Dark Knight Megathread

[Undeadfire]

The only way to make LD Lifesteal effective enough is to effect every attack possible than focused GCDs only, or it's still going to massively suck. After trying to speed run using Drk myself, I want to keep a 10 foot pole to keep it away from me, my goodness trying to fit in so much O-GCDs and trying to stay up to date on the mechanic situation is brain breaking.

[Keagian]

One change I do want to see that will make dungeon DRK less squishy is to just bring Abyssal Drain back to a GCD and make it the second AoE combo after Unleash.

We never use it in Raids and Trails anyway and since it’s an GCD AoE, we won’t be using it on our opener, so no button bloat there. Why they haven’t done this yet is beyond me.

[Lyth]

I think that they're still trying to gauge feedback on their ideas, or else we would have seen more specifics about the change and possibly even a proof of concept.

As long as the heal or die condition exists on Living Dead, there are going to be player complaints about it and there will be a need for UI changes to support the action's use. It fundamentally does not make sense for Living Dead to have a longer cooldown than Holmgang while having an extra punishment condition attached. If they just get rid of that instant death condition, then I think pretty much everyone will be happy with the proposed self-healing component regardless of how it gets tuned. If they don't, it's going to come up again and again.

Ideally I'd like to see something done about Oblation's underwhelming effect as well, but if they get Living Dead and Blood Weapon right I could learn to live with it.

[Archwizard]

As long as the heal or die condition exists on Living Dead, there are going to be player complaints about it and there will be a need for UI changes to support the action's use. It fundamentally does not make sense for Living Dead to have a longer cooldown than Holmgang while having an extra punishment condition attached. If they just get rid of that instant death condition, then I think pretty much everyone will be happy with the proposed self-healing component regardless of how it gets tuned. If they don't, it's going to come up again and again.

Exactly this. Even with the self-healing element proposed, as long as the tallied instant death condition is connected to its maximum duration, the effect will always be imbalanced with the other Tank Immune skills. The only other one with a cost to use is Superbolide, but the cost is negligible given that it's paid on activation and can be visibly reimbursed over the duration, by visually communicated means.

I would be willing to give up the (up to) 10 sec prep time afforded by Living Dead if it meant that Walking Dead wouldn't 1) kill the DRK when the timer ends and 2) dispel the defensive effect alongside the Doom countdown, preventing a full 10 sec of defense. I'm sure we would find consensus in that, too, at least providing that the activation didn't have an animation delay as now.

And to the rare elements of the community who crave theoretical risk over practical reward: There are solid ways to make an immune CD with a risk element attached to using it, but the Doom clock as executed is not one of them. Even with the self-healing "reward" of the CD, it becomes further punishment if the effect is still dispelled early, especially by itself.
To ask for the "risk" or "forced communication" to be maintained in a position where it only serves as punishment without any support to counterbalance it (or even having any telegraphed communication for how close it is to being dispelled), is asking to put the cart before the horse.

[ItsUrBoi]

The change on LD is great if the invincibility doesn't expire even after healed to full.
What I mean is that when you go into Walking Dead, you cannot die for 10 seconds regardless if you heal to full or not. If you heal yourself to full you just lose the "you die at the end of the duration" problem.

What DRK needs at the moment is a bit of a regen and a better Oblation, with Dark Mind probably changed completely to synergize with the job's defensive kit.
->Oblation should be a bit stronger, maybe 15%. At the moment it doesn't feel valuable. On P4S, if you don't use Oblation but use Shadow Wall, you cannot see a difference compared to using Oblation as well.
->Oblation could have a regeneration effect added to it, to allow DRK to recover some healing from sustained damage such as auto attacks or hits that happen often and somewhat hard, but not hard enough for TBN to be broken reliably.
A regen of 200 potency for 12 seconds would equal 800 healing in total, which is much less than PLD's 1000 ( + Clemency if needed ) and GNB's x2 Aurora ( + 900 potency heart of corondum )
->Dark Mind should be changed to be something else which has more synergy with the job. A simple additional damage reduction which - 1) works only on magic damage 2) you have too much damage reduction that you start getting diminishing returns from stacking it so much - doesn't really add anything. Instead another shield or an instant heal?

Here's an idea for a Dark Mind rework:
->Grants 3 stacks of Blood Price + 2 additional stacks for each enemy in a 25 yalm area around the player.
->Each stack of Blood Price is a 400 potency shield, which when consumed heals you for the same amount.
->Stacks are consumed whenever you take damage, but can only be consumed by 1 for each attack and not more than 1 per second.
->Stacks last for 20 seconds, Dark Mind keeps its CD of 60 seconds.
->Reactivating the ability allows you to consume all remaining stacks, for half their potency as a heal.

This is basically a pretty good ability to deal with auto attacks, it can be ended early if you need a heal as well, and is not particularly over powered. It works well in dungeons when multiple mobs are attacking you, and it solves mostly any situation I can think of regarding DRK's sustain. It can even be used quite effectively on multiple hit tank busters to some extent.

