Dark Knight Megathread

[GoatOfWar]

It's not a matter of it being busy as much as not having a clear execution path without having to go to icy veins or some other website to tell you what it is. That and since it is busy the person has to watch their hot bar more than the fight until they have put a rather significant number of hours into it. Machinist can sort of fall into this category, but they are still a lot easier to work around than the DRK since they only got DPS cooldowns and the automata is sort of a fire and forget thing. RPR and WAR take way less hours to master and get good at.

Every ''con'' you listed in this thread so far is exactly what made me play the job. You don't have to like or play Dark knight, just don't advocate for it to turn even more into the one tank i as an actual Dark knight player, want to play the least.. If i was looking for slow, straight forward, and uninteresting i would be playing Warrior.

[Colt47]

Every ''con'' you listed in this thread so far is exactly what made me play the job. You don't have to like or play Dark knight, just don't advocate for it to turn even more into the one tank i as an actual Dark knight player, want to play the least.. If i was looking for slow, straight forward, and uninteresting i would be playing Warrior.

I can see where you might get this impression, but keep in mind the context of this entire thing. Having a lot of OGCDs isn't a problem if there is a structure to the usage. Machinist has a structure to the OGCDs so there is a rhythm to using them, but DRK loses its rhythm because too many of the OGCDs unintentionally compete with one another at the very onset. That's why it turns into "face roll on keyboard" as an opener and why in some cases a player has to sacrifice a DPS ogcd for a mitigation during some fights. Dropping the number of OGCDs is only one solution to the problem. Another is just going through and redoing the OGCDs so a clear structure exists.

[Rithy255]

I'd like High Apm, but more throughout it's rotation not just during bursts.

I also think Just having OGCD's doesn't always make the gameplay better, actually having GCD's and combo path attacks would add a lot to tanks in general, but it's been something very lacking in the tank design, the more "complicated" tanks try to be OGCD heavy, which I think gunbreaker strictly just does it better, while DRK is left being very thin on GCD actions while it's ogcd gameplay is all at once. I always saw PLD as a more GCD heavy tank but now it's just spam the lightup button like other tanks, but Honestly I just want more diverse DPS buttons on all tanks... the current design isn't great for anyone.

I think it comes down to mainly a tank issue in general, tanks have just become so meaningless in differences that holding onto the current design of Dark knight is more a thing because of how it can get worse, I mean just look at Paladin, it's not exactly likely they're going to add any complexity to the job, if we're going by the current way jobs are designed/reworked anyway.

[Marxam]

Imo the two min meta should be DPS exclusive while T/H stay on the one min. It would give tanks and healers more consistent damage while DPS can focus on doing more "bursty" damage. It would also bring back dots to tanks since their damage is more consistent throughout a fight and is not heavily reliant on party buffs. All jobs will still meet at two mins but the emphasis is now more on the DPS to actually do the damage. Other than that, direct hit needs to be DPS exclusive and they need to do something with Tenacity.

Personally I would like to see tenacity be a passive buff to mitigation and healing received while all mitigation across the board gets nerfed in tandem. ex. Rampart 15%, 30% mit reduced to 20%, ToB healing reduced to 5%, etc. Defensive cds currently are too powerful and using tenacity as a way of building back that mitigation is a great incentive not just in prog week but as a whole. ex. 800 Tenacity will increase Ramparts base 15% to 20%. It gives you some flexibility in how much defensive do you want in exchange for damage. This would also affect jobs exclusive short cds i.e. TBN, BW, HS, HoC.

People are complaining about WAR's op healing? At base Tenacity you are only getting 100 heal potency per hit. DRK's TBN is 15% at base tenacity, etc. Ultimately, this change will also benefit healers as now tanks are taking more damage so they have to heal more and tanks have to mix and match defensive cds more thoughtfully because they can no longer rely on a single cd to carry them, especially when they go for crit/det. They don't even need to change the outgoing damage of bosses and this would prolong the need to do another stat squish.

[Absurdity]

Imo the two min meta should be DPS exclusive while T/H stay on the one min. It would give tanks and healers more consistent damage while DPS can focus on doing more "bursty" damage. It would also bring back dots to tanks since their damage is more consistent throughout a fight and is not heavily reliant on party buffs. All jobs will still meet at two mins but the emphasis is now more on the DPS to actually do the damage.

This would fix absolutely nothing for most tanks because it's basically what we have right now. I know this thread is about Dark Knight but tell me what would change about Warrior's or Paladin's gameplay? They're already on a 60 second loop, sure didn't make either of them more interesting. Even Dark Knight is technically already on a 60 second loop, you just bank Shadowbringer for the party buff window, something you would still do as long as they keep the 2 stacks.

And if you keep tanks and healers on a 60 second rotation the 2-min meta will not be "DPS exclusive" because tanks and healers will inevitably play into it as well.

[Marxam]

This would fix absolutely nothing for most tanks because it's basically what we have right now. I know this thread is about Dark Knight but tell me what would change about Warrior's or Paladin's gameplay? They're already on a 60 second loop, sure didn't make either of them more interesting. Even Dark Knight is technically already on a 60 second loop, you just bank Shadowbringer for the party buff window, something you would still do as long as they keep the 2 stacks.

