Dark Knight Megathread

[Zedrin]

Superbolide sets you to 1 and THEN is identical to hallowed ground.

If you remove the death penalty (which Walking Dead in its current state is dumb, let's not lie), however, Living Dead literally becomes identical to Holmgang. If it has the trigger of starting after you would drop to 0 hp, then it's just holmgang but frame-perfect; that's a lot closer to Holm than Superbolide is to Hallowed.

[Archwizard]

and Bolide is just hallowed ground that sets you to 1

While I understand your point, I also think Hallowed Ground is too strong compared to its competitors, being the only one without inherent drawbacks or conditionals, cooldown aside.
But we already knew it was the best one, so it's not really adding much to the conversation.

I mean, there's prime opportunities to buff LD and bust HG to be in line with the other two, but since this is a thread about DRK, let's just focus on LD and leave HG for another.

[Duskane]

Superbolide sets you to 1 and THEN is identical to hallowed ground.

If you remove the death penalty (which Walking Dead in its current state is dumb, let's not lie), however, Living Dead literally becomes identical to Holmgang. If it has the trigger of starting after you would drop to 0 hp, then it's just holmgang but frame-perfect; that's a lot closer to Holm than Superbolide is to Hallowed.

both are same regardless despite activation
bolide is just hallowed that sets you to 1
Living dead would be Holmgang with 10 seconds to proc minus the bind effect(granted is useless in raids anyway)

both have a small difference but are effectively the same

[Duskane]

While I understand your point, I also think Hallowed Ground is too strong compared to its competitors, being the only one without inherent drawbacks or conditionals, cooldown aside.
But we already knew it was the best one, so it's not really adding much to the conversation.

I mean, there's prime opportunities to buff LD and bust HG to be in line with the other two, but since this is a thread about DRK, let's just focus on LD and leave HG for another.

Hallowed drawback is its CD 7 minutes
while holmgang is 4 minutes LD is 5 and Bolide is 6 all now last 10 seconds and end goal is the same
Holmgang has always proved itself the best due to its shorter CD even when it only last 3 seconds and ability to fit 3 and sometimes even 4 in a fight PLD is lucky if it can even use it twice

[Shurrikhan]

Hallowed drawback is its CD 7 minutes
while holmgang is 4 minutes LD is 5 and Bolide is 6 all now last 10 seconds and end goal is the same

Living Dead does not last 10 seconds. It lasts up to <10 seconds minus the server delay by which a received heal is recognized and further delay to remove the Doom effect>. And that's assuming your healer is willing to lose uptime, or lucky enough, to finish off your last bit of required healing at the last possible moment. (They won't be, by the way.)

Neither their end goals nor end results are equal so long as LD is in that list.

On the larger topic, I'd be fine with Living Dead basically turning into a Holmgang, or a Holmgang that doesn't outright nullify would-be overkill damage, especially if Holmgang itself had a shorter duration. (I think Holmgang's duration ought to be shortened regardless, so long as it remains on a mere 4-minute CD. Its healing requirement is at worst merely equal to Bolide's while the health cost of Bolide matters incredibly little if the skill is played around, all while lasting just as long and somehow having only two-thirds the cooldown.)

[Crater]

Hallowed Ground has mostly been considered the weakest of all the invulns going as far back as Heavensward, because the cooldown is so incredibly long that you're almost guaranteed to get one fewer use out of it in a given fight than any other invuln. The only thing it was ever really good for was that the actual 'incoming damage reduced to 0' will, occasionally, allow you to use it to bypass a mechanic that's still supposed to debuff you through LD or Holmgang - and Superbolide has eaten its lunch now.

I really think a lot of the discourse around invulns, and particularly around Living Dead, is completely off-base. In a vacuum, the healing requirement on Living Dead is not and never has been a particularly heavy burden. Despite all the histrionics you see whenever people talk about it, in any raid setting, even in a situation where things are kind of going sideways, it's pretty trivial to heal it off. The problem is only relative, when you compare it directly across to the other invulns and find that Holmgang is now strictly superior in every way (and, to a lesser extent, that Superbolide has just a few too many advantages over it for something that is only ever disadvantaged in fights with extremely specific durations that allow an extra use of LD over SB). The healing requirement doesn't need to be removed; it just needs to be respected.

I think if you moved LD down to a 240s cooldown, moved Holmgang up to a 300s cooldown, then squeezed SB and HG together so that Superbolide was at 330s and Hallowed at 360s, you would pretty much solve the balance equation, without having to resort to any more homogenization than we've already had inflicted on us.

[Dracosavarian]

Gonna clarify some things about Living Dead here, since that is being discussed actively currently, as I feel it's relevant to bring up just how much this ability sucks as a whole.


Upon activation, you enter into a state of Living Dead for Up to ten seconds.

If, at any point during those 10 seconds, you are hit by an attack that would have killed you, the following occurs.

Your status of Living Dead is immediately interrupted, and the effect ends.

