under Living shadow at the same time they add some interactivity on a skill that currently you can't do anything when you use it, i want to recomend the dev team to reconsiderate where the burst of the job needs to be and removing the 2 burst we have now in our MP economy and Blackblood system.


2.4 Sugestions

In order to diferenciate DRK from WAR and preserve WAR identity here i will recomend sever changes on this section of the job.

• Rework Delirium complety or remove it from the game, the spam the same skill 5 times in a row should being removed from the job asap.
  
• Reconsiderate the contribution of Bloodspiller and Quietus to the rest of the kit by adding interactivity with other skills or contributing to the MP economy.
  
• Repurpose the contribution of Living shadow to the rest of the kit and make it the burst of the job, add some purpose to his duration like all GCD get a buff of X potency under his duration or allow the execution of upgraded skills, anything that make his Darkside gauge have a meaning and integrate the skill with the rest of the kit.

-Goals of this changes

Complety separate DRK gameplay from WAR, increase the ineractivity and complexity of blackblood and related skills with the rest of the kit and properly place the burst of the job while the rest of the identity remains inctact.



-3.X AOE rotation, leveling process and living dead

3.1 AOE rotation and leveling process

DRK like the rest of the tanks suffer from don't having his aoe rotation prior lvl 72-75, DRK specially pass most of the time spaming unleach until lvl72, Quietus feels unrewarding to use and looks like more a filler and like in his single target MP rotation they use only Flood of shadow as a MP expender option.

On leveling DRK suffer from learning certain skills to late like Dark missionary and TBN (granted this one has been mitigated with the buff on the role mitigation skills) and learning his aoe to late so the dev team should reconsider the learning order to acomodate a smoothly leveling process.


3.2 Living dead

It's not a secret that Living dead has been target of several criticism across the years due how this skill become a healing check for AST and SCH and not allowing them to dealt with it with the same comfort of Holmgang and Superbolide and how DRK is the only tank that can't really do anything to survive by hilmself after his use and this need to being looking at in some way.


3.3 Sugestions

In order to make DRK acomodate the previous sugested changes to his AOE and leveling process i will make a few sugestions.

• Make Abyssal drain cost MP again but remain being an oGCD so combined wich Flood they will have the same dinamic Flood and Edge have in the 1.3 sugestions but in AOE situations.
  
• Consider learning Dark missionary and a weaker version of TBN early to be on line with the other tanks on early levels.
  
• Consider add some kind of selfhealing to DRK or any kind of ajustment that help the job to dealt with Living dead and make it more comfy to AST and SCH to dealt with it.

4.4 Future skills and comunity comunication

New expansion new skills, i wanna add here that DRK need more GCD on his main rotation, spaming soul eater combo and a ocasional Bloodspiller become dull pretty quick and while the sugested changes can apease that feeling it would be nice if next expansion DRK don't stay all day with soul eater again.


Im sorry now if i sound blunt but i consider the dev team and the comunity managers are interacting to little with us, i want you to reconsider your politics when interacting with us since from a long time this hasn't been enough, as a player and a fan of your game i feel really frustated when have been takes months and ever entire expansion cycles to get a response of our issues, i understand you can't always offer any real answer to our concerns but an acknoledgement of our issues with certain jobs or content should be at least mentioned if it gets enough support so we don't have a constant feeling you are ignoring us or don't care about us at all, constant comunication with the playerbase leads to more acurate and more organizated feedback specially if you don't really understand what we are asking for, so i will ask you again raise your efforts to comunicate with us, as a tank and a healer sympathizer who have been feeling really frustated with the lack of answer fo you guys i belive this would increase the overall quality of the feedback.



-Final words

Hello everyone i want to thank you all for reading this post, i know it's a bit too long and i apreciated the effort of everyone on reading all, i maybe edit certain parts of the post sometimes for make it more easy to understand due my limitations with english and i will apreciated if something isn't clear feel free to tell me so i'll fix it. this thread aim to restore HW DRK identity while retain the new stuff and build a new DRK everyone could love, feel free to participate and raise your problems with the job gameplay and how can be solved, thank you all for you understanding and have a nice day.