And if you keep tanks and healers on a 60 second rotation the 2-min meta will not be "DPS exclusive" because tanks and healers will inevitably play into it as well.

That's the point. You want to back off the 2 min meta by emphasizing that its the DPS's job to do damage. The devs have shown they are incapable of balancing around job exclusive windows but 120 can be divided 2, 3, or even 4. This would open up the possibility of bringing back 40 sec cds like how blood weapon used to be in SB. This would benefit DRK in the most part as they can finally get back to SB DRK which imo was peak. It had the high resource management and ogcd spam of ShB/EW DRK but had the utility to match PLD and the healing to match WAR. Everyone will still meet at 2 mins but what they do in between can vary wildly because cds aren't just 120 or 60.

Imagine if in DT we get SB BW and you got to regain MP every 40 secs while also getting a haste buff. It would feel vastly different to the other tanks since you have these mini ogcd burst phases. However, if they really wanted to de-emphasize T/H from taking part in the 2 min meta they can just make all all dps raid buffs affect them at a lower potency ex. MNK Brotherhood is 5% for all DPS but 2% for T/H. This would just make it so that tanks meeting every 2 mins with the DPS is a nice bonus but not the difference between clear and enrage. Lets try to avoid P8S again where jobs that lined perfectly with that 2 min burst window was heavily favored.

[Kalaam]

We ougth to get rid of party wide direct damage buffs and replace that by more horizontal buffs. Things that'll help damage by facilitating doing it (increased movement speed to execute mechanics, why not stuff like increasing range by 10yalm for 15 seconds, etc etc)
In any way the 2 minute meta is stifling a lot of things in the job design and it makes a lot of problems more apparents

[Lyth]

Any setup with synchronous raid buffs is going to result in a 'Least Common Multiple (LCM) meta'. Changing burst windows timings to a number that is still a divisor of the LCM doesn't change your gameplay. All that this means is that you likely will have one or two low effort burst windows per LCM cycle where your burst happens outside of a major mechanics check.

For practical purposes, a lot of jobs currently have a 'mini burst' at 1 minute anyways. Where this has the potential to become more interesting is if you have the gauge space to 'store' your 1 minute burst in order to carry it into the 2 minute mark. As an example, RPR has the potential to setup a Triple Enshroud, which can lead to interesting setups around tincture usage as well as special cases like P8S Everburn. If that type of decision making doesn't exist on the job due to having a small gauge capacity, then the specific timing interval isn't really important as long as it's a divisor of the LCM. Asynchronous timings will tend to push a job out of meta.

Damage under raid buffs will always be a consideration for tanks, unless the relative damage contribution of the role becomes so low that it becomes irrelevant. I think you would see a dramatic shift towards 1/2/5 comps well before that point.

I think that the GCD/oGCD balance on DRK is worth commenting on, since all jobs have a limited amount of hotbar space. I think it's reasonable for DRK to swap in a couple more GCD actions so that downtime periods become more interesting. It's worth remembering that oGCD recast frequency has more of an impact on APM than the total number of individual oGCD actions that you have. That's why GNB plays at a higher APM than DRK.

[Colt47]

The two minute meta is a completely different thing to the dark knight rework. I mean the honest truth is that the changes it got from Shadowbringers was more like copy pasta warrior except with a worse inner release and no real organization to how the skills are supposed to be setup, leaving the player to figure out absolutely anything and everything while throwing even more OGCDs on it in Endwalker for no good reason. Even the sound staging of the attacks makes delirium feel like it is a cop out as the sound is done in relation to the swing animation rather than the impact of the attack like on warrior.

1. Part of the problem is likely that Dark Knight already had big splashy attacks with Edge of Darkness and Flood of Darkness, with shadowbringer just becoming an MP-less version of either Edge of Darkness or Flood of Darkness depending on the number of targets. Yes, it has different potency calculations. No, that doesn't make it special or different than Flood of Darkness and Edge of Darkness. It's just both of those skills in a single button with two charges.

2. Our living shadow is literally a DOT and I'd rather have a burst phase like reaper and just merge with the shadow than have Delirium and a DOT that looks like a person.

3. Can we just have the Salted Earth have the initial damage from Salt and Darkness as an upgrade, instead of having to manually trigger Salt and Darkness? There is never a time where I'm not going to activate Salt and Darkness INSTANTLY.

4. We do not need two completely disconnected resources.

5. TBN is not good in dungeons. What is the most common healer to go with you in dungeons? A WHM. What does a WHM do on pulls? Uses Holy spam. What does Holy spam do? Stuns absolutely everything! So in order to get the benefit of TBN, it has to break so we get a free flood or Edge, which can't happen if all the enemies are stunned.

6. Also just about every other tank has a better defense kit than DRK does. Shields are not as good as mitigation when dealing with multiple attackers and are only good for buffering against a really strong attack.

[Oizen]

I really see no reason why TBN couldn't give the dark arts stack upon the effect fading like HoC does with healing.