Dark Knight Megathread

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Personally I am actually quite fond of only having one single-target combo since it currently solves all the basic resource generation DRK needs. What I get though is the general lack of GCD diversity compared to other tanks, but an equivalent to Storm's Eye or Goring Blade as a comboed finisher isn't the solution.

Probably already suggested, but additional non-combobreaking GCD spenders like consuming Darkside time for a high damage DOT (Scourge) or other buff / debuff management sound like something to break the mold, maybe a Haste effect to make up for the loss of pre-SHB BW haste? Currently Darkside is basically brainless to maintain, so turning it into a resource sounds interesting.

Bloodspenders could maybe also use something to spice it up, not sure what though.

[Shurrikhan]

Personally I am actually quite fond of only having one single-target combo since it currently solves all the basic resource generation DRK needs.

On the flip-side, though, any need which can be fully met through a non-choice (such as a single combo) provides nothing that a stronger auto-attack wouldn't already have done. It merely increases the punishment for (effective) downtime, just as AAs would.

What I get though is the general lack of GCD diversity compared to other tanks, but an equivalent to Storm's Eye or Goring Blade as a comboed finisher isn't the solution.

I agree, but only because those combos are similarly non-choices in 99% of content. In single target, Goring Blade, Storm's Eye, and Gnashing Fang are really just... cooldowns. Gnashing Fang is a ~30-second CD, Storm's Eye a (now two-charge) ~30-second CD, and Goring Blade a ~21-second CD. When that cooldown has readied, they will always out-prioritize the filler combo. There are no competing decisions, only buff- or bar-watching. DRK deserves better. Tbf, they perhaps all do.

Probably already suggested, but additional non-combobreaking GCD spenders like consuming Darkside time for a high damage DOT (Scourge) or other buff / debuff management sound like something to break the mold, maybe a Haste effect to make up for the loss of pre-SHB BW haste? Currently Darkside is basically brainless to maintain, so turning it into a resource sounds interesting.

Agreed.

Bloodspenders could maybe also use something to spice it up, not sure what though.

Just note the same constraints to depth we find everywhere else. If A is always better than B, then B is bloat. If A is always better than B but on a cooldown that makes it unavailable at least half the time, B still gets to exist, but that relationship would be at best half-assed and unoriginal.

That's fine so long as A is itself interesting. But that requires more than, say, Living Shadow's 2400-potency oGCD spender on a 2-minute cooldown "but ooh! look! it's a DoT!"

But, yes, I'm guessing there's something we could do. It's just probably better to have an idea that's interesting in and of itself that may happen to be better off, for potency budget or bankability or whatever other concern, on the Blood Gauge, rather than adding another Blood spender just for the sake of variety in Blood spending. We already have 3, and since the loss of the Blood Weapon -> Quietus interaction, they've all been similarly dull in concept.

[Lyth]

DRK doesn't need a second combo. Combos lock you into a fixed rotation. Additional combos are always some variant of base combo/DoT upkeep/buff upkeep/debuff upkeep, which you end up just cycling through in some fixed ratio. Does this metronome-style gameplay challenge your conscious decision-making in any way? Not after about a week.

The Blood system presently is superfluous. It would be fun as part of a system in which you trade-off MP between blood to generate more and more resources, but that wouldn't be intuitive to just pick up and play.

I really like what's being proposed for Reaper. From the sounds of it you can enter your burst window on demand, but it powers up based off of how much you charge it up first. This type of 'resource-gated' burst interests me more than our current 'time-gated' burst windows.

You could do something similar, like this:
1) Get rid of blood. Using Edge/Flood or mitigating with TBN increases your Darkside.
2) Darkside buffs your damage and haste while active by some fixed value.
3) At 50 Darkside, Bloodspiller and Quietus become unlocked as fourth combo actions, to generate even more MP and do even more damage.
4) Use Living Shadow at any point to execute some burst damage depending on how much gauge you've accumulated. Your meter resets after use.
5) You can use a finisher to terminate Living Shadow early and regain some MP and Darkside to start building again.
6) At 100 Darkside, Frey tires of this charade and shows up regardless of what you have to say on the matter.

I think that the problem at present is that every job in the game, regardless of whether it's a fixed rotation or resource-management focused, tends to play out like clockwork. I really just want to see something that just has too many slight variations to spreadsheet out and requires on your gameplay sense to succeed.

[Crater]

I agree, but only because those combos are similarly non-choices in 99% of content. In single target, Goring Blade, Storm's Eye, and Gnashing Fang are really just... cooldowns. Gnashing Fang is a ~30-second CD, Storm's Eye a (now two-charge) ~30-second CD, and Goring Blade a ~21-second CD. When that cooldown has readied, they will always out-prioritize the filler combo. There are no competing decisions, only buff- or bar-watching. DRK deserves better. Tbf, they perhaps all do.