[Jirah]

Useless comment but I have so much admiration with these types of breakdowns and critiques not a DRK main myself so I feel I wouldn’t have any good points to say

[shao32]

Useless comment but I have so much admiration with these types of breakdowns and critiques not a DRK main myself so I feel I wouldn’t have any good points to say

showing admiration is never a useless thing, i appreciate you coment even if you don't consider you can add anything worthy to the threat, specially after being so empty after several hours so thanks for passing by ^^

[Snek]

You've pretty much hit all the problems I have with the current iteration of DRK. Not really much to add... I can't even find anything I disagree with. So I guess I'll give some alternate ideas to the problems you've brought up instead: (so skip this post if you're not interested in that. It doesn't really add anything outside of said additional ideas for the problems)

Mana management:
I fully agree that need more things to spend it on. Best thing is to reintroduce Dark Arts and mana values on different skills.

• Dark Arts will grant Dark Arts (shocker) and costs 1000 mana (thus the equivalent to 250/150 potency against a single/group). It goes exactly where Dark Arts currently is on the HUD and never fades.
  
• TBN now grants 50 blood when broken (mana -> blood interaction)
  
• Abyssal Drain costs 500 mana

Different skills are changed when you have a stack of Dark Arts

For example:

• Having Dark Arts then casting Salted Earth will make it tick up your blood (like it used to) for each enemy in the bubble. Results in positive DPS in 2+ enemies, neutral on one (converting mana into blood)
  
• Having Dark Arts increases the cost of Abyssal Drain to 1000 mana and will reduce Abyssal Drains CD to 15 seconds (i.e. 2000 mana total including the DA cost). DPS loss in all instances, but a large HP gain in large pulls. This also means you have to be careful when holding a Dark Arts cast, but we regain some of our Abyssal Drain power in large dungeon pulls
  
• Having Dark Arts then casting Carve and Spit will result in it doing 600 potency of damage. Casting Carve and Spit without Dark Arts is reduced to 300 potency. Thus huge damage gain and something you always want to Dark Arts (like before)
  
• Having Dark Arts then casting Bloodspiller/Quietus results in a potency increase of 250/150 respectively. DPS neutral. Allows you to dump Dark Arts if you need to.
  
• Plenty of other possible interactions without returning the every other button spam.

Living Shadow:
I fully agree this is a horrible missed opportunity to grant something truly special, and have also been thinking this could be an awesome burst phase mode for DRK.

For example, instead of paying 50 blood to summon something you can't interact with, how about instead we become Frey? Think of the black orb that envelops you when you use the DRK level 3 limit break. Have a smaller bubble envelope the player and explode for X potency and then you appear as Frey for 15 seconds. While you're Frey all mana costs is reduced by 50%. There would obviously need to be a lot of potency/CD number tweaks, and Living Shadow will likely have a 210+ second CD, but DRK would have an insanely busy and powerful burst then. Frey can explode again when you're returned to being yourself. This also ties into the DRK story (level 50 quest. Where you fight Frey.). He tells you that if you ever tire, he'll be waiting to take the reins. "you need only ask". So this skill is you asking.

Living Dead:
I'm of the opinion this skill is perfectly balanced... However balanced doesn't mean fun (see: the state of healers and tanks). IMO the biggest problem is that it becomes the healers job to try and extend your invuln as long as possible where it should be the tanks. Perhaps changing the duration of "Living Dead" to 5 seconds and adding "increase damage taken by 100% for 10 seconds". This will allow you to transition to "Walking Dead" more easily but also places a failure state on the invuln (don't die in 5 seconds... Take double damage for 5 seconds). However the payoff could be that while in "Walking Dead" you become immune to all damage and must be healed to full. When you are healed to full you must reactivate the skill to remove the "Walking Dead" status. Thus you can choose how long you are invulnerable and (if you wait too long) will K.O. yourself. It's pretty much just a much more difficult to use Superbolide and that's why it has a shorter CD. The duration of the skill is placed on the tank instead of the healer.