[Undeadfire]

What I mean is that when you go into Walking Dead, you cannot die for 10 seconds regardless if you heal to full or not. If you heal yourself to full you just lose the "you die at the end of the duration" problem.

Why is this a concern exactly? 14 is based on time and maths, you aren't falling back to 1 HP after taking what is planned. Healers are still going to jack your HP up.

[ItsUrBoi]

Why is this a concern exactly? 14 is based on time and maths, you aren't falling back to 1 HP after taking what is planned. Healers are still going to jack your HP up.

Its a concern because if you are in Walking Dead and are supposed to take a tank buster / mechanic that does successive hits and you are also in burst you may end up healing yourself too fast, and "curing" walking dead early.
The invulnerability ( you cannot go below 1 HP ) should be independent from the "if 100% HP is restored, you are fine, otherwise you die" - so that you cannot leave it by mistake of you doing too much damage or the healer healing you up too fast.

[Crater]

Why is this a concern exactly? 14 is based on time and maths, you aren't falling back to 1 HP after taking what is planned. Healers are still going to jack your HP up.

If the self-healing is too potent, it's entirely possible that your own self-healing, combined with the healers using AoE heals on the rest of the group to deal with raidwide damage, will remove your Walking Dead status before you actually take the damage you're intending to use it on.

All the way back in 3.3, I once had a Brute Justice pull where my healers had an unlucky series of critical Medica II/Indom/etc heals on me during the last Final Punch, while they were healing damage to the rest of the party from Long Needle, and I just died because Walking Dead was removed a second or two before I took the last attack in the sequence. It's not very fun to die 11+ minutes into a fight when nobody has made a mistake because your healers' critical heal luck was a little too uncanny.

It's not really a problem with the current version of Living Dead, because you need some extraordinarily bad luck to be healed to full by raidwide heals, but if the 6.1 changes don't include a safeguard against removing your invuln too early and the self-healing is strong enough that healers remove the effect after healing only 50% (or less) of your HP, then this change is a massive nerf to Living Dead and is going to render it unusable in a lot of situations where it's currently completely fine - basically in any instance where healers want to do party healing at the same time you're using an invuln.

Hopefully SE has the foresight not to make that mistake.

[Undeadfire]

If the self-healing is too potent, it's entirely possible that your own self-healing, combined with the healers using AoE heals on the rest of the group to deal with raidwide damage, will remove your Walking Dead status before you actually take the damage you're intending to use it on.

I have never been in one fight Healers using AOE while Walking Dead is active, mitigation would be soaking 1st than healing in the middle of it, Healers have so many O-GCDs. And I doubt life steal would be insanely strong, this is SE we talking about.

All the way back in 3.3, I once had a Brute Justice pull where my healers had an unlucky series of critical Medica II/Indom/etc heals on me during the last Final Punch, while they were healing damage to the rest of the party from Long Needle, and I just died because Walking Dead was removed a second or two before I took the last attack in the sequence. It's not very fun to die 11+ minutes into a fight when nobody has made a mistake because your healers' critical heal luck was a little too uncanny.

This is really unplanned and can easily be avoided, my whole team was topped before Final Combo, though we did the Water skip.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

snip

While I 100% agree that Square hopefully had the foresight to consider this, this kinda situation is insanely niche as is.

With how they've been gradually designing fights, almost every single important tank mechanic is now happening in its own little 'bubble', so to speak. Happening when no other mechanics are happening, telegraphed by a 5-6s castbar along with however many 3s chains of autoattacks separate the tank mechanic from the previous mechanic, etc. The amount of overlap between 'when healers AOE heal' and when multi-hit tank busters (let alone just single hit ones) happen is effectively zero these days.

There's also the fact that it's only a very small niche of multi-hitting tank busters even need a long time on the immunity timer - taking this tier for example, Elegant Evisceration's two hits in P4s are spaced out literally 1-2s apart, meaning even if you somehow got an early cleanse on WD 3s in, you'd be perfectly fine. To my recollection, the longest multi hit chains in recent memory are Ahk Morn (3rd or 4th ones) from UCOB (where there's also no residual AOE damage going out), Ifrit's triple flare breath (again, no aoe damage) in UwW, & TEA's heat + 3x divine spears, where there's also no residual AOE damage going out. (and WD can also be delayed on by simply popping DM + TBN so Heat won't kill to give even more wiggle room).

Again, I'm not denying that hopefully Square took it into consideration, but AOE heals from healers accidentally purifying WD is such a niche issue in the grand scheme of things with how they design their fights. The bigger issue IMO is if the lifesteal is GCD based or if any move can proc it, since in the latter it might be possible for a DRK to solo turbo themselves out of WD by accident if a tank buster aligns with their 2min burst window and the lifesteal per hit is strong enough.