I think it's a mistake to dismiss those things as "just" buff or bar watching. Historically, the bulk of the depth and fun in FFXIV's combat system has come from each class having a number of internal 'maintenance' mechanics and timers, and half of the game's actual gameplay has been working out how to be efficient and effective in the upkeep of all those maintenance mechanics (the other half is encounter design). The dissatisfaction with the playstyle of classes like DRK, any of the healers, and some of the DPS in the current expansion comes mostly from SE's attempts, over the course of the last two expansions, to remove/trivialize as many of those maintenance mechanics as possible - and I don't think those classes are ever really going to improve unless players can convince SE to re-add maintenance to the game on a class-by-class basis.

It's easy to say that it's simple, and a non-choice, and therefore not interesting, to have a resource consumer that is the most effective use of that resource but is on a cooldown, or a combo finisher that you only use when it's time to refresh its effect. But the Heavensward incarnation of Dark Knight was largely a matter of being presented with a series of such "non-choices":

- Use Scourge every 30 seconds, in between combos
- Maintain enough MP to use Dark Arts on Carve and Spit every 60 seconds
- Maintain enough MP to use Dark Passenger on cooldown
- Maintain enough MP that the Darkside drain won't take you to 0 MP before your next MP regeneration
- Use Salted Earth, Low Blow, Reprisal, and Plunge as they become available (except in the case of a fight-specific instance where you are better off saving Plunge or Reprisal)
- Maintain Delirium, and/or keep MP low enough that you won't overcap if you don't DASE

It didn't have any "competitive choices" (and in fact I don't know if there are or have been any cases in FFXIV where any class did, in any expansion - I'm not sure what that would even look like in the XIV combat engine), but it was still not only generally regarded as a fun and engaging class to play (even on fights that were not, themselves, especially interesting), but was actually fairly difficult, to the point where a "good" DRK was the exception rather than the rule - despite the fact that so much of playing it correctly came down to keeping track of a series of individually-uninteresting 'non-choices'.

Having just one or two such mechanics per class is incredibly uninteresting. Having 6-8, as most classes did in 3.x, is really all it takes to give a class depth and complexity.

[Kalaam]

DRK doesn't need a second combo. Combos lock you into a fixed rotation. Additional combos are always some variant of base combo/DoT upkeep/buff upkeep/debuff upkeep, which you end up just cycling through in some fixed ratio. Does this metronome-style gameplay challenge your conscious decision-making in any way? Not after about a week.

The Blood system presently is superfluous. It would be fun as part of a system in which you trade-off MP between blood to generate more and more resources, but that wouldn't be intuitive to just pick up and play.

I really like what's being proposed for Reaper. From the sounds of it you can enter your burst window on demand, but it powers up based off of how much you charge it up first. This type of 'resource-gated' burst interests me more than our current 'time-gated' burst windows.

You could do something similar, like this:
1) Get rid of blood. Using Edge/Flood or mitigating with TBN increases your Darkside.
2) Darkside buffs your damage and haste while active by some fixed value.
3) At 50 Darkside, Bloodspiller and Quietus become unlocked as fourth combo actions, to generate even more MP and do even more damage.
4) Use Living Shadow at any point to execute some burst damage depending on how much gauge you've accumulated. Your meter resets after use.
5) You can use a finisher to terminate Living Shadow early and regain some MP and Darkside to start building again.
6) At 100 Darkside, Frey tires of this charade and shows up regardless of what you have to say on the matter.

I think that the problem at present is that every job in the game, regardless of whether it's a fixed rotation or resource-management focused, tends to play out like clockwork. I really just want to see something that just has too many slight variations to spreadsheet out and requires on your gameplay sense to succeed.

I like the idea of trying to keep Darkside up but being careful not to get overwhelmed by darkness.
That was the whole point of the first quest after all.

[Shurrikhan]

I think it's a mistake to dismiss those things as "just" buff or bar watching. Historically, the bulk of the depth and fun in FFXIV's combat system has come from each class having a number of internal 'maintenance' mechanics and timers, and half of the game's actual gameplay has been working out how to be efficient and effective in the upkeep of all those maintenance mechanics (the other half is encounter design).

Right, but the complexity of that comes from working multiple around each other. If you have ONLY options A and B, there's no competing decision. There's a critical mass before which the investment has very, very little pay-off. That's not to say that we shouldn't try, only that, as you've just concluded for yourself, it takes several things interacting across a shared decision space -- connected noticeably regardless of whether that be directly or indirectly.

Honestly, I still don't think 3.x DRK hit that critical mass, either, though maybe not do to having too few things in play, alone. Rather, it brings up further conditions -- most notably, alignment and polish: What do those shared decision spaces really mean to accomplish, how worthwhile are those goals, and do they really accomplish those things? When those aren't down solid, seemingly separate bulletpoints like "Maintain enough MP to... <A, B, or C>", for instance, all just feel like a single and very basic gameplay fixture.

