Dark Knight Megathread

[GoatOfWar]

I think a kinda thematic resource flow for DRK could be like MP(HP) spenders, Dark Arts spenders, and Blood Gauge spenders. MP is a stand in for HP, any action that restores HP should also restore MP at the same time, and rate. When you use an attack that costs MP, you gain Dark Arts which you can hold up to 3 Dark Arts stacks. Dark Arts can be spent on tanky actions, but can also deal some damage. The Blackest Night, Salted Earth, and some kind of burner action now cost Dark Arts. TBN now procs Abyssal Drain when broken, Salted Earth now provides personal mitigation when you are in its area of effect -- and it's made slightly bigger, and the burner action now just deals damage, and restores MP/HP. Keep Blood Gauge simple, using weapon skills, builds gauge to spend on more weapon skills.

That will never happen because it would end up being shit.
You can't have one tank that actively drops their own health just to play the game without any reward. But the streamers have already decreed that no tank can be better at anything than Warrior.
So it would just end up being an annoying mechanic that's either irrelevant by the self damage being super low, or makes healers play ping pong for no reason.

[Lyth]

I think at this point most direct changes to DRK's single target mitigation are going to result in a net nerf in terms of recasts. Oblation doesn't really have a proper niche as a tank mitigation tool, though, especially when you consider that several melee dps get personal 10% mitigation on half the recast from actions that they obtain 30 levels earlier. If 'Oblation' is an offering, perhaps the effect needs to be changed to empower the next defensive/utility action to have either an alternative or more potent effect. That would give you the primary strength of Heavensward's Dark Arts system without any of its design flaws. It could even be a way of working around DRK's magic-only effects. As some examples:

Dark Mind + Oblation: 15% physical damage reduction, increases recast to 90 seconds.
Dark Missionary + Oblation: 10% physical damage reduction and increases movement speed, increases recast to 120 seconds.
TBN + Oblation: 30% HP flat damage reduction, removes MP cost, restores HP on shield break without granting Dark Arts, increases recast to 30 seconds.
Blood Weapon + Oblation: Restores HP in addition to MP and blood gauge.

Having it on set charges would force you to be selective on how you wanted to augment your cooldowns on a fight, especially since most of these are on 60+ second recasts to begin with.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

[...]

The way I read this, Oblation will remain as an action with two charges @ 60s Recharge and the function of 10% generic damage reduction applicable to self or a target party member is replaced with essentially Dark Arts "but for defensive actions". Based on this, we now have a somewhat limited access to this modifier, making the cast of this ability the inherent cost (on top of losing out the mitigation it currently has).

Modifying your mitigation definitely adds some spice to the mix and offers a degree of versatility... at the cost of losing a different kind of versatility and a situational cost of the non-modified version of the skill being inherently mutually exclusive to the modified versions.

Why would it need additional "cost" by increasing the recast of that action? That's just awful for no good reason.

As for the individual skills, I have some words as well:

• Dark Mind: We already don't have 10% from Oblation anymore, why only 15% on physical only? This is far inferior to current Oblation + Dark Mind versatility.
• Dark Missionary: 10% physical reduction and an Expedient-like speedboost for 120s is far too situational. If this was generic damage reduction regardless of type, "maybe" but as it is, this is awful and would see very limited use.
• The Blackest Night: If we lose current oblation, make the HP shield 30% and the recast for this combo 30s, it would at MINIMUM need to cover slightly above 50% HP in shield + HP recovery to make up for the 2x standard TBN + 1x current Oblation you could use instead.
  
  Also I keep lol-ing at every attempt of making TBN a skill that can be used without MP. But the heal on shield pop (along with Dark Arts for EoS/FoS) would be cute in general. I like skills similar to AST's Exaltation and SCH's Excogitation.
• Blood Weapon: So basically turn "Infuriate with extra steps" into "Infuriate + Equilibrium with extra steps" except you can't really hold Blood Weapon unlike the mentioned skills so it's either use it or lose it for the HP bonus. For the situational cost alone the heal would need to be massive.

I'mma be real, the idea is neat but sacrificing Oblation for it along with the current stats is a hard no.

[Lyth]

...

Oblation has a fundamental design problem, which in turn is linked to TBN. If you look at most of the level 82 tank action upgrades (Sheltron to HS, RI to BS, and HoS to HoC), they are designed to add another 10-15% DR on top of the baseline 25 second recast action. The issue is that TBN was balanced against these baseline actions trading off a 10 second recast difference against the requirement to break the shield to stay damage neutral. Adding more damage reduction or more %HP shielding as a flat upgrade makes this shield break less likely to happen, which is why they were forced to split it into two parts.

Oblation really isn't designed to be used in isolation. 10% DR is more appropriate for raid mitigation, and even DPS have personal mitigations on 10% DR with much shorter recasts. It's genuinely absurd when you consider that a level 82 tank action is providing similar %DR on a longer recast than a Lv. 6 SAM action or a Lv. 30 RPR action. As far as charges are concerned, HS/Intervention are functionally on a 2 charge system while generating faster charges, so this is a thoroughly underwhelming action on all fronts. It's just a missing supplement to TBN that was fractured off into a separate action to balance against the integrated upgrades on other tanks.

