Dark Knight Megathread

[Malthir]

Why do you keep passing any position that doesn't think that repeatedly restated grievances, especially if given in contexts that could only make those complaints seem less reasonable, are of sufficient benefit to be worth overshadowing most other avenues of discussion as... naive optimism?

Such has very little, ultimately, to do with optimism (nor naivety, for that matter). It's not even a primary factor.

Fool me once applies here.

You would totally have a point if some of these "grievances" were only from the last expac. Sadly that's not the case.

We complained about living dead immediately: no response from Dev
We complained about the removal of parry: no response from Dev
We complained about the living shadow: no response from Dev
We complained about new darkside: no response from Dev
We complained that our aoe rotation doesn't get completed till level 70: No response from Dev
We complained that they removed abunch of actually useful abilities we likes: We got a response, O we are deducing actions pressed, then they added extra moves we didn't like.
We complained that building our class around TBN was not fun especially since you didn't get it till like 70: No response from Dev
We complained, We complained and on and on.

While I agree that with new issues like how squishy we should give the devs benefit of the doubt however after a certain point you lose that benefit. They have screwed Drks in every expac and instead of addressing anything what did was; look guys we gave you a new move attached so salted earth, ruined carve and split and abyssal drain and now made that ranged move you barely use a core part of the rotation o and by the way it's still a spell suck it.

[Lyth]

...

Restating a complaint doesn't alter its merit.

While you can't expect anything of a damage balancing patch, you're just seeing the symptoms of a deeper problem of the development team that doesn't engage with player concerns. They seem happy enough to ignore many years worth of feedback about issues in Living Dead's design, for example, as long as it stays out of sight in these relatively obscure forums. But if you look at the influencer front, it's always 'Oh, Square Enix is really receptive to player feedback, their development team enjoys playing various jobs in their free time and directly talks to the playerbase to stay in the know.' That's a nice ideal to sell, especially if they're willing to put in the effort to live up to it. But sooner or later that bubble will burst.

When Warcraft was at its peak, their class balance team regularly made blue posts on their own forums. One of the things that really impressed me about Koji Fox on first impression back in ARR was seeing him take the time to make lore posts directly on the forums and interact with people. I know that nowadays that level of interaction from devs is impossible in games, with every bit of communication probably needing to be triple checked and filtered before being released. But I do see smaller game devs who have more to lose spend a lot more time answering player questions and talking about game design philosophy behind balance decisions. I hope that SE revises its communications strategy with the playerbase, because this current approach won't retain players in the long term. A revolving door approach only lasts for so long before even prospective players catch wind of trouble.

[Archwizard]

Dark Knights have once again held off since 4.0.

I highly doubt you've done any "holding off", considering you're jumping on even the faintest opportunity to launch your aggression.

Unless you mean to tell me 6.08 was the last straw for you? Despite knowing in advance that nothing would come of 6.08 except damage buffs?

Or is it more likely you were just waiting for a chance to be disappointed so you could vent your frustration. Because it really does not seem earned in this specific case, and you've pulled the "since 4.0" diatribe more times than it has been days since the patch dropped.

I highly admire your optimism

Nah Shurri's right, the absence of knee-jerk pessimism isn't itself "optimism" or "copium".

I do have healthy skepticism that even if they drop a rework in 6.1, it won't solve all of DRK's problems or "change everything", and we'll be lucky if it's more than bandaids. They probably will leave LD largely the same, and they certainly won't add any new abilities (much less return ones they dropped back in Stormblood) or replace ones like Oblation and Dark Mind. Some things are beyond the scope of a .X patch, and if they miss a .0, they may never come at all.
I set my expectations low, so I can be pleasantly surprised.

I just think it's hard for the devs not to take notice when it's actually a meme at this point that DRK is the worst tank to heal, as much as WAR requires virtually no healing at all.