You drop to 1 Hit Point, and now enter into a state of Walking Dead, for up to 10 seconds. You must be healed to 100% Max Hp Value, or you will die after 10 seconds.

To Elaborate on this: During those 10 seconds of Walking Dead, healers must heal you, for the total maximum HP recorded on your character sheet. You can take damage, that bit doesn't matter. So long as the healer meets your HP Max total, you won't die. So, if you have 250k max hp, so long as the healers throws out a total value of 250k healing in your direction, you won't die.

Now, here's the kicker.

Assuming the max value has been met, Walking Dead is now cleansed from you. Buuuuttttttt....you also lose your invuln.


This in turn, means the following scenario can happen.

You activate Living Dead. (I have a macro set up to blare out alarms with sound effects in party chat to warn healers that I am using it. Kind of messed up, if you ask me, that this is a necessity. But I digress... )

2 Seconds in, boss hits you and you would have died. Living Dead immediately ends, and you drop to 1 hp, and enter into a state of Walking Dead.

The healer throws out enough healing to reach your max hp value.

Walking Dead state now ends.

And so does your invuln

This means, effectively, that your entire invuln span could last literally all of 3 seconds. Sadly, I've had that happen on my own end several times where it lasted that long, since I run extremes with my Friends on Discord and warn them to be prepped for it's use.



Long and short is this. All of the other tanks always get the FULL benefits of their invuln.

Dark Knight is the only one that requires such, in my opinion, ridiculous rules to monitor for it's use, and we can lose it shortly after activation to boot.

[Dauntess]

While everyone's on the topic of Living Dead, I think you can keep the theme and make it a really good skill.

For starters, you should become invulnerable once you enter walking dead, as in you take no damage. Second, separate walking dead from the room mechanic by simply just placing Doom on your character along with the walking dead status. You become invulnerable for the duration of walking dead, can keep the invulnerable even if the Doom gets cleansed.

Would it be OP? I don't think so. You still have to get full cured or you die. I think it's a pretty good high risk high reward. You could say healing to full is easy, but you don't know how many times I've died to this bad skill because healers couldn't top me off even though they knew it was coming.

[Dauntess]

While everyone's on the topic of Living Dead, I think you can keep the theme and make it a really good skill.

For starters, you should become invulnerable once you enter walking dead, as in you take no damage. Second, separate walking dead from the room mechanic by simply just placing Doom on your character along with the walking dead status. You become invulnerable for the duration of walking dead, can keep the invulnerable even if the Doom gets cleansed.

Would it be OP? I don't think so. You still have to get full cured or you die. I think it's a pretty good high risk high reward. You could say healing to full is easy, but you don't know how many times I've died to this bad skill because healers couldn't top me off even though they knew it was coming.

Doom mechanic, not room mechanic.

[Weetzlo]

Honestly, I think the community's general opinion of DRK is way too low for what it really is. It can absolutely clear any content at minimum item level, TBN still gives our brains the good chemical, and now we stole GNB's DPS crown which is a neat brag. However "works" and "is good" are two separate concepts. People's main frustration, especially for healers, is the performance in dungeons and I think they could buff it's dungeon performance specifically by rolling back some 5.0 changes and twisting them a bit.

-Give it back the old function of Dark Arts, even if you give it a new name, and make it like Eukrasia
-Burn twice the mana on "Eukrasian" Flood of Shadow and it blinds enemies hit, dropping their accuracy
-Abyssal Drain has no recast to speak of, but an MP cost of maybe 1500 to just do damage or 4500 for the "Eukrasian" version to restore HP
-Where do we get all this MP? Bring back Blood Price, which restores MP based on number of hits received, doing very little for you in single target but keeping you nice and topped up on a wall to wall pull
-Players comfortable with current DRK's kit will ignore burning more MP for HP and take the DPS gain of more Floods, clearing dungeons even faster as a reward, and use the non drain version of abyssal drain to guarantee enmity of entire mobs as they sprint from wall to wall
-Bring back 3.X Delirium, again it can get a new name, but it was an alternate 3rd hit of your combo like Goring Blade or Storm's Eye but it debuffed the boss to do less magic damage. It was literally just Dark Missionary with potentially 100% uptime if you're willing to give up a bit of potency every few combos (and learned 26 levels earlier so syncing back in a roulette would suck less). Giving that back would act as a notional improvement to it's ability to tank with the flavor of also being beneficial to the whole party and satisfy people upset at the fact that it has only the 3 GCD combo buttons. Give it the Power Slash animation as a treat for old fans

Honestly though I would give up any of those changes to just get them to shuffle the level you learn certain abilities. Playing a Heavensward job in Heavensward content shouldn't feel this boring and gutted. Also not getting your party mitigation until Shadowbringers really hurts. Paladin get 1 of theirs in HW, and the other 2 get theirs during Stormblood. Also also, Unmend used to have a 30% chance to give you a free AoE spell, though it cost MP itself. Now that it's free, make it a 15 or 20% chance and there's your "Enhanced Unmend" instead of the Plunge thing