Delirium could (and should) be deleted. I don't think there's much argument for this skill... Perhaps replacing it with Scourge (man do I miss that animation). But instead of being a DOT it could be another means to regain mana. A "DOT" that, instead of doing damage, ticks up your mana, further emphasising the oGCD heavy mana mangement playstyle.

Remove the "Additional Effect: Grants Darkside, increasing damage dealt by 10%,Duration: 30s, Extends Darkside duration by 30s to a maximum of 60s." from Edge of shadow (explained in "goals of this changes" below).

This change is quite nice and clever. Actual Darkside management. Still easy to do, but gives a purpose to the gauge without additional buttons. Personally I think making Darkside stop all mana gain would be nice too, so mana gain is fully from using skills.

Overall, fantastic breakdown of the problems with current DRK with some pretty neat suggestions.

[bundythenoob]

you put together a nice outline of problems. I quite like your suggestion to make Edge/Flood 2000 mana each. Dark Arts would have cost 2k mana in the current build, so it makes sense for our spenders to be 2k mana with reduced potency. this would allow Square to make room for more mana generation and not have to worry so much about damage balance.

Your mention of Living Shadow being wasted potential really hurt me too. When the trailers showed it off, it seemed as if Fray was going to copy whatever moves you threw out, but reality is often disappointing. a friend of mine who just started in SHB was hyped to get it, but when he saw that Fray simply does his own rotation (slowly at that) he was disappointed. "even fray copying what we do, as if he was our shadow, would be better than this glorified dot"

as for Darkside, I don't think a 10% dmg buff is worth curtailing our mana generation kit. i'd rather see that 10% damage be spread throughout our toolkit in a way so that the mana we generate with our tools would add up to that 10% through our abilities, but i do like the suggestion above to make darkside stop mana generation so that we can let our tools do the work again, but if they don't want the fight cutscenes to affect our generation (a problem in STB) they can make cutscenes automatically remove darkside timer. this way we can regen mana while in cutscenes and then come back to use flood to immediately get darkside back again.

I'm guessing in order to consolidate the hotbars they ended up deleting tools they deemed "useless", but they ended up butchering the entire mana generation kit itself. If I were to make any suggestions, it would be to bring back a few older skills, but fuse them with current toolkit. for example:

- Dark mind + blood price = lv 45 since dark mind is currently a 10 sec buff on a 1 min cooldown (like current BW) why not make it so that you also regen mana/blood? that way its can get some value out of it while not in magic situations. this would also return some much needed mana generation to DRK at lv 50, which it sorely lacks.

- Salted Earth + Sole Survivor = lv 52 Since SS was a 15 sec mark on an enemy, and SE is now a 15 sec ground dot, why not combine both so that the skill would target an enemy and drop a bubble on area around it as a patch of "salted earth", dealing the current salted potency, but with the bonus that if the original enemy died u get 30% hp/mana, but if the timer runs out and the salted patch decays, you get 20% back instead. this helps to return that MP economy, while helping players out who have problems using the ground target system.

- Dark Arts I've made a suggestion in another thread i made, in which DA would affect more of our toolkit, such as making Souleater a guaranteed direct crit heal, making Abyss drain free (like edge/flood) and what not. I would also love to see the return of the animation, so like if your bubble pops, your character goes into the old animation to let you know that you have it available in case youre looking at the boss and not your hotbar/gauge.

Overall though a solid thread, and I'm hoping SOMETHING changes with DRK, cuz its current form is so grossly stripped of what made it the building and spending based tank we got back in heavensward.

[shao32]

snip

Any sugestion is welcome, in fact i been a bit reserved with blackblood and living shadow contribution changes bcs i didn't want to add my crazy ideas i have for them so ppl can discuss on who to make it unique.

