Dark Knight Megathread

[RatCopter]

Assuming the best case scenario, where this thread is seen, yoshi took the suggestion that DRK had problems seriously, that JPN forums are making some noise, and that the devs are taking a closer look at DRK;
What do you guys think we can reasonably expect within a given time frame?

I'm guessing minor number changes by 6.1 (mana numbers, cooldown adjustments, etc. ), mechanical changes by 6.2 (BW on a charge system, etc.), and major reworks by 6.4 at the absolute earliest. I want to temper my own expectations, but I'd be interested to know what your thoughts are.

[ItMe]

and major reworks by 6.4 at the absolute earliest.

What kind of "major rework" do you think they'd do mid-expac?

[Marxam]

What kind of "major rework" do you think they'd do mid-expac?

Most likely nothing since, by the numbers, DRK is an functional tank within reason. Its not wildly unbalanced like in ARR/HW. SB was the closest they got to balance while keeping the tanks different and even then they weren't nowhere near the balance of ShB. It's not gonna get anything new outside of hopefully making Blood Weapon 5 stacks, or, give it 10% haste like in SB. Unless DRK becomes the social pariah that 2.0-2.1 WAR and HW PLD was, it's likely gonna stay as is, outside of potency tweaks.

It's a shame they missed out on Dark Arts as the concept of buffing and augmenting your abilities is a great idea. Guess we have to deal with a poormans WAR/MCH hybrid for the next two more years.

[Crater]

[...]

My main thought here is that I really hope DRK doesn't get a mid-expac rework. I expect that they'll tweak the numbers around in any case, whether that's making it into the game for 6.0, or if it's the panic buffs in 6.05, or some round of buffs in 6.1 or 6.2 or whatever. But I really hope they don't try to make major changes partway through an expansion, because every time they've attempted to do that with a class in the past, the form the "rework" has taken has been to throw the baby out with the bathwater and destroy a class mechanic rather than fix it. If we get a 6.3 or 6.4 rework, we're liable to see something stupid like Edge/Flood changed to 1.5s Spells that are on the GCD, rather than an improvement to DRK's actual gameplay.

The only real hope here is that DRK limps along through Endwalker without any major revision, and then gets a total overhaul in 7.0 that might produce something more fun than the current version. If they try to tackle this mid-expansion, it's all but guaranteed to just make things worse.

[RatCopter]

What kind of "major rework" do you think they'd do mid-expac?

Changing Enhanced Unmend to something less insulting :V

Real talk, I dunno. Changing how the new skills interact with each other, expanding the dark arts system, those kind of things.

[Mekhana]

I'm very wary of having hopium. SB was a terrible time for DRK. We were bottom and the redesign was awful. I can't understand thinking the old Dark Arts was good because it 'empowered' or 'changed' abilities when it came down to using it when you had MP to spare or not using it when you were low or out. Also, it was just APM bloat. You had to squeeze an extra action for everything and still be a worst tank than PLD or WAR. Also, TBN not getting broken was a much bigger deal back then, too. A single Holy would royally screw you over in a trash pull. All of this coming off HW DRK which was sheer perfection.

What might happen is you either wait too long for nothing (literal years too) or wait too long for something that might not be worse but it isn't good. Make yourselves heard or let your wallet do the talking.

SHB might be boring but at least its functional. I'll take it over 4.X DRK.

[Kiteless]

On the one hand, HW era DRK was the most fun I've ever had with this game. I know that we can't go back to that for a variety of reasons (not going to lie, it was jank as hell then too, but for entirely different reasons), and as much as I deeply, deeply miss HW DRK, I do understand that the simplification of tanking kind of had to be done to make the entire game more playable. But I do think things went way too far in that regard, and I wouldn't mind dialing things back to a more refined version of the concept we had in HW.

Tanking is plenty accessible now, with so many simple jobs, it wouldn't hurt to have one with more complexity now. We can roll back that huge overadjustment a little bit, even just for one class.

[Recon1o6]

On the one hand, HW era DRK was the most fun I've ever had with this game. I know that we can't go back to that for a variety of reasons (not going to lie, it was jank as hell then too, but for entirely different reasons), and as much as I deeply, deeply miss HW DRK, I do understand that the simplification of tanking kind of had to be done to make the entire game more playable. But I do think things went way too far in that regard, and I wouldn't mind dialing things back to a more refined version of the concept we had in HW.

Tanking is plenty accessible now, with so many simple jobs, it wouldn't hurt to have one with more complexity now. We can roll back that huge overadjustment a little bit, even just for one class.

thats the problem, all jobs are braindead simple. The universal simplification and homogenisation was not neccessary in the jobs that suffered most from it.
There is nothing wrong with having some jobs be more challenging than others. It works for the dps jobs, it worked back in SB, it worked in HW. That's one reason why everyone wants to go back to HW for a lot of jobs- because HW was the most fun era.

