Dark Knight Megathread

[Crater]

What can be done with Dark Mind?

The preferred option there is "Absolutely nothing, because it's one of DRK's best skills and arguably the strongest tank defensive in the game."

[ItsUrBoi]

The preferred option there is "Absolutely nothing, because it's one of DRK's best skills and arguably the strongest tank defensive in the game."

How is it one of the strongest tank defensive tools in the game? It only works on magical, lasts 10 seconds. Why would anyone want this over Camouflage?

[Shurrikhan]

How is it one of the strongest tank defensive tools in the game? It only works on magical, lasts 10 seconds. Why would anyone want this over Camouflage?

Because the majority of tankbusters are magical, and having 30 seconds' shorter of a CD means it's available for many more, resulting in much better overall coverage against a fight's arsenal of tank damage.


Camo is twice as long (irrelevant unless you'd end up covering an extra tankbuster in that time) and adds a further 10% mitigation to its non-dominant category (20% physical, 10% magical), but its CD is also 50% longer than Dark Mind's.

[The_User]

If you really want it then maybe have [DOT] Scourge cone aoe+damage fall off>consume darkside timer and just remove passive damage bonus from darkside and then.... maybe have delirium turn them to [a cooler version of] Bloodspiller>https://youtu.be/I1_w_zk6DbM?t=163 or entirely new satisfy sword slam>https://youtu.be/cWdl2RgmaBo?t=539


Or


Make Scourge a cone aoe with a damage fall off that give damage up buff


Or


Make Scourge a cone aoe with a damage fall off that give a buff that increase a gauge when landing the next 5? gcd?


Or


Make Scourge like the option above and create another gcd that give a buff that allow you to increase another gauge so you can have 2 kind of gauges to manage and make a decision kinda like a Red Mage.



Just 2 cents btw... I don't feel motivated to brainstorm for quite sometime now.

[Lyth]

That's a fair point. Camo is a much better choice if you find yourself repeatedly wiping during dungeon prog.

[ItsUrBoi]

That's a fair point. Camo is a much better choice if you find yourself repeatedly wiping during dungeon prog.

Or if you find yourself getting murdered by auto attacks in an ultimate or savage.Also with no way to determine which attacks are magic or physical in game, thats a very dogy argument. I know a lot of tank busters which are physical. In fact I know more which are physical, then magical.

[Crater]

I know a lot of tank busters which are physical. In fact I know more which are physical, then magical.

Excluding attacks that deal less than 2/3rds of a tank's health when completely unmitigated, and excluding attacks that are almost universally dealt with via invuln, this is the complete list of physical tankbusters in Endwalker endgame content:

P1S: Heavy Hand
DSR: Heavenly Heel, Ascalon's Mightx3

By contrast, the magical tankbusters:

ES EX: Hubris
P2S: Doubled Impact, Coherence
P3S: Heat of Condemnation, Beacons of Asphodelos
P4S: Elegant Evisceration, Nearsight/Farsight, Demigod Double, Heart Stake
DSR: Soul Tether, Dark+Holy Orb, Staggering Breath, Hallowed Plume, Trinityx2, Ahk Morn's Edge


You can go back through Shadowbringers content and you'll find a similar distribution; Stormblood content design is slightly less one-sided, but still tilts heavily toward magical tankbusters. You have to go back to Heavensward to regularly find fights with threatening physical tankbusters, and I don't think it's controversial to say that Heavensward content design and level 60 balance in 6.x don't really have a lot of bearing on the current state of the game.

[The_User]

Sure, we don't talk about how weak it is compared to other short recast tho.



It would have been nice if there are so many tank busters that other short recast can't keep up and only mine can...

[Crater]

The point to be made here is that when you have a literal 5:1 ratio of magical to physical tankbusters in the game's modern-era content, that is a pretty good indicator that the encounter designers are not throwing darts at the wall to determine damage-typing on tankbusters and leaving DRK to twist in the wind. Any time a tankbuster turns out to be physical, considerations are being made for Dark Mind's type-specificity.

Sometimes that's as simple as tank damage in the fight being so infrequent and weak that every tank has an enormous overabundance of mitigation with or without a tertiary defensive. Sometimes it's because they want to soak up your invuln to make it more difficult for you to use elsewhere. Sometimes it's there to act as a limiter on Dark Mind by forcing you to spend Rampart or Shadow Wall so you have fewer things to stack 60s later.

Ignoring the actual observable, practical reality that Dark Mind is an incredibly effective mitigation tool in content that actually exists, simply because it sticks in your craw that there are hypothetical encounters that do not exist and show no signs of existing anywhere in the foreseeable future, seems... unproductive.

It would have been nice if there are so many tank busters that other short recast can't keep up and only mine can...

P3S, P4S, and (especially) DSR all have situations where the shorter cooldown on TBN is a distinct benefit over the 25s options on other tanks.

Focusing on the last phase of DSR specifically, tanks are hit with, effectively, eleven tankbusters over the course of slightly more than 3 minutes: eight pairs of Trinity attacks, each of which are roughly equivalent to a Savage-level tankbuster of 80~90k damage, and three Ahk Morn stacks, which deal Ultimate-level (several hundred thousand HP, unmitigated) damage to both tanks.
TBN, and TBN alone, can catch every Trinity, leaving all of DRK's other mitigation for the Ahk Morn stacks - and with good timing, you can fit a wholly-unnecessary TBN onto the Ahk Morn stacks too. Every other tank A) Has weaker primary mitigation for Ahk Morn, and typically must use their short-mitigation skills there to help survive, and B) Couldn't even hit every Trinity with their short-mitigation skill if they wanted to.

[The_User]

Oh yeah and LD used to be the best invul too according to the claim of people who don't really main DRK.


"majority of tank Buster is magical" yes,when your whole game is the high end contents.
When you do a hunt or help someone else leveling in a dungeon magic mitigation is such a life saver.


Btw if Oblation swap place with the Dark Mind it could be more useful despite that the only thing that happen is having one ability unlocked sooner than another.