But when I see you (and I do mean you, MagiusNecros) clogging multiple pages of a feedback thread doing little more than bicker and whine about how DRK will only get worse (and in fact have seen you doing the same in other threads) and throwing bile at the devs that nobody would want to read, and get other people on the same train, and declare anyone who isn't as down bad as you either hopelessly naive or taking Copium, I can't help but see it as derailing constructive discussions. With enough "EVERYTHING IS BAD AND JUST GETS WORSE" drowning out actionable feedback, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We're not trying to shut down discussion about DRK being in a bad place, because we were literally already talking about that this whole time.

But there's a difference between "Aw man, DRK didn't get anything, X is still a problem, that's disappointing" because you got your hopes up, and --

It seems to be the class fantasy to see how much shittier they can make the job each expansion.

That's like... Reverse Copium. (Un-Copium? Anti-Copium? I feel like there's a word for it, it's on the tip of my tongue...)

And this certainly isn't the place for venting by questioning the devs' competence. If you really must, start a rage thread on reddit, not piling into every feedback forum about DRK.

[MagiusNecros]

Not seeing anything much besides "angry DRKs shut up pls". If you wish to have a different avenue of discussion that isn't pure Copium I'm all for it. Not particularly interested in a "wait and see what happens" for another 6 years. The treatment of DRK is akin to wearing old leather for so long you can't imagine anything else. Maybe 6.1 will change everything. But I will keep expectations very low.

[SineNomine]

MagiusNecros, you seem to take developer decisions that don't align with what you personally want really...well, personally. Try to remember that, one, the devs don't hate Dark Knights or the players that play them, two, they have a LOT of game to focus on at any given time, three, there can be valid design decisions that are 100% opposed to what you personally want, and finally four, at the risk of stating the obvious the devs can make mistakes.

All of those should be self evident. You don't need to feel like you are some beleaguered soul being harried by malicious forces. The devs truly want Dark Knight to be fun and balanced. They obviously fall short in your estimation, and have over and over to you which definitely sucks. I can understand the frustration. But it certainly isn't the fault of favoritism towards other jobs or their players. Design is hard, and a lot of the factors that Developers have in mind when making decisions on how to balance a class simply aren't relevant to individual players of said job.

...I guess the overall point I am making is simply that you should breathe. There are no enemies here, just people that disagree about game design decisions for maximum enjoyment.

[Archwizard]

The devs truly want Dark Knight to be fun and balanced.

Exactly this!

No dev wastes time, money and resources making a job they hate and just want to demolish, much less make it a posterboy for an expansion and add a new job to the same role in that time.

At worst, they think their experiments with the job have been successful; feel free to dispel those notions as they come with actionable feedback. Even if they wouldn't revert an expansion's worth of changes, you can still offer suggestions on how to build on or adjust what they have.

But they wouldn't try to make it worse. That would actually be a waste of their time.

[Malthir]

Exactly this!

No dev wastes time, money and resources making a job they hate and just want to demolish, much less make it a posterboy for an expansion and add a new job to the same role in that time.

At worst, they think their experiments with the job have been successful; feel free to dispel those notions as they come with actionable feedback. Even if they wouldn't revert an expansion's worth of changes, you can still offer suggestions on how to build on or adjust what they have.

But they wouldn't try to make it worse. That would actually be a waste of their time.

I'm learning towards they are helping the Drk Roleplay community, by making existence pain. Now you can truly feel like a Dark Knight

[shao32]

Exactly this!

No dev wastes time, money and resources making a job they hate and just want to demolish, much less make it a posterboy for an expansion and add a new job to the same role in that time.

At worst, they think their experiments with the job have been successful; feel free to dispel those notions as they come with actionable feedback. Even if they wouldn't revert an expansion's worth of changes, you can still offer suggestions on how to build on or adjust what they have.

But they wouldn't try to make it worse. That would actually be a waste of their time.

From my point of view the Devs actually don't try to make DRK fun at all just balanced, they mess up so bad with it by strip him from his gameplay and his unique mechanics and skills that reverting and fixing all that mess would take aproximately the resources and the time of develop a new job from almost the scratch.