I've argued all through shb we need HW drk as the base, with a bit of SB and SHB drk added on top. the latter two had some good additions but they don't have the fun that was HW

Grit is a mere enmity switch now so thats fixed.
Darkside can be used for a haste mode, perhaps each attack drains mp while giving more potency and blackblood.
Dark arts being able to be stocked could be a place to explore.
Blackblood can be used for mp regen or sustain

so much they could do if they gave it the same effort as they do dps

[Shin96]

thats the problem, all jobs are braindead simple. The universal simplification and homogenisation was not neccessary in the jobs that suffered most from it.

It had to be done. Back in the HW era, SE had a clear target audience in mind and as such, the expansion was catered to them specifically. Dark Knight was born during that era and offered a more complex tank with rewarding gameplay for anyone that bothered.

Fast-forward, ShB and Endwalker are targeted at the "casual" demographic that doesn't give two flying shits about learning their job. Hence the huge emphasis on story-elements and less focus on gameplay mechanics. SE is smart enough to understand how complexity can get in the way of accessibility hence why they homogenize and simplify tanks as they bear responsibility for party wide failure.

Overall, if we had any sort of gatekeepers around tanking perhaps this wouldn't have happened, but we're not going to see 3.0 complexity ever again.

[Crater]

But I do think things went way too far in that regard, and I wouldn't mind dialing things back to a more refined version of the concept we had in HW.

I don't actually think it would be that hard to create a version of DRK that felt like HW DRK while still being in keeping with the general post-Shadowbringers design philosophy, if SE were actually of a mind to do it. The actual complexity of 3.x DRK is not really possible to bring back, but that's not really the main thing that DRK lost: The actual loss that you feel every time you try to play 5.x DRK is that its gameplay identity has been completely reversed from what it was supposed to be, and it's instead been shoved into a niche that other tanks already occupy (and are better at).

3.x DRK was an oGCD-focused equivalent to modern-day PLD: It was not a burst-damage tank; it was instead based on continuously doing damage across an entire rotation. While modern-day PLD achieves this by having three distinct 'phases' to their rotation, 3.x DRK achieved it by having oGCDs with irregular cooldowns that lined up differently from minute to minute, and rate-limiting how fast you could spend MP to deal damage.

If you sort of break down how and why 3.x DRK felt the way it did, it isn't impossible to imagine a post-5.x version of the same gameplay identity:

• If you had an excess of MP and wanted to turn it into damage, you had to do it through Souleater, giving it an effect 3 GCD cooldown. You could achieve the same thing today by adding an 8-10s cooldown to Edge/Flood, solving the two major problems of 1) 5.x DRK's burst windows feeling more spammy than 4.x DRK's "Dark Arts spam" ever did and 2) 5.x DRK not having anything to do outside of burst windows.
• Most of 3.x DRK's oGCDs were designed to not line up cleanly with 60s Trick windows, which meant that much of DRK's gameplay happened outside of party burst. Salted Earth was 45s, Blood Weapon and Blood Price were 40s, Reprisal's parry requirement gave it a randomized cooldown that averaged somewhere between 40 and 50 seconds, and Low Blow was 25s (with a randomized chance on parry to reset at essentially any moment). Only Plunge and Dark Passenger, at 30s each, were made to line up with Trick. Modern-day DRK could easily achieve this by rolling Salted Earth and Blood Weapon back to 45s and 40s, introducing Shadowbringer at 40s instead of 60s, and changing Plunge to 25s, not to mention any possible changes to Abyssal Drain, Delirium, or Living Shadow. (Obviously potencies would have to be adjusted to make sure it didn't come out too strong or too weak).
• Kind of a tag onto the last point, but: At 60 seconds, Carve and Spit was 3.x DRK's longest offensive cooldown. Everything else was shorter, and Plunge didn't have Charges, which (obviously) meant that DRK had things to do and buttons to press in between party buff windows. On 5.x DRK, once you realize that charges effectively give Plunge a 60s cooldown, Carve and Spit is actually tied for DRK's shortest cooldown, a complete reversal of how the class was supposed to work. Fixing this would go a long way to restoring DRK's gameplay identity.

I don't think that changing these aspects would run too contrary to the post-5.0 design philosophy, and they would go a long way to restoring the "feel" of 3.x DRK. Getting back the full range of gameplay nuance is probably not on the table, but there is an actual problem here that isn't just a case of lost complexity.

Ideally, with four tanks in the game, we would have:
1) A GCD-based, burst-damage tank [WAR✓]
2) A GCD-based, continuous-damage tank [PLD✓]
3) An oGCD-based, burst-damage tank [GNB✓]
4) An oGCD-based, continuous-damage tank [DRK✗]

Instead, DRK has been changed into something that's trying to wear the same pair of pants as GNB, and the results are, unsurprisingly, that DRK's gameplay feels unsatisfying and lacking in unique identity.