Dark Knight Megathread

[Ryaduera]

You may as well say that blue and red are the same in the context that they're mixed together.
A thing with an added function is not the same as another without it. They may, in most cases, amount to the same thing, but they are not literally the same.

I know, I said that too but in a different way. No two similar things are the same, but red and blue are primary colors.

Ahhh, okay. I see what you mean. Since you replied to a quote discussing scaling, I thought the drawbacks you were talking about were likewise a matter of scaling. I still disagree that all other short-CD mitigation has "all of the benefit" of TBN.

Admittedly it is a strange case since TBN isn't necessarily to DRK as HoC is to GNB, that would be oblation, but there's still a lot of comparisons to be made in which I find HoC wins out even if you were to stack Oblation and TBN. And this isn't even where the problem really is, the problem is how much TBN digs deep into the DRK mitigation tools.

Literally just an hour ago played the Dorito for a clear party and saved the healers a total of 4 times (dps another, so 5 together) in a single pull when they weren't in place for the spin mechanics which would otherwise have one-shot them. The latter situation does exist.

And my point is that I've done the same thing with HoC. The question isn't "can it do this" since every tank is capable of similar feats, the question is "is it better at this" and the answer is that if it doesn't kill you, yes, HoC is better. The conditions in which TBN is better is for more situational. The thing is, this particular situation can be solved by the Healer/DPS learning to execute the mechanic better. Once that happens, then what?

This was based on the earlier misunderstanding. Having responded to a quote about gear-scaling, I assumed the downside you were discussing was related to gear-scaling. Admittedly, I got a little confused, also, in your bit about incoming "damage also scaales with ilvl so the porpotion of damage generally stays the same anyway. But heals from those abilities do."

Glad that's cleared up. I was trying to say that yes your HP scales up which buffs your TBN value, but the damage you're taking also scales up with harder content. The older content gets the less important mitigation becomes since none of it is %hp based so it's not relevant for which class is better at what in any role.

Let's be clear here. To mitigate means "to lessen or reduce". You cannot not lessen or reduce things that has already hit you. You recover from them.

There is no such thing as "post-damage mitigation." The closest you get to that (i.e., to reduce or lessen damage taken after you've already taken it) is for you to (1) increase max eHP and then later (2) restore a portion of damage taken, in which case you really have two effects (as usually shown by two distinct buffs), one which increases your maximum eHP for a duration [mitigation] (perhaps infinitely, as per invulns) and another than then heals you after the fact [healing]. Even the likes of Purifying Brew, by which to purge DoT damage to be taken (based on a portion of direct damage that was delayed, instead being dealt over time), must still be done prior to that DoT damage taken. Meanwhile, the likes of "heal for 30% of damage taken in the last 4 seconds" is just content-scaled healing.

That's how "reactive" tanks work; they increase their eHP, typically without increasing the effective value of each point of health, and then self-heal the difference. But that does not turn healing into damage reduction. If they did not have access to maximum eHP (be it by passive or active means) greater the passive values of other tanks, they'd be unplayable outside of casual content in most MMOs (i.e., any that actually expects tanks to, idk, use their defensives for more than just the occasional healer GCD saved).

There is no "I unmake your having hit me in the face by parrying your strike afterwards." There is mitigation (literally "(damage) reduction") and there is healing. That's it.

Let me try to be more clear. You know you're going to take damage so you use something that will heal you while you do. The vast majority of damage (on tanks especially) is not all at once front loaded, but rather over time repeatedly getting hit. If you get hit, then restore, then get hit, then restore, on and on and on, that is eHP. It's a conditional eHP being that [if x doesn't kill you, gain y more HP] but in situations where you know for absolute fact that x will not kill you. eHP is more than how much hp you have raised by your mitigation value, it's how much HP has to be cut through to reduce the tanks HP to 0. We use the term eHP because mitigation is more than just your HP + shields x by damage reduction, healing is in fact a factor in every situation with the exception of tankbusters, which each tank has effective ways of dealing with (being TBN + Other cooldown for DRK) but there isn't a single tankbuster where TBN is necessary, it's just the tool that DRK happens to have unique to them.

If this is a situation of "by 'can't' I really meant 'can'; language is flexible," then... okay, but... there's otherwise no sense to your position outside of having overgeared content so greatly that the tank needs not pop a single defensive ability over the whole fight, which is not a condition you want to design tanks around. (Vengeance? Thrill of Battle? Rampart? The mitigation component of Raw Intuition? Nah, don't need them. Nothing can kill you anyways now that you overgear this tier, so let's just focus on you healing yourself back up afterwards. Not like there's a next tier.)

To be completely honest, I have no idea what you're on about here. Unless you think all of my assumptions were with current gear and trials? I was going off of all of this with last patches tomestone gear before getting Ex trial gear, which had me around 70k HP and I actually only melded once I already had accessories. Not sure if that's what you're getting at or not though.