So what we have now? the worst designed job where no skill make sense and it's full of useless mechanics and heavely situational skills that are just a wasting of code space buuuut is balanced number wise, is very easy to see they don't actually wanna make DRK fun and cohesive job to play anymore, is just a job they just slap whatever thing on it and keep it as a balanced low manteinance trash design and don't care if that rise more complains, it's working right? we don't care about your feeling about the older versions.

[MagiusNecros]

From my point of view the Devs actually don't try to make DRK fun at all just balanced, they mess up so bad with it by strip him from his gameplay and his unique mechanics and skills that reverting and fixing all that mess would take aproximately the resources and the time of develop a new job from almost the scratch.

So what we have now? the worst designed job where no skill make sense and it's full of useless mechanics and heavely situational skills that are just a wasting of code space buuuut is balanced number wise, is very easy to see they don't actually wanna make DRK fun and cohesive job to play anymore, is just a job they just slap whatever thing on it and keep it as a balanced low manteinance trash design and don't care if that rise more complains, it's working right? we don't care about your feeling about the older versions.

I believe this is correct. It's so focused on homogenization and balance DRK cannot have it's own identity. All tanks for example if 100k DPS(bloated number) was the average they all must be doing around 100k. We will say that PLD/WAR do 100k, GNB 101k and DRK 102k but on average all Tanks are balanced across the board to do 100k DPS. So on average for the hardest content you'll have DRK maybe clearing 10 to 20 seconds faster?

I get the game is about damage but Tanks should be about defensives, mitigation and sustain and it's very clear that DRK is underwhelming on that front.

I mean if the other 3 Tanks only did about 100k average DPS and DRK was pumping out 120k DPS I could say yeah you know what DRK is weak defensively because it puts out uunga buunga damage like a BLM or SAM. And it would be much more forgivable.

But that's not the case. I just miss the high risk high reward style that came with Heavensward. Right now it's high risk low reward.

And you can argue that back in 3.0 after you built a enmity lead you could drop stance and have 20% boosted damage and end your typical 8 minute boss fight in 4 minutes instead. Very rewarding for high play.

And I think Reaper still has higher overall sustain with Bloodbath? Like the Arcane Crest nerf didn't even mean a thing. 50 potency less big whoop. 250 less potency over 5 ticks won't be missed. 20 seconds of Bloodbath is a lot of burst heals given most attacks Reaper has is physical damage including Avatar oGCDs with the exception of Gluttony and spells.

[Archwizard]

It is funny that you mention this, because in ShB, DRK got, despite being the Posterboy, completely outshined by GNB which was not only a new Tank to the Rooster, but also advertised in a very flashy way by Tankred in the Trailer.

Sure, the point I was just trying to make is that the twin notions that the devs:

1. Wanted DRK, specifically, to fail, but then made it a posterboy for an expansion and cast all player focus and scrutiny onto it
2. Wanted to dunk on a tank job, or ran out of ideas to balance more than just PLD and WAR, but then introduced another tank that "outshined" it in that period

... are utterly ridiculous.

From my point of view the Devs actually don't try to make DRK fun at all just balanced,

And that's a valid concern to have. However, I remind you that fun is subjective, and devs (as creators) innately have a biased understanding of what others find enjoyable to play in their game.

And even when they agree that gameplay X is fun, they may not believe that it is a healthy position for the job or a direction they want to undertake for the future. For instance, they will probably get around to nerfing WAR because by the same merits, being OP is "fun" but unsustainable.

Yes, they removed several actions from DRK, but A) they wanted to take the job into a new direction with the introduction of/focus on TBN and B) given the sheer number of actions they removed according to the compilation video, clearly they realized they had bloated it with way too many buttons and sought both to streamline and future-proof it. I will grant that it's plausible they trimmed too much off in favor of TBN, but at this point several of the actions removed are incompatible with the current system anyway.

And frankly, as a Stormblood-baby, I cannot tell you if there were flaws of the HW DRK that might have pressed such decisions, or whether its praise is tinted in shades of rose. All I can say is I've heard mixed reviews about the old Dark Arts system, despite how often people seem to beg for its return when talking about what the job "lost".