Dark Knight Megathread

[Oizen]

That aside, if you saw me complaining about the Shadowbringers media tour info dropped and how I was complaining about Dark Knight was just going to feel awful to play, you probably would have been the first people to tell me to "shut up, try the new stuff out first and deal with it or GTFO" because that has indeed happened to me on the forums before, but that is based on memory and that was like near the end Shadowbringers epansion.

Well this game is no stranger to blind fanboys who defend everything about it, but if I recall, that was a fairly normal take.
It was basically a meme about how bad Endwalker DRK looked compared to the other 3 tanks.

If you don't like the job, don't play the job is my opinion on it.
I personally don't think its as bad as people say, but more of from the perspective that other jobs aren't terribly more interesting than whats happened to DRK.

A number of us would tell you that the current state of DRK isn't fun, isn't exciting, and quite frankly is the single worst iteration of DRK we've ever gotten. We've been on a downward spiral since they started changing us in Stormblood, and we're at our absolute worst. To add insult to injury, the devs are more concerned with DRG (which is fine) and AST than actually fixing the worst tank in the game.

Thats the thing though, this DRK isn't the worst iteration we've ever had, from a meta perspective anyway.

It just so happens that everything Endwalker decided to do with gameplay ended up rewarding everything that DRK has been about for a while,
being mashing oGCDs on cooldown, and pooling resources to barf them out in a 2 minute window. I'd even say the existence of tools like Dark Mind and how they play with Oblation make the job oddly more sturdy than people would expect.

This resulted DRK being the best its ever been (meta wise) and getting a higher play rate than it probably would have.
I don't see the DRK/GNB meta ending in 6.4 either. They've been remarkably tame with balance changes, maybe we'll see Fell Cleave get 10 whole more potency but I don't expect anything mindblowing for the remainder of Endwalker.

Now Squenix feels like they're a pretty hands off dev, who only cares about raw numbers and not player feedback based on what I've seen so far in Endwalker, as a result to them they likely view the job as fine. Its meta after all, its leading the pack in terms of Savage and Ultimate Clears, so it MUST be fine. I don't see DRK getting any significant attention until 8.0 at the earliest, and thats only if it falls off in 7.0 for one reason or another.

[DRKoftheAzure]

snip

Yeah... there is enough fanboys who probably have enough money to make sock puppet accounts just to dunk on people who actually have criticisms with the game...

As for the Meta perspective, my point still stands; Could someone please genuinely explain to me what is so exciting about about spamming a bunch of oGCDs every minute or so and give a compelling reason as to why I should play Dark Knight for aesthetics and big tank damage? Because everyone interacts with the GCD more than oGCDs and that is a fact, oGCD spamming is probably the most boring thing if you really only have 1-3 buttons, with the occasional 4th button you press in between if you're lucky, within 1 minute and it feels like the longest minute has passed... and to add this, someone who is all about "The Meta" can tell me since they claim to be ore qualified as to why I should pick Dark Knight for how boring the job actually is...

snip

My first guess was that you finally had enough of being silent with how Dark Knight was handled for the last 2 expansions in PVE specifically and you would have jumped on the "Dark Knight feels bad to play" train a lot sooner... which is the main reason you finally started posting on the forums... can't say I blame you... and 6.4 they are probably just going to do potency adjustments at most for Dark Knight, otherwise expect NOTHING meaningful AT ALL for Dark Knight...

5.x and 6.x Dark Knight make me wish there were private servers for classic Heavensward and classic Stormblood JUST SO I could play those versions of Dark Knight... And I am also not hopeful for Dark Knight in 7.x because we are probably going to be getting more 5.x Dark Knight... and not in a good way... Also, we all know Black Mage is going to get 1 maybe 2 new abilities and that's it for Black Mage because the devs aren't brave enough to remove anything from Black Mage out of... Enochian...? I hope I spelled that that right...

[RyuDragnier]

Thats the thing though, this DRK isn't the worst iteration we've ever had, from a meta perspective anyway.

I'm looking at it more from the perspective of how it feels to play. HW was chaotic fun and cohesive, with us having a job identity, having to push ourselves to get good output, and felt like the Tank version of SMN/SCH's micromanagement. SB DRK still had a bit of an identity, but DA spam was the epitome of unfun and basically went from something you used for utility into something you just spammed for higher DPS, but overall it still had a bit of that HW flair in there. ShB DRK removed everything to where we had no job identity, and was barebones as hell, with it KIND of feeling like fun, but you can tell it didn't compare to the previous iterations.

This iteration in EW? By far feels the worst out of all of them to play, with our sustain completely gutted, a vomit of oGCDs including a capstone move that does not interact with anything in our kit, a lackluster "upgrade" to our mitigation in the form of Oblation (which really should have come into play far earlier in the levels to make up for the lack of TBN) and the only thing that actually feels good about it is the Living Dead change THAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED YEARS AGO.

[Zairava]

snip

I would be one of the last people to tell you to shut up and try it out first if you've seen any of my prior posts or rants about it. I've been bitching about the current state of DRK since 5.0(although I didn't really post here during Shadowbringers) and will happily take either Stormblood or Heavensward Dark Knight back.

