Dark Knight Megathread

[Kalaam]

Heavensward DRK felt frantic and constantly on the edge. There you could see the Guts inspiration of just constantly flying by the seat of your pants, reacting to what was coming to you in what would look like a chaotic way.
It felt good to play.

[Lyth]

I don't think that burst is incompatible with resource management. Take Reaper for example. Arcane Circle/Plentiful Harvest guarantee that you'll be entering Shroud during your burst every 60s. But you will also be entering your burst window at other points in time, depending on your resource gains from your combos or mob deaths.

Let's say that Delirium actually did something fun like new animations, a shadowy aura, and all that. Let's also say that it's usable on demand with no significant recast, once you hit 50 blood. All you really need to do is to have Living Shadow grant you 50 blood on use, and then let you do some sort of combined finisher with you and Frey when both LS and Delirium are up. Now you're free to do all the variable resource gains that you like. You'd have to move Bloodspiller off the blood gauge, but I'd honestly prefer that if it meant having a resource-gated burst window.

I also don't think that DRK has too many oGCDs. It was designed around being an oGCD heavy job from the outset. They just need to make them more interesting.

[Kalaam]

I don't think the amount of OGCD is the issue either, it's more that they all have the same CD so it frontloads your opener and then "nothing happens" for a minute.

[WhyAmIHere]

i just wish DRK and WAR weren't so close in class lore. That to me is SE pigeonholing themselves in terms of designing a kit for the two.

Like what really separates a WAR's "Inner Beast" from DRK's "Inner Darkness?" I don't mean "well one's anger and the other's inner turmoil," I mean fundamentally. It's no wonder SE made DRK so hard to distinguish from WAR when their class fantasy can both be boiled down to "don't let your emotions take control over your actions."

What happened to "Doing what's just even if it's in defiance of what's right?" Where's the "Serving the dregs of society that the law turns a blind eye to?" Sure, something vague like that is difficult to translate into job skills, but I'd say TBN does those things pretty well.

[shao32]

I think the most accurate way to say it is DRK just have to much fluff oGCD that offer nothing gameplay wise more than pretty animations and no substance 1 time per min.

[Mekhana]

I'm not sure about pretty after they removed all our cool stuff and Reaper came out

[Kalaam]

Who is ready for the Templar DPS job taking the holy fighter aesthetic away from PLD, the Berserker DPS taking the savage combattant away from WAR and Legatus DPS taking the gunblade stuff away from GNB ? xD

No more seriously though, it does hurt to see RPR getting so much stuff from DRK aesthetic, since it IS inspired by FF XI DRK.

[Sazuzaki]

Honestly I'd love for something like class specs to be added to the game. I came from Blade and Soul (yes I know it's hot garbage...) and one thing I REALLY liked from that game is that you had different specifications on how you played your class. For example Blade Master had a "Spirit Blade/Fire" spec where the class rotation literally revolved around holding down your RMB while managing your cooldowns. Meanwhile there was the chad "Lightning" spec where you had to continuously animation cancel by timing your LMB and your RMB to maximize DPS while managing very fast cooldowns. It was awesome and felt nice to pull off.

Now, imagine if we had something like say a "Shadow" or "Dread" spec for DRK where it was more reminiscent of the 3.0 DRK without all the DPS boosts you get from MT. Then there's Warrior I mean Delirium spec for DRK and it's basically just the simple version of DRK we have right now. For the people who can't really grasp the Shadow spec. Both specs would be equal in DPS.

Yes the "if I work harder, my dps should be higher" excuse still stands, but hear me out. This would fix the gap between the 5.0 and 3.0 enjoyers and add something that both can enjoy about the class, if done correctly. DRK could be the lowest DPS tank, but if it's fun to play and makes me actually use my brain, I wouldn't give a damn.

It would be a nightmare to balance I know. But if BnS, a game that doesn't even earn close to 10% of the money that FFXIV makes did it, why can't FFXIV? (I say "did it" cause they ruined the balance by adding the mentor spec in BnS, good job NCSoft :p)

[Llyud1996]

In Final Fantasy you can see the different jobs as a single spec. E.g every Tank is viable in every piece of content at the moment (tho others have more advantages in certain content, like DRK having no party wide mitigation in sub 80 content), but every single tank job has it‘s own core. So there is no real need for different specs for every single job. Imagine the balancing of 18 Jobs with 2 or more specs per Job. Coming from other MMOs I can understand why people want or suggest to bring specs for the different Jobs here, but we already have this, by splitting up all Jobs in different roles (Tank, Heal, Melee, Physical Range, Magic Range). If a party is looking for a magic dps, You can technically decide between BLM, SMN and RDM (spec).


