Dark Knight Megathread

[Kalaam]

Could Dark Mind be reworked into a MP regeneration boost similar to Lucid Dream ? The name is fitting, and it'd be a useful tool.

[Saraide]

Dark Knight feels pretty meh, oblation is the only thing mildly interesting that has appeared and all it is is a 10% mit on two charges. Not exactly a breakthrough. Meanwhile all the issues dark knight had were just left untouched like TBN, dark mind and living dead. Delirium is still just an exact copy of inner release aswell, it even also got the change into charges while bloodweapon stayed on a timer. Abyssal drain was made into an aoe version of carve&spit for no discernable reason.

The clearest indicator how little thought was put into dark knight this expansion however is without a doubt enhanced unmend. What a joke of a trait. Probably gonna swap to pld if nothing changes until savage.

[Kalaam]

Imagine Oblation healing you for a portion of the damage mitigated. Proccing early if you are under 20% HP or stuff. Now that'd be a good skill.

[shao32]

After some testing and such i just felt that DRK is even worse that SHB in terms of gameplay, not only for the obvious gameplay loops its shares with WAR more painfully similar now both jobs base they gameplay on wait until inner delirium and use they fell spillers with all they oGCD and buffs aviable there, but how empty and swallow the downtime is, like seriously just pure 45s of unalterated souleater spam and a ocasional bloodspiller/salted heart is basically PLD ARR levels of gameplay engagement.

The job seems to fullfill his duty in terms of numbers but god lord the gameplay, i never belive DRK will reach such levels of braindeadness and boredorm on what is 3/4 of his gameplay loop considering his story on this game and previous gameplay design, basically you performance will be solely determinated if you have the ping to do all the double weaves on the burst with all the fluff it have every min.

[Mekhana]

I agree. I'm half tempted to macro plunge, salted darkness and and shadow bringer into every keybind.

As pathetic enhanced unmend is or whatever, I must be thankful it procs on something I only use ever so occasionally, otherwise I'd have to plunge on everything.

[Sutiban]

For the First time I decided to creep into the forums myself and offer a bit of input on the issue. I want to bring up a few things I've learned bouncing between all the tanks and what maybe the devolopers could do to address Dark Knight's identity crisis.

I: 5.X and 6.X

As of the current iteration of dark is a modified iteration of the old warrior model from shadowbringers, lets talk about that first, the whole "Warrior clone" business. Back in shadowbringers Warrior was universally seen as a "braindead" tank class due to the incredibly simple rotation structure warrior had as a result of loosing aggro rotation. I moved from WAR to darknight because I noticed that dark knight in Shadowbringers was actually warrior but more fleshed out mechanically. Yes, I said it. Drk was a more interesting warrior than warrior was. You had two meters to juggle with blood gauge and MP, meaning compared to warrior having a single build up phase, Dark Knight had a follow up phase that in the same way summoner had dreadwrym trance and summon bahamaut. As a player this was kinda a big deal to me. But for long time dark players I understand the frustration. Especially since it's evident that Gunbreaker is modeled after 3.0 Dark Knight's "Dark Artes Spam" As you can see, Dark Knight is having a problem that WHM suffers from, a lot of it's abilities are being poached by other classes, robbing it of identity. This is evident with the 6.X tanks getting universal targeted mitigation tools due to (in my opinion anyway) the overwhelming positive feedback from usage of The Blackest Night and what it can offer to trials to make this more common.

[Sutiban]

II: What does Dark Knight have now that it can call it's own?

From playing all the tanks enough to understand the general "gist" of what each one is trying to emphasize. Dark knight unfortunately has only a handful things it can call it's own right now. The first is The Blackest Night, the Targeted Mitigation tool that rewards proactive mitigation in the form of a refund to it's MP cost, and is an absolute centerpiece of the Dark Knight toolbox.

The second thing is Esteem, Dark Knight's Simulacrum. a pet-based damage over time ability meant to be a force multiplier and call into play one of Dark Knight's most defining story traits. This one in particular is a win for the developers as it's effectively a dot that doesn't actually clog the debuff bar on the opponent's status. Overall it's a real crowd pleaser, and it's pretty damn good at what it's job is.

Finally we have the less flashy aspects, Dark knight is still the only tank with a two stage burst phase rotation, and one where meter management actually matters even in it's "Warrior but not Warrior" interpretation. It sounds bad, but mechanically Dark Knight has much room for expression still, there's a reason why it still keeps being a favorite of world first clears. The second being that it has the most off global weaving of all the tanks.

[Sutiban]

III: Where do we go from here?
Ultimately I personally think dark knight has four possible futures we could delve into to for the class. two of which are promising, and two which are less exciting but effective.

The first path the role design team could focus on for DRK is to focus on one of Dark Knight's biggest star players, Esteem. Dark knight could use Living Shadow as a form of job maintenance to stand out from the crowd. Instead of being a Burst Phase Tank, Dark Knight could use it's rotations to maintain Living Shadow on the field, The blood gauge could be repurposed into an Esteem Meter, and using MP on moves like Bloodspiller and Quietus could go to keeping this gauge filled, while we maintain our primary damage buff through Edge of Darkness and Flood of Shadow normally used to maintain Darkside. Naturally this would mean overall potency would drop across the board as Esteem would be effectively doubling it with his continued presence, skill expression can still be maintained by balancing your Esteem maintenance and Darkside maintenance with other damage abilities.

The second path could be a focus on the theme of retaliation, and emphasize more on the retaliatory nature of The Blackest Night and the themes of endurance from spells like Living Dead. Likewise we could amusingly enough steal from warrior Vengeance and utilize the ability to turn boss auto attacks into more damage. The Blackest Night would be your primary means of extra damage, and we could expand that concept of absorption into reflection with party wide retaliation skills, such as Dark Missionary converting raid wide damage into MP or more directly reflecting it back to the target. There's a lot of ways to transform dark's defensive cooldowns into offensive bonuses for aggressive and proactive mitigation. giving it a nice contrast to the reactive nature of Paladin with healing and parrying. The Blood gauge or the Darkside timer could instead be turned into a The Blackest Night HP counter for determining how much more damage it needs to break. We've already seen how sheilds breaking can be turned into a class mechanic with Sage. Perhaps Dark Knight could be our first Barrier Tank to contrast with Warrior's Regeneration.

[Sutiban]

The Third Path is to bring back Dark Arts, using Dark Arts as a tool to modify and enhance existing skills at the cost of resource to make our abilities more interesting. Sound familiar? this is what Gunbreaker does with Continuation. We can however turn this into a plus if we could look at what we can enhance with Dark Arts, such as non damage spells like The Blackest Knight. If we're going to be a diet version of another tank, I would rather us be diet Gunbreaker

The Fourth path is to maintain current course, and keep levering on the emphasis on two stage burst with a smattering of GCDs to keep the rotation busy. This means though that Carve and Spit and Abyssal Drain need to be decoupled. And Enhanced Unmend needs far more than just a cooldown reduction to plunge, This wont cut it.

[MagiusNecros]

DRK just needs a party of Sages and they won't have sustain problems anymore.

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