We are by far at our worst design since the 5.0 culling for a multitude of reasons, and we could sit here and beat the dead horse, but I believe we all know what they are already.

They've been hacking at this job ever since it's inception and it's incredibly infuriating.

I'm not holding my breath for 7.0, I'm quite frankly dreading to see what they do to every job, including Black Mage. It feels like they're playing the game of "How low can we take it with Dark Knight before we have no choice but to actually, genuinely, work on it and read what people are saying". Since it doesn't feel like they read anything here, they barely say anything at all about pve job design.

Can't wait to see "we made adjustments to X jobs" for the part 2 liveletter with no other details given until the patch drop. Please look forward to it™

[Lyth]

While I enjoyed HW, I don't think it would work with the current playerbase. In particular, the concept of sacrificing dps to mitigate more or heal more probably wouldn't go down very well. Setting aside the fact that Stormblood was objectively DRK's weakest expansion (which was reflected in player numbers as well), it really highlighted how unnecessarily long a lot of the oGCD animation locks were by making everything a mandatory double weave with DA. That expansion was also the turning point where players realized that they weren't going to put up with gross inequities in job design, like a 180s recast Shadow Wall that offered none of the additional benefits of the 120s Vengeance or the 40% DR Sentinel. Please don't get me started on how bad that expansion was for DRK.

I think DRK needs to be oGCD heavy at baseline, because that's the one recurring design point. You can make the periods between burst windows more interesting by offering more variety in GCDs, or perhaps even experimenting with actions that speed up your GCD like Blood Weapon used to. There may be some value in looking at the size of our resource pools relative to action costs. I think that adds an element of strategy to fights, where you potentially could consider skipping a smaller burst window to pool up for a bigger one under buffs (i.e. Triple Enshroud under Potion). But that works better with a job that is almost entirely resource gated rather than time gated.

[Shurrikhan]

While I enjoyed HW, I don't think it would work with the current playerbase. In particular, the concept of sacrificing dps to mitigate more or heal more probably wouldn't go down very well.

While a decent bit of HW DRK was clunky, I feel like that's among the gameplay constraints least worth pandering to. I see absolutely no issue with tanks having a higher maximum DPS but also needing to sacrifice some of that in order not to die. Hell, I'd prefer that for all of them. Being able to leverage that feels more tank-like than having one's defensive resources solely doled out on timers unrelated to the rest of one's kit.

I think DRK needs to be oGCD heavy at baseline, because that's the one recurring design point. You can make the periods between burst windows more interesting by offering more variety in GCDs, or perhaps even experimenting with actions that speed up your GCD like Blood Weapon used to. There may be some value in looking at the size of our resource pools relative to action costs. I think that adds an element of strategy to fights, where you potentially could consider skipping a smaller burst window to pool up for a bigger one under buffs (i.e. Triple Enshroud under Potion). But that works better with a job that is almost entirely resource gated rather than time gated.

Agreed. That said, even an entirely resource-gated job would still has forced times by which at least one ability per resource type must be spent, just as a time-gated kit has forced times by which one charge per CD must be spent.

(There's not really any difference save between what either kit allows except that it gets far more tacky to house the separate gauges for several separate resource spenders than to simply house several separate CDs (which, may likewise be shared across multiple skills) and that the resource skills may further suffer from downtime... if they're not something like BRD's Soul Gauge, which is functionally just a RNG-muddled stopwatch.)

In both cases, if we additional timing/cycling 'options' we need conflicts, competitive choices. That's not to say that everyone would even like those choices, but simply that there no 'options' as to how to cycle unless optimizing window A means not fully optimizing window B, etc.

(Which then, in effect, means slightly overtuning the job in raidbuff-less comps as you compensate it for the potential loss/desync, but that's no biggie so long as those buff-less comps still aren't optimal; the choice otherwise just boils down to "Are my comp's raidbuffs enough to hold one of my own buff cycles (etc.) for, or should I attempt to get an extra use out of my own over the length of the fight?")

[DRKoftheAzure]

While I enjoyed HW, I don't think it would work with the current playerbase. In particular, the concept of sacrificing dps to mitigate more or heal more probably wouldn't go down very well. Setting aside the fact that Stormblood was objectively DRK's weakest expansion (which was reflected in player numbers as well), it really highlighted how unnecessarily long a lot of the oGCD animation locks were by making everything a mandatory double weave with DA. That expansion was also the turning point where players realized that they weren't going to put up with gross inequities in job design, like a 180s recast Shadow Wall that offered none of the additional benefits of the 120s Vengeance or the 40% DR Sentinel. Please don't get me started on how bad that expansion was for DRK.

I think DRK needs to be oGCD heavy at baseline, because that's the one recurring design point. You can make the periods between burst windows more interesting by offering more variety in GCDs, or perhaps even experimenting with actions that speed up your GCD like Blood Weapon used to. There may be some value in looking at the size of our resource pools relative to action costs. I think that adds an element of strategy to fights, where you potentially could consider skipping a smaller burst window to pool up for a bigger one under buffs (i.e. Triple Enshroud under Potion). But that works better with a job that is almost entirely resource gated rather than time gated.

