Dark Knight Megathread

[Crater]

Think about it, if you replaced LS with a 120s CD, costing 50 blood gauge and inflicting a dot, it would be the exact same as Living Shadow, minus the flashyness of the skill.

There's a couple important differences there. The first is that a DoT would be missing Living Shadow's AoE damage, which is still very considerable despite the 6.2 nerf. The second is that DoTs snapshot according to what buffs and debuffs are active when the DoT is applied, and Living Shadow actively gains and loses buffs as you do.

The AoE is pretty self-explanatory, but the snapshotting is also pretty important to consider. DRK's burst window is so busy that it's a specific upside to the current version of Living Shadow that you can use the skill before raid buffs go out; if it were a standard DoT then that would no longer be the case. It's good that DRK's burst window is as busy as it is - it's fun! - but it's also pretty much at-capacity, and you would definitely do harm to the class's design by adding extra things to it without a really good reason.

[CKNovel]

There's a couple important differences there. The first is that a DoT would be missing Living Shadow's AoE damage, which is still very considerable despite the 6.2 nerf. The second is that DoTs snapshot according to what buffs and debuffs are active when the DoT is applied, and Living Shadow actively gains and loses buffs as you do.

The AoE is pretty self-explanatory, but the snapshotting is also pretty important to consider. DRK's burst window is so busy that it's a specific upside to the current version of Living Shadow that you can use the skill before raid buffs go out; if it were a standard DoT then that would no longer be the case. It's good that DRK's burst window is as busy as it is - it's fun! - but it's also pretty much at-capacity, and you would definitely do harm to the class's design by adding extra things to it without a really good reason.

I understand the argument, yet...

For the AoE, you can simply shift the lost potency to other abilities such as Shadowbringer to not lose any aoe potency. To fully benefits from LS AoE, it requires a good positionning. Shifting the AoE potency from LS to player abilities would offer more flexibility and control over it.
As for the Snapshot, I don't think DRK would have much troubles weaving another ability. Even then, you can still keep the windup, as short debuff that release the attack when running out.

I understand your arguments, I think there are many ways to keep the benefits from current LS while changing its nature, giving more control and flexibility to the player.

[Duskane]

either rework it into Bushin for DRK or give Esteem/Queen stacks so they don't just fizzle out as easily

[baklava151]

They could change Blood Weapon to just have it give 50 Blood directly. Then you swap LS and Delirium in your opener and it should catch raid buffs better.

[Crater]

Honestly, yeah, that would also work and be a pretty good change; I've made that suggestion before. Blood Weapon serves no purpose anymore other than to generate exactly 3000 MP and 50 Blood, and there's no reason for it to be a stack-based buff to do that. If it were just Dark Infuriate and applied the resources directly, that would also solve the Living Shadow problem in DRK's opener.

I doubt they'd change it again so soon after making it stack-based, but they did revert the High Jump/Mirage Dive change instead of sticking to their guns on a blunder, so maybe they're more open to that kind of fix than they have been in the past.

[Sazuzaki]

I've seen a lot of people saying TBN should be free/punish free. Please, for the love of god, don't change TBN.

DRK is the only tank that has it's defensive kit directly tied to it's offensive kit, and I think that's super cool. Everyone's saying how that's a bad thing, and while I can see where they're coming from, removing the cost only homogenizes it more. Yes it could use improvement, but it's super fun to do wacky stuff with it and incentivizes you to get better if it fails.

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE THE MANA COST FOR THE BLACKEST NIGHT.

Edit: I've been hearing this from outside the forums, but I still wanted to throw my opinion on here just in case

[RyuDragnier]

I've seen a lot of people saying TBN should be free/punish free. Please, for the love of god, don't change TBN.

DRK is the only tank that has it's defensive kit directly tied to it's offensive kit, and I think that's super cool. Everyone's saying how that's a bad thing, and while I can see where they're coming from, removing the cost only homogenizes it more. Yes it could use improvement, but it's super fun to do wacky stuff with it and incentivizes you to get better if it fails.

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE THE MANA COST FOR THE BLACKEST NIGHT.

Edit: I've been hearing this from outside the forums, but I still wanted to throw my opinion on here just in case

No, it needs to be like the others in cooldown. DRK should not be the only tank punished for mistiming a cooldown via DPS loss. Either all the tanks should have this problem, or none of them should.

[Oizen]

No, it needs to be like the others in cooldown. DRK should not be the only tank punished for mistiming a cooldown via DPS loss. Either all the tanks should have this problem, or none of them should.

Why? Its not like Dark Knight is hurting for damage output right now.

[Undeadfire]

No, it needs to be like the others in cooldown. DRK should not be the only tank punished for mistiming a cooldown via DPS loss. Either all the tanks should have this problem, or none of them should.

Funny enough it actually benefits more on 2min bursts having MP costs. Drk would need to skip a GCD on their openers before opening Blood Weapon if it became a cooldown only making Living Shadow longer to setup.

[Archwizard]

Either all the tanks should have this problem, or none of them should.

I think this needs some clarification.

In the discussions about making TBN "more in line with other on-demands", the topic that comes up a lot is homogeneity. If every tank plays the same, then there's no distinction between them and tanking as a whole is less fun.

However, the discussions overlook two simple facts:
1) Encounter design is balanced around certain elements of roles and raid compositions being consistent. For tanks, that's equal access to a required amount of mitigation and recovery tools to survive the encounter. In other words, a baseline of homogeneity is to be expected just for equity within the role, and everything else is built off that.
2) There's more to a tank's playstyle than mitigation. In fact, because of that first point, homogeneity is best staved off by making the rest of the playstyle more distinctive.

When it comes to on-demand mitigation, DRK is the odd man out. It's the only one that weighs mitigation against damage output, the only one that has a 15 sec cooldown on its on-demand instead of 22-25, and the only one that has a hard limit on its on-demand's defensive value.
Now, if another tank had a similar system with its mitigation, we wouldn't be having this discussion because DRK wouldn't be alone; there'd be some division between the tanks, like there is between barrier and pure healers. We'd just be comparing the benefits of TBN versus that other tank's specifically, or arguing if someone else should swap places with DRK in this system, or whether one system or the other is superior overall.
Likewise, there'd be no space for comparison at all if every tank had a wildly unique mitigation system -- it'd be impossible to compare fairly, forcing us to look at DRK in a vacuum -- though that would be way more difficult for the devs to balance.

But at present, DRK is alone. Which means that we can see encounters being balanced for every other tank, and DRK either pulls way ahead (as in ShB) or has to tough it out -- beating a dead horse here, but we see that very early in EW dungeons where DRK's barrier is quickly overwhelmed at a point when your tank is expected to have some massive boost in self-healing and instant mitigation. I've seen it brought up several times that "it doesn't matter if DRK's harder to heal, its damage output is so high the encounter ends sooner"... but ignoring that the difference between tank outputs just became even more marginal, damage numbers are ever a capricious thing, and eventually we may see DRK overtaken with nothing to show for it.

Another part of the issue that presents is that a lot of people equate DRK's playstyle largely with its unique mitigation system, and overlook its other flaws as a tank as a result of that. For instance, we regularly point out that after the opener, DRK's current rotation feels like a bare-bones offshoot of WAR, with several skills having 1:1 comparisons. And now we don't even get to lean on "well DRK gets more value out of Crit and DH boosts than WAR."

The point I'm getting at is, there are other avenues to set DRK apart than just focusing on its bubble... and frankly it needs those way more than the illusion of a counterattack.