[Shurrikhan]

I know, I said that too but in a different way. No two similar things are the same, but red and blue are primary colors.

My point was that increasing max eHP (mitigation / ToB-likes) and recovering back to maximum eHP (healing) are opposite sides of the same interaction (surviving). (Red -> Purple <-Blue, if you will.) They work together, and may therefore amount to the same thing in many contexts, but if you treat them as literally the same, ignoring the unique advantages of max eHP increases, you end up with imbalances similar to what 2.0 Warrior (which died not due to type, but due to oversights) faced and end up seeing jobs fundamentally reworked instead of addressing a simple, very specific, lack of parity that bottlenecks the larger concept.

And my point is that I've done the same thing with HoC.

I gave that example because in as direct A|B comparison as I can make, TBN (and/or Oblation) did do something unique. That aforementioned dorito-run was with a GNB. They once tried to save an out-of-place DPS (a little over HP) with it. It barely wasn't enough. When I made the same attempt later on, TBN was enough. When both healers (both Sages) were about to take every possible AoE during snakes-fire-birds, he HoCed the other and I cast Oblation on both of them. They came into that damage with the same HP, but only the TBNed one came out (barely) alive (183 HP, iirc).

Now, if both heals had all of 200 more max HP, yeah, HoC probably would have done it, too, but that cases where, trying to save someone at ~60% HP from a single hit (not yet triggering Catharsis but not leaving them with enough HP, even at 1.43x [1/(1-.3)], to survive the next attack).

It's no huge point against HoC (though Intervention and Nascent, with enough precasting, could technically handle that situation better), but it is something that TBN does a bit better than its alternatives (in some cases reaching, yes, a unique result), and I really like that about it. And it is, again, just the difference between frontloading effect into entirely mitigation rather than partly into mitigation and partly into healing.

Glad that's cleared up. I was trying to say that yes your HP scales up which buffs your TBN value, but the damage you're taking also scales up with harder content. The older content gets the less important mitigation becomes since none of it is %hp based so it's not relevant for which class is better at what in any role.

Yeah, my bad there. I way over-assumed that your reply was much more narrowly aimed.

Let me try to be more clear. You know you're going to take damage so you use something that will heal you while you do.

Again, though, that only works if, without mitigation, you'd last for more than one hit. That is not always the case in Savage among tankbusters that can hit pretty damn hard. Any time we've seen reactive tank design ignore that need for single-hit max eHP, they get completely barred from certain fights, which sucks because, yeah, reactive tanks are fun, especially just as a matter of diversity. Single-hit max eHP (what is normally meant by "max eHP" anyways, but just to be clear) is not something that can be ignored past the casual level.

I was going off of all of this with last patches tomestone gear before getting Ex trial gear, which had me around 70k HP and I actually only melded once I already had accessories. Not sure if that's what you're getting at or not though.

No, no, nothing like that. I just mean that jobs can't be designed with only the current tier in mind so long as there's going to be notable gear-step going into the next. And, again, that you can't single-hit max eHP -- the difference between mitigation and ToB-likes... and healing. The two only become even figuratively interchangeable at the point ("non-reactive") tanks no longer need to use their skills.

If I hadn't seen whole, fun tank concepts (2.0 Warrior included) die over exactly that kind of conflation previously, I wouldn't harp on this. Sorry if that came off as anger. I'll admit I let myself get a little exasperated, hence (and worsened by) my error in comprehension, but I was never angry with you. I'd just seen that core idea that max-eHP increasing and simply HP-increasing effects are interchangeable kill tank classes/specializations/builds in the past and did not at all agree.

[ShinShimon]

Our DPS is fine, TBN is fine, our opener and rotation are fine. All we need is some ability to restore our own HP, especially in dungeons.

Change Abyssal Drain to something like its old Dark Arts version. 3000MP, no cooldown, no MP restore. Same damage and cure potency it has now.

Change Oblation to provide a powerful HoT if the shield from TBN breaks on the same target, or if target has Walking Dead.

Change Walking Dead to provide a big lifesteal to all attacks for its duration. Decent DPS and the Oblation HoT should be enough for a DRK to heal their way through.

[Sazuzaki]

our opener and rotation are fine.

I agree with everything you said but that, pressing 1-2-3 for 45 seconds isn't fun. Opener just feels like you're spewing out random attacks without any synergy, same thing applies every minute.

[Sacrilegion]

"Healing is not mitigation" True, but recovering after heavy damage is just as important especially when your healer is occupied trying to keep dps alive. DRK struggles in this category and they cannot fill in for an actual dps (they ain't that strong).

[Shurrikhan]

I agree with everything you said but that, pressing 1-2-3 for 45 seconds isn't fun. Opener just feels like you're spewing out random attacks without any synergy, same thing applies every minute.