But anyway, now to the important part. What I would love to see is:

- Stacks for Bloodweapon ; not having the ideal GCD Time, stresses me alot, because during a ping spike I wont hit the 5th GCD inside the window.
- Please remove the MP cost from The Blackest Night. We were told that tanks get a reward for better timing of their CDs (more mitigation in the first 4 seconds for the other tanks), but DRK still has a penalty of 500+ potency, if TBN is not soaking all the Damage. In the best case we get our 500+ potency back. Having a penalty bound to TBN is a straight disadvantage. As a Trade off a higher CD of The Blackest Night would be fair! To reduce button bloat, TBN could have the first 4 seconds an increased %mitigation of 10% and Oblation could get removed. 25 sec CD would be fair, just as the other Tanks. You could introduce this change with a trait, instead of the Unmend Trait at Lv 84.
- To reduce button bloat, we could make one button out of salted earth and abyssal drain and add a healing effect, while we are within the area of salted earth. Having 2 buttons with very low potency, is in my view pointless, since it‘s just one more button we press every minute or 90 secs. That has nothing to with personal skill, it‘s just an unnecessary button worth 150 potency every minute/90sec.
- Change Unleash and Stalwart Soul to Weaponskills and make Stalwart Soul available at lower level. Skill Speed does not affect our AoEs and we always sit on 2.5 GCD for Unleash and Stalwart Soul. I know that DRK knows magic abilities and that this is tied to Lore, but we could keep the magic abilities to our oGCDs, right?
- While Dark Missionary is DRKs equivalent to GNBs Heart of Light, I would like to see a change to Dark Mind. Personally I love Dark Mind as it is, since it gave me for certain encounter a good advantage above the other tank, but thats it‘s downside, for certain encounters, which means it‘s situational. Situational abilities are to my experience not used by the average player or just for one or two auto attacks, which isn‘t worth a button imo. Dark Mind could be changed to something with an effect like Aurora or Equilibrium. There are a lot of possibilities, but please remove the restriction of damagetype specific mitigation for a self target cooldown.
- With the Change of every Tank Invul having a duration of 10 secs, Living Dead is straight up the worst. While Holmgang and Superbolide bring you down to 1 HP, they do not have the trade off of require healing, you can just tank swap. Living Dead makes you invulnerable for 10 secs IF! triggered, but the DRK needs to get healed by 100% of it‘s max HP, which again is a penalty tied to a DRK ability. WAR & GNB don’t need immediate healing and can be healed via HoTs or with their own abilities after a tank swap, DRK requires immediate healing and has no ability to heal itself, except Soul Eater, but you know thats a joke. With Living Dead there is again an issue that the CD is tied to Lore, therefore it require the Healing in the case that the DRK would have died. Wouldn‘t it be possbile to change the ability by itself? In the case the DRK would have died from lethal damage, we become one with the Darkness and a Part of our Esteem absorbs the Damage that would kill us for 10 secs. This way Living Dead would basically be the same (press living dead, if triggered you get to be invuln for 10sec), but with a lore friendly change that DRK doesn‘t require 100% max HP healing anymore, and so it wouldn‘t have a penalty anymore in comparision to the other tank invulns.

[Sazuzaki]

Please remove the MP cost from The Blackest Night.

If this is the case, what other things would we have to spend MP on? Only EoS/FoS? The job is already easy enough, it doesn't need to be dumbed down even more. TBN is extremely powerful BECAUSE you have to take a risk. But TBN isn't even that hard to break, and with how easy most of the fights are, you can just completely ignore it anyway and have barely any consequences.

I feel pretty indifferent towards stacks for BW. I like having to manage the timing of my BW but I can see why it would suck for higher ping players. Dark Mind honestly could just be 10% dmg reduction tied with 20% magic dmg reduction, to kind of keep that "magical tank" feeling