For the living dead well yeah, i put it there bcs is a current debate right now and ppl are 50-50 about the skill so it was worthy to be mentioned, for the rest thanks ^^

snip

Yeah the purpose of reducing the MP cost for all MP related skills is to acomodate the increase of MP generation and his constant management, basically how it was in the past but with enough room to operate so is not so tight like it was on SB.

Darkside sugestions where made to use the already present UI and give the job some kind of easy but consistent interplay combined with the MP changes, the potency of the buff and the rest of the skills will obviously being acomodated so everything is worthy to keep up and run smoothly.

I wanna point that you sugestion of Dark mind + blood price would tie DRK in the MT spot for maximun DPS optimization and could be contraproductive, i will suggest to you idea change blood price by convalescence for example, will make dark mind more usefull universaly and that would be the help living dead needs without need to change the skill at all, 2x1 win win ^^

And yeah i miss dark arts a lot too, i wanna use this moment to say this thread is aiming to 6.0 since at this part of the movie SE aren't going to do the extensive rework of blackblood and despite my sugested changes on darkside and related skills are simple they are pretty worthless without increasing the MP generation and ajusting potency across the kit, it's going to be a lonng year until next expansion but lets hope they do something for us and get at least some kind of recognition before that.

[bundythenoob]

I wanna point that you sugestion of Dark mind + blood price would tie DRK in the MT spot for maximun DPS optimization and could be contraproductive, i will suggest to you idea change blood price by convalescence for example, will make dark mind more usefull universaly and that would be the help living dead needs without need to change the skill at all, 2x1 win win ^^

And yeah i miss dark arts a lot too, i wanna use this moment to say this thread is aiming to 6.0 since at this part of the movie SE aren't going to do the extensive rework of blackblood and despite my sugested changes on darkside and related skills are simple they are pretty worthless without increasing the MP generation and ajusting potency across the kit, it's going to be a lonng year until next expansion but lets hope they do something for us and get at least some kind of recognition before that.

fully agreed on waiting till 6.0. I doubt square is gonna do anything soon, besides telling us that tanks are balanced.

I didn't think about that MT thing you mentioned. maybe make Dark Mind so u can give it to other party members, that way it works for OT as well? it would be cool to allow teammates to mitigate magic dmg too? idk might be OP lol

I just wish Square would at least say they acknowledge the problems and that they are working on something. the silence makes me sad as a player and as a paying customer, not to mention sad as a fan of FFXIV in general.

[shao32]

fully agreed on waiting till 6.0. I doubt square is gonna do anything soon, besides telling us that tanks are balanced.

I didn't think about that MT thing you mentioned. maybe make Dark Mind so u can give it to other party members, that way it works for OT as well? it would be cool to allow teammates to mitigate magic dmg too? idk might be OP lol

I just wish Square would at least say they acknowledge the problems and that they are working on something. the silence makes me sad as a player and as a paying customer, not to mention sad as a fan of FFXIV in general.

Idk how that will work having the chad TBN around ^^

I wish it too but i lose hope on SE keeping proper comunication with us outside of the "we listen" and then spend months praying for them doing something and then feel awfully bad everytime they do nothing.

[Ryulaido]

What i really miss are the old skill animations : Power slash, Scourge, Delirium (the old HW combo finisher)

Why cant they at least give the lvl 80 dark shadow version that you can summon those old skills? At least give him those skills so if you cant use those attacks let him use it in order to give him separate animations so he dont feel like a cheap copy paste version of you am i right?

i know nobody that prefer Soul Eater over the old combo finishers in terms of skill animations. I dont say remove or replace Soul eater with the other skills but at least give us back the skill animations.

[shao32]

I personaly prefer if they sustitute soul eater with power slash or old delirium, i dodn't really dislike the animation but i find it pretty awkward every time you use an oGCD the animation get cut mid air telepirting you character to the ground to execute the new animation, it happen the same with bloodspiller both aren't meant to be interrupted the way they are being.