Agreed on both counts, but... most openers at this point fit that description fairly well. Not an excuse for DRK, by any means, just... a complicator.

I'm sure it can be 'fixed'... sort-of, but it's hard to come up with a solution off the top of my head that wouldn't also feel constraining (nearly as much as it'd also feel better for having reinvigorated and given some through-line or cohesive goal to burst phases). Of course, we could also bring back *gasp* mini-burst phases to deal with some of the problems of the long lulls.

Change Abyssal Drain to something like its old Dark Arts version. 3000MP, no cooldown, no MP restore. Same damage and cure potency it has now.

Change Oblation to provide a powerful HoT if the shield from TBN breaks on the same target, or if target has Walking Dead.

Change Walking Dead to provide a big lifesteal to all attacks for its duration. Decent DPS and the Oblation HoT should be enough for a DRK to heal their way through.

These would be solid changes, save that with Flood only doing 130->160 potency anyways, Abyssal Drain's potency would need to be less for Flood to be worth casting when taking even the slightest damage not already covered by Kardia et al.

Given its CD, though, it'd be wholly fair to have Walking Dead provide lifesteal AND still remove the chance of dropping its "cannot drop below 1 HP" effect early and get rid of the alt-Doom effect outright.

(I don't think Oblation necessarily needs a powerful HoT, let alone that it needs to be bound up to TBN --though that makes thematic sense-- since both heavily limit its applications, but I wouldn't be opposed to it getting some form of buff.)

[ShinShimon]

These would be solid changes, save that with Flood only doing 130->160 potency anyways, Abyssal Drain's potency would need to be less for Flood to be worth casting when taking even the slightest damage not already covered by Kardia et al.

(I don't think Oblation necessarily needs a powerful HoT, let alone that it needs to be bound up to TBN --though that makes thematic sense-- since both heavily limit its applications, but I wouldn't be opposed to it getting some form of buff.)

Forgot about early Flood. Yeah, drop Abyssal potency to 100-120 if it's spammable.

Oblation HoT gives us effective single-target sustain, tied to our lvl 82 skill like other tanks. Other tanks have it tied to their TBN equivalent, so why shouldn't ours? If TBN isn't going to break, we probably don't need the heal anyway.

[Luin]

Blood Weapon is ping hostile. Having 5 stacks, similar to Perfect Balance or Delirium, would fix this.

Living Dead is the weakest invuln. It needs a rework, but reducing the healing requirement would help. With Holmgang now being 10s, Living Dead has no advantage.

Dark Mind is the only damage-type specific CD currently in the game. Feint and Addle were adjusted to work on both damage-types. Camouflage works on both damage-types. Why doesn't Dark Mind work on both damage-types, with a bonus against Magic damage? Why can't Dark Mind be 10%physical 20%magic?

(It is silly to have a tool that only works on 1 damage-type when the developers refuse to give us official methods to discern the damage type)

Abyssal Drain is a gain on 4 targets. Every tank AoEs at 3. It's weird for DRK to not use one of their AoE tools until 4 targets. DRK uses Flood and Quietus at 3. Why do they Drain at 4, and not 3? Increase Abyssal Drain potency.

(Also, I liked using Flood on 2 targets. I want to use Flood on 2 targets. Please revert Flood nerf.)

[Archwizard]

Abyssal Drain is a gain on 4 targets. Every tank AoEs at 3. It's weird for DRK to not use one of their AoE tools until 4 targets. DRK uses Flood and Quietus at 3. Why do they Drain at 4, and not 3? Increase Abyssal Drain potency.

I'd love to believe they'd increase the potency of AD by at least 20... but I get the feeling they'd look at it and cut C&S by at least 60p instead.

[VicariousXIV]

Another question; What exactly does the DRK community want more and which can be more realistically expected, a full rework of the job or just enough changes to help it in dungeons?

Cause I'm still seeing multiple people arguing that the DRK is fine, and please do not try and tell me "no one is claiming DRK is fine" again cause I just read through several pages with multiple people arguing that it's overall in a "fine" state.

Not the norm, but there are enough to have someone saying it on almost every page, to varying degrees.

But anyways, I mainly ask because I see a number of rework ideas that I agree with and disagree with on several different aspects for each, but what are the realistic chances we'll actually get one? DRK still retains high playrate for the casual base and is serviceable in extremes and savages, so even though I agree a rework SHOULD be the answer do we actually expect it to happen?

I'm not being facetious either, I'm actually seriously curious if this is a realistic possibility.

Cause from where I stand, I'd put money on small changes if any, but if there's reason to believe otherwise I'd welcome it.

Also can people stop requesting AD go back to costing 3000 MP? Dungeons would become AD spam, fuck Flood and TBN, let's just go full one-dimensional kit! Besides, there are better options to add sustain anyways.