The problem is that while TBN holds back the design here, any change to this setup is going to be a definite downgrade on recast alone. I also think a revision to TBN and further homogenization on recast is probably inevitable, simply because people have been pushing for it. I think a compromise is to offer both options. Keep the short recast and baseline TBN if you want, or give it up temporarily for a bigger defensive and removal of the MP cost. That's what I've proposed here.

A similar situation holds for Dark Mind. Dark Mind is the strongest defensive in its category on recast alone. Any revision to it is going to be a nerf. Consider that ToB is effectively 15% HP flat DR, Bulwark is 20% DR, and Camo is 10% DR + 50% parry (effectively 10% physical DR when averaged over multiple hits), all on 90 second recast. I find it highly unlikely that any other tank job main is going to allow you to swap over Dark Mind on demand to physical mitigation while keeping the 60 second recast. Yet a fundamental issue with Dark Mind is versatility. So you should think about ways in which you could have a degree of physical parity without losing the recast advantage on the base ability.

Dark Missionary has been a longstanding balance problem. The lack of personal healing on DRK has been a longstanding balance problem. Do you want to give up two of your 90-100 actions just to fix balance problems that should have been addressed this expansion? Or would you rather repurpose a fluff 10% DR and upgrade all these issues at once? I think you need to be practical about this. It would have been really easy for me to suggest something obviously imbalanced and guarantee that it gets ignored by the balance team, rather than suggesting a plausible upgrade that addresses multiple issues at once.

[Flay_wind]

Augmenting your mitigations is good, but why increase recast time (especially TBN, which doubles the recast)? Sounds like a step forward and two steps back. You're already limited by charges as is.

[Supersnow845]

Oblation I think has a strong niche these days in criterion because you can use oblation on both DPS and TBN on the healer and you have a proxy bonus 10% raidwide mitigation which is huge since criterion’s biggest battle is having enough mitigation between 4 players (also why the shield healers dominate)

Maybe they should go towards something along the lines of receiving a reward for using oblation on another player rather than yourself, with dark mind being exclusive to DRK already TBN didn’t need an amplifier anyway over the other 3 because before their 82 traits the other 3 were so hilariously weak compared to TBN that the traits still only make TBN barely weaker

[ItsUrBoi]

A pretty interesting idea I had was why not expand on the Darkside gauge to make it so that you go in some sort of over drive mode when darkside is very high and you use a certain ability. ( ex: Living Shadow )
Or perhaps the whole bloodgauge mechanic could be similar to RDM so that you have a combo and using it requires bloodgauge for each action.
I just really wish 7.0 is not a disappointment where we get some warrior copy paste and in some cases just weak and useless traits that upgrade Living Shadow potency. If you really need to upgrade Living Shadow potency from level 90 to 100, do so in the trait that already upgrades the standard combo actions and give something more meaningful with the other traits. ( "More meaningful gaming experience" )

Somethings I'd like to see would for sure be:
- Some defensive cooldown consolidations regarding TBN , Oblation and Dark Mind.
- More sustain and HP recovery options, as the job is doing really well in high end content once people know what to do, but in progression or casual content its difficult to survive without a healer.
- Changes to Delirium and the Bloodgauge as to separate them from WAR's Beast gauge and Inner Release.
- Some more identity besides oGCD spam and big sword, perhaps more akin to HW or SB DRK?

[rawker]

If Tenacity was just a great stat, DRK could have been the tank that would have benefited to it, the most.

[GoatOfWar]

If Tenacity was just a great stat, DRK could have been the tank that would have benefited to it, the most.

Not really, if nothing can kill you in one hit then healing becomes a lot more valuable than stacking any further mitigation.

[Brixy]

All tanks got massive mitigation upgrades to their primary mit buttons at lv.82 except for DRK.
- Warrior got Bloodwhetting and let's be honest, Raw Intuition was already bonkers and didn't need the extra -dt and a shield on top. Pair that with Equilibrium, Thrill of Battle, AND Shake it off and you will never die. Ever.
- Gunbreaker got Heart of Corundum: -30%/-15% for 4/8 seconds and a decent heal on top of it. Pair that with Aurora for some passive healing ticks.
- Paladin got Holy Sheltron: -30%/15% for 4/8 seconds topped off with a regen over time. All sorts of heals added everywhere at 84 that no longer require a dps loss like Clemency would.
- Dark Knight got a button bloat -10 dt. Not a single heal in sight, other than Abyssal Drain. Doesn't quite seem fair does it lol.

Replace Oblation with a job trait for TBN that applies Dread Spikes when it breaks at Lv.82. Dread Spikes applies a buff where each hit you receive grants a stack and heals after 5 seconds depending on how many stacks you built up. Some form of healing for dungeons would be nice and this is a way to give them a unique heal while sticking to their job aesthetic. It would be a nice callback to FFXI's DRK also!