So you want GCDs with unique recast timers...? I need to make sure I got that right, because I am open to oGCDs on Dark Knight and Dragoon can prove you can have an interesting GCD rotation AND an interesting oGCD rotation, but that's probably due to Dragoons signature Jumping abilities, and it has worked with Dark Knight in 3.x as well, but the problem with an oGCD heavy job with no interesting GCD rotation past 1-2-3 is that you might as well be playing a playing PVP or playing another job that doesn't feel like a chore to play/level, or just play an entirely different game altogether...

While a decent bit of HW DRK was clunky, I feel like that's among the gameplay constraints least worth pandering to. I see absolutely no issue with tanks having a higher maximum DPS but also needing to sacrifice some of that in order not to die. Hell, I'd prefer that for all of them. Being able to leverage that feels more tank-like than having one's defensive resources solely doled out on timers unrelated to the rest of one's kit.


Agreed. That said, even an entirely resource-gated job would still has forced times by which at least one ability per resource type must be spent, just as a time-gated kit has forced times by which one charge per CD must be spent.

(There's not really any difference save between what either kit allows except that it gets far more tacky to house the separate gauges for several separate resource spenders than to simply house several separate CDs (which, may likewise be shared across multiple skills) and that the resource skills may further suffer from downtime... if they're not something like BRD's Soul Gauge, which is functionally just a RNG-muddled stopwatch.)

In both cases, if we additional timing/cycling 'options' we need conflicts, competitive choices. That's not to say that everyone would even like those choices, but simply that there no 'options' as to how to cycle unless optimizing window A means not fully optimizing window B, etc.

(Which then, in effect, means slightly overtuning the job in raidbuff-less comps as you compensate it for the potential loss/desync, but that's no biggie so long as those buff-less comps still aren't optimal; the choice otherwise just boils down to "Are my comp's raidbuffs enough to hold one of my own buff cycles (etc.) for, or should I attempt to get an extra use out of my own over the length of the fight?")

In regards to the whole "raid buffs" debate, I'm in the camp that believes those should be for speed clears, at least the ones that boost the party's damage output anyway, but that's my personal opinion...

[Lyth]

I think that the addition of any GCD would be of benefit, given that DRK has 4 GCDs in single target and 3 in AoE. My recommendation would be to have something combo off of Bloodspiller, because not only would that break-up the base rotation, but it would also turn Delirium into a 6 hit sequence (which could have a speed buff attached). There are other solutions as well, but you have to keep in mind that expansions typically only add three actions at a time, so you don't want to expend too many of them trying to build up a new combo sequence.

[DRKoftheAzure]

I think that the addition of any GCD would be of benefit, given that DRK has 4 GCDs in single target and 3 in AoE. My recommendation would be to have something combo off of Bloodspiller, because not only would that break-up the base rotation, but it would also turn Delirium into a 6 hit sequence (which could have a speed buff attached). There are other solutions as well, but you have to keep in mind that expansions typically only add three actions at a time, so you don't want to expend too many of them trying to build up a new combo sequence.

Well re-working Edge of Darkness into a job gauge spender at the level Dark Knight gets it would be a good start, along with moving Abyssal Drain to level 30 but Flood of Darkness to where Abyssal Drain currently sits... this will make more sense should we take the Red Mage burst combo approach, but instead of 1 burst combo, we have 2, with a main combo path(s) generating both MP and job gauge at reasonable pace that doesn't feel like the players are waiting for the 4th combo action, which is probably the best possible re-work option there is if the devs REALLY DO NOT WANT enmity combos/control to come back at all, and let's be real here, it has to come back at some point...

[Shurrikhan]

Well re-working Edge of Darkness into a job gauge spender at the level Dark Knight gets it would be a good start, along with moving Abyssal Drain to level 30 but Flood of Darkness to where Abyssal Drain currently sits...

I can't tell what you're going for here.

MP is already, for all intents and purposes, DRK's primary job gauge. It has the most generators and is spent from the earliest level of any gauge. As such...

• Why would it help to switch our MP-spender(-and-Darkside-generator) into a Darkside- or Blood-spender?
• Likewise, how does it help to swap the level at which we get our 3.33-charge, frequently-available AoE oGCD (Flood) with our single-charge 60s-CD AoE oGCD that interacts with no other manipulable resource (Abyssal Drain)?

this will make more sense should we take the Red Mage burst combo approach, but instead of 1 burst combo, we have 2, with a main combo path(s) generating both MP and job gauge at reasonable pace that doesn't feel like the players are waiting for the 4th combo action

If this is related at all to the suggested Edge change, again, I'm not seeing the benefit. Making Edge part of a Blood-spending combo just replaces what are currently two actions (our offensive ST MP spender and, separately, our ST Blood spender) with a single action that just takes 2 button-presses to complete.

which is probably the best possible re-work option there is if the devs REALLY DO NOT WANT enmity combos/control to come back at all, and let's be real here, it has to come back at some point...

Why would Enmity combos "have to come back," though?