Dark Knight Megathread

[Zarkovitch]

As a former DRK, adding lifesteal on living dead nerf/buff.

nerf due to if you get heal by healer and you attack with gcd when there a second buster coming to you and you are fully healed ( so no more walking dead).You are kinda on the big yikes moment.

Buff due to we got something to counter walking dead.

But at the end. It still a shitty invul button but now there a gimmick on it. They should just put the holmgang affect with touch of superbolide and add lifesteal when reaching 1 hp be done. But, nope let make this job the worse design ever. I play SMN right now and they say my job is incomplete. Compare to DRK my job is more complete than DRK will ever be.

[Lyth]

...

Crater's point is that if the only change being made to Walking Dead is to add a lifesteal effect without changing the way that the rest of the old skill works, then that 'niche' scenario is going to become more common. The alternative complaint that you'll see come up is that players are forced to stop attacking if there's a lot of ambient healing going out for fear of cleansing the effect too early. And telling players to 'just work around' a badly designed action is not an acceptable response.

The amount of lifesteal that they've added will actually be irrelevant if the dev team doesn't properly understand the underlying problem. The core problem is the implementation of the heal or die condition, not in finding resources to meet the healing check:
1) You do not know how much healing is still left to cleanse the effect because there is nothing on the in-game UI that tells you this.
2) It is possible to cleanse the death prevention effect too early.

Both of these problems absolutely have to be addressed or the same complaints will come up again and we'll be revisiting this in future Q+As. Pretty much the only solution that isn't going to create a lot of additional work for the dev team is to just make this Holmgang + Lifesteal and remove the heal-or-die effect altogether. It's still not a great solution, because death prevention effects only actually mitigate damage when you're at 1 HP, so the two effects will always work against each other to some degree. But at least it would be a meaningful solution.

[RatCopter]

I think they said before that they like the flavour of the skill so much they want to keep it, but I feel like it directly goes against the design philosophy they've taken with every other job, which is to make things more simple.
If they separate the heal or die mechanic off from Walking Dead and just put it into a simple Doom debuff, which I feel that most healers intuitively know, it's probably the best thing they can do, but the more time goes on the more I worry that they won't do that and this is just gonna be a bandaid "fix" that causes more problems. Much like DRK's EW kit.

Oh, and being that it's been a significant amount of time, has anyone actually benefitted from Enhanced Unmend yet?

[shao32]

Some in the JP forum has said the don't die mechanic will remain even if you clear early walking dead so the main question is if you are going to be able to get rid of it by your self and if the self healing effect is going to remain the full duration of the don't die buff, is not 100% sure as far I can tell so we still have to wait but if the JP forum is right then living dead will be decent, if not then it just open a new bag of problems for the skill like many has said

[Oizen]

I don't get why they don't just get rid of the death mechanic.

[SylviaCrystal]

I don't get why they don't just get rid of the death mechanic.

Something something job flavour.

I don't get it either, since they've been erasing the flavour of DRK for a long time. Instead of tweaking Dark Arts to be less spammy, they just removed it. They also took the coolest looking DRK animations, like Power Slash.

Living Dead's flavour could be anything. Living Shadow could be summoned and take the damage for you, like a dummy, instead of being a glorified DoT. Myste could appear and cast a spell that would make you invulnerable for 10 seconds. Anything other than killing the player for using a skill that's intended to... protect them from death.

[Derio]

Hoping the JP forum is correct. The dont die mechanic still is in effect the full 10s even if you cleanse the death penalty. Its still pretty bad if the healing is not as significant as they say.

[Archwizard]

Leaving the death penalty in isn't ideal, and still arguably leaves LD as the worst invuln bar none... but if the Doom effect can be dispelled without removing its Holmgang element and we get a guaranteed 10 sec of survival, on top of the life leech potentially clearing it, it'll be a vast improvement over now and make the skill at least workable for casual content.

Though if the self-healing element can clear it, it really just seems like extra steps to negate the Doom penalty without actually removing it, but at this point I'm taking whatever.

[baklava151]

I just noticed something (hope someone didn't mention it already), go to around 8:15 and watch the DRK's buffs near the top. I wonder how they're going to work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJpSIpC4uXU

[OdinelStarrei]

I just noticed something (hope someone didn't mention it already), go to around 8:15 and watch the DRK's buffs near the top

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJpSIpC4uXU

Oh boy. Since I'm unwilling to talk about anything happening to DRK in PvE, I am more than willing to talk about Dark Knight in PvP. I love DRK in PvP. I'm not as hyped for PvP as I am for Ultimate, but I'm more interested now than I have been since my Feast days. Here are some things I have noticed.

-We still got Bloodspiller and Quietus, with their MP restoring functions removed due to the PvP changes. Blood gauge acquired through Souleater/Unleash combos, looks like.

-Shadowbringer is here, 4000 potency, possibly replacing Edge and Flood. Using Shadowbringer grants Darkside for 15 seconds, in a strange twist of fate. Darkside seems to guarantee critical direct hits on all outgoing damage. That's cracked, YIKES.

-Plunge is here. The classic. 2000 potency. Plunging on enemies seems to inflict Another Victim from Sole Survivor. This is probably a damage received up debuff. Very good for picks. If Plunge resets on kill/assists like it does currently, this could be devastating for people out of position or retreating.

-TBN is here. May be a duration of ten seconds, it lasted a bit longer than it usually does. TBN being broken gives you Dark Arts for 10 seconds. I can't determine exactly what Dark Arts actually does though. It may actually grant the usage of ANOTHER Shadowbringer, this would make sense to get a max duration of 30 seconds of Darkside, the current PvP cap.

-Salted Earth, ten seconds duration? Looks like it applies two buffs to the DRK, one 10 second(I'm assuming for the circle itself, like in PvE), one 5 second, seemingly becoming active after using SaD, that also seems to be applying some sort of debuff! I REALLY hope it's a heavy. Salt and Darkness explosion has a potency of 4000. Reminds me of Tar Pit a bit.

The limit break. Eventide? Living Dead? Drains all HP, deals 16000 - 18000 damage, 22000 on crit, huge line, really edgy. Gives you a red buff that looks like Raise, cannot die while this buff is active, and also seems to be the healing component of Living Dead. Duration of ten seconds and heals via damage dealt 1:1 or maybe just a flat amount? Unsure, but it's definitely coming from the Dark Knight, as was said in the Live Letter changes. Something interesting, the buff DOES NOT go away when the Dark Knight reaches max HP thresholds. A silver of hope for you friends, maybe.

I hope Dark Knight is good in this mode, I love the idea of light area denial combined with massive aoe burst damage. I can see good synergy with WHM and DNC in particular.