3.x DRK got damn close to being great, and was certainly had more going on than the other tanks of the time, imo, but it had plenty of room to improve, from tuning DA to actually be worthwhile or making it more than just a mechanic that appeared to make DRK's defensive CDs less responsive (since they were inferior to other tanks' unless preceded by DA), to Delirium being more than just an Intelligence Down debuff and minute damage bonus, etc., etc.

and in fact I don't know if there are or have been any cases in FFXIV where any class did, in any expansion

PLD presently and in 4.x, SAM at any iteration (though now just between ad hoc and per-minute rotations, rather than in sen order), BLM in 3.x, 3.x DRG, NIN in 2.x and 3.x at certain SkS thresholds, MNK in any expansion until ShB, MCH in 4.x, SMN in 4.x.... Each had notable points of potential departure available in their rotation (or in BotD-usage, in DRG's case, though SkS thresholds allowed for double-Full rotations in 2.x), by which to take a short-term loss for long-term gain based on upcoming conditions.

Monk was an especially good example of this. Until 4.0, Monk could, at lower effective potency loss than would be thereby gained, adjust its rotation for upcoming positionals, atop having, at certain SkS thresholds, three different possible rotational strings. It had tremendous available nuance. (Then they adjusted Demolish's timer despite the loss of ToD/Fracture, added enough %Attack Speed via GL4 to force what was previously an actual decision in double-True rotations and make Demo-drop rotations obsolete, and even added True North and the later version of Riddle of Earth because "Why actually have mechanics when you can just spend half a kit half-assing them and the other half undoing them?")

[WhyAmIHere]

I like the idea of trying to keep Darkside up but being careful not to get overwhelmed by darkness.
That was the whole point of the first quest after all.

But as we've seen, the team is more than willing to forego gamelore for gameplay. DRK used to be all about that. Now it's gameplay is just "go ham lol who cares."

[Lyth]

...

Both you and Shurrikhan are addressing different issues.

You're right in pointing out that maintenance actions like DoTs and buffs can be interesting. They do become more challenging when you have to juggle multiple maintenance effects. The main reason why we don't see this so much is because it tends to be intimidating for newer players to MMOs, and the playerbase as a whole tends to struggle with them.

One of the most obnoxious parts of playing DRK in Heavensward was losing dps to problems with Storm's Eye uptime on your co-tank. And as much as everyone claims to loves Scourge, it wasn't unusual to see even relatively decent players with sub-80% uptime on it, even after accounting for boss jumps and downtime. It gets even worse when you start looking at a maintenance effect that's on the second or third step of a combo.

It's not a difficult challenge, however. It's a bit like learning to play a drumkit. At first, it may feel like you're trying to do way too many different things at once, but eventually you find a pattern in how each stick and pedal syncs up and unsyncs. After the fifth pull, you idly notice that Scourge always gets refreshed midcast during the second Sacrament, and so on. Solving the puzzle is fun, but eventually you figure the pattern out and can do it sleep-deprived and semiconscious. There's no on the fly decision-making or replayability, and I think that this is what Shurrikhan is hinting at.

There are ways to to change this up. Small Butterfly-effect variations in resource generation mean that you might be at different thresholds each fight. Perhaps Blood Price catches an extra auto here, or an extra Low Blow reset during a Blood Weapon window gives you a bit more MP there. These little things can add up over time such that the fight doesn't always play out exactly the same way. Every. Single. Time.

I think that FFXIV has strict rotational jobs down pat. It works out really well for PLD and GNB. But they're trying too hard to forcibly turn resource-management jobs into strict rotational jobs. Blood Weapon no longer procs off of a multitude of physical oGCDs or player autos. You get one tick each GCD. You can predict what your MP totals will be at different points in a fight. It completely defeats the very point of this sort of job design.

I think it would be really fun to have a few really well designed maintenance effect focused jobs like you've described. It would be nice to have a few jobs with elaborate combo systems and 40+ step rotations, with completely predictable Crit/DH effects for those spreadsheet players out there. Here is my solution to the math problem. Give me my percentile.

But what I really want to see most of all is a job or two with real resource management and on the fly decision-making, with variable resource gains and procs. Something intuitive, but with enough random variations that the spreadsheets just can't handle it. It's the only way that you can get away with completely scripted fight design and still keep players engaged. But try to fix that too.

[shao32]

I consider DRK need a second combo, but not any tipical second combo we are use to, it's need his HW second combo system, the one that make you choose use souleater when you have DA for it and Delirium when not, was a fun mechanic and never feel rigid bcs you could play with it depending of the amount of resources you have, it was the best combo system of the game it's a shame they just delete the whole thing.

[jetfire117]

I consider DRK need a second combo, but not any tipical second combo we are use to, it's need his HW second combo system, the one that make you choose use souleater when you have DA for it and Delirium when not, was a fun mechanic and never feel rigid bcs you could play with it depending of the amount of resources you have, it was the best combo system of the game it's a shame they just delete the whole thing.

yea the combos were perfect, in my opinion. But as of now, what would another combo do? Like Reinhardt said above, our (boring at this point) soul eater combo gives us what we need. So it's kinda hard to think of another combo they could give us since aggro doesn't exist anymore. At this point, I'm just hoping they change delirium to literally anything else.