Dark Knight Megathread

[Duskane]

Opener gonna be a travesty
Blood weapon
Salted earth +follow up
Edge of Shadow
Carve and split
Abyssal drain
plunge x 2
Shadow bringer x 2
pre pull delerium if it lets you

[Mortex]

add "A lack of gameplay excitement from 68 on when Delirium is obtained." Cuz lets be honest Stalwart Soul is less "oh wow I get to do cool thing now!" and more "wow I'm finally on par with the other tank's who've had 32 levels by that time of a more full aoe rotation.
and add abyssal drain being garbage self-sustain and DRK's overall lack of sustain just because TBN shields for so much. Like I get it, abyssal drain'd be hard to code to work as an analogue to anything the other tanks have. But... even a charge system or heavens at least a shorter recast of 30 seconds? literally anything to improve DRK's sustain. Because the whole "well it's 3rd GCD action is a heal!" is garbage IMO.

It’s just so sad when you played drk in dungeons in stormblood and you could heal yourself the entire dungeon through abyssal drain and dark arts and you didn’t need a heal even for the bosses. Now it’s just feels tedious doing dungeons as drk.

[Benn]

There is a Petition to Square Enix and Naoki Yoshida posted today on reddit with request of fixing Living Dead: https://chng.it/wprqyWjQ

While one may say that Forum should be enough of a place for feedback I think every way should be used for maximum possible outcome so it won't hurt to support it.

Link to reddit original post

[Garnix]

Not allowed to discuss leaks. You should edit your post before they come delete the next few pages =)

[WhyAmIHere]

the lack of foresight from the devs to not move skills like stalwart or missionary, the new dark shield skill (why is that lv 80+?) could have been our baby tbn that upgrades, the lack of a new mana or darkside spender, lack of blood weapon fixes are the reason some of us are choosing to put the greatsword down permanently. hell, they could have reworked abyss drain back into a spender that has the whole "x potency on first enemy, x% less on remaining". like they literally have the means to do so, theyve done it to other abilities like stardiver, polyglot or maybe future abilities that we will see after the embargo, but hey.

there wasn't much we could do with sch/drk

Hell.
Turn Abyssal into a 20 gauge spender that restores a flat 600 potency heal, and 100 for every additional enemy beyond the first. throw on a 30s recast and *boom*

DRK is even more like WAR, but at least Abyssal is fixed.


...

[Shin96]

At this point you have alot of unused animations. I mean according to the job trailer (cough..) you'd think they just threw something together and abandoned the job in its whole entirety.

C'mon man. Was it so hard to fix the issues of early levels where all you can use is Unleash? No Stalwart Soul at earlier levels? The job has the worst self-sustain from any tank as well. Even if you wanted to play it against all odds, it's practically the worst tank to go with. I wonder what they do with Bloodweapon and Unmend too. I have a feeling it's going to be a disaster.

[RinaB]

I wouldn't say disaster it's just gonna be shb drk with a couple of unnecessary extras. The devs have made it very clear they want tanks and healers dumbed down for accessibility reasons even though it's making veterans of said roles leave to dps (like me). That being said, the roles are obviously attracting more new and inexperienced players and let's be honest, a lot of people just love the drk esthetic and edginess regardless of how boring and dry the job actually is.

[Shin96]

I wouldn't say disaster it's just gonna be shb drk with a couple of unnecessary extras. The devs have made it very clear they want tanks and healers dumbed down for accessibility reasons even though it's making veterans of said roles leave to dps (like me). That being said, the roles are obviously attracting more new and inexperienced players and let's be honest, a lot of people just love the drk esthetic and edginess regardless of how boring and dry the job actually is.

Nothing accessible about a trash rework with nothing to expand on. An idiot can play this job; if they actually expanded on it at all they would've added charges to Bloodweapon among other quality of life improvements. Or fix Living Dead, for once. It's a fundemental given. Even inexperienced players will see the better difference between LD and Holmgang for instance. And they will choose accordingly, an aesthetic theme and a little bit of purple won't change that.

Dumbing down doesn't mean bad job design. It means reducing the entry skill ceiling in exchange for smoother skill expression and an easier learning curve. DRK in 6.0 however, is what happens when you just don't give shit anymore.

[Lammas]

Yes, this is yet another DRK thread among endless threads, but for the sake of simplicity, I wanted to create a Megathread containing all criticisms and possible improvements players may have for DRK in case a SE representative may ever stumble upon it.

Here are a few questions to get started.

1. What issue with Dark Knight do you have since 5.0?

2. Is there a viable solution to your problem? If so, write it down.

3. What did you like about previous iterations of Dark Knight?

4. How did DRK capture your interest while playing FFXIV?

The short answer to OPs 3 and 4 is lore and aesthetic reason as well as the fact that I quite dislike the lore and aesthetics of PLD and WAR. GNB is better but not quite there.

Now for 1 and 2, the problems I have and possible solutions I'd offer, that's a bit longer.

- The first thing is that it just feels a bit unfinished when it comes to resource management. There's this whole new job gauge that's full of nothing. There's a Fray timer that's completely unnecessary as you can't interact with it in any way. There's a Darkside timer that you don't have to pay any attention to and the mana gauge that also plays itself for the most part once you realize this. Having any kind of build up on this foundation where you could spend your darkside to do something but then have to use mana again to not drop darkside but would then have to use blood to rebuild your mana would make it a lot more interesting. It would be hard to design tho so I'm not sure how viable I'd call it but there's people being paid to design these jobs as far as I know.

- DRK could have something going on between its burst windows. Pressing BS every now and then to not overcap isn't the most interesting thing by itself. What I said in my first point could be the solution but here's another way simpler one: introduce a Drill like GCD into DRKs rotation on 20 or 30 sec cooldown. Something that you wanna keep on CD. It's not much but having another button does break the monotony by a lot already. As a bonus, I'd say that DRKs getting pretty stacked on OGCDs on their burst window so they could even go ahead and rework C&S for this role. This would free up some ogcd space for more interesting buttons in the future while giving us a more interesting rotation while also allowing us to actually see the C&S animation. The mana that it currently gives could be baked into something else easily. If you wanna fill up the current OGCD burst slots then make AD 30 sec cooldown with 2 charges. Obviously tweak potencies of both so the damage stays where it's intended to be. AD thingy would also give people more of the self healing that they seem to be craving for, although only for mobbing.

- Some individual skill woes.
Living dead, fix it already. This is getting beyond ridiculous and tiresome.
Bloodweapon really should have stacks instead of a timer but if it does stay on timer then make it stay up as long as current Delirium does (over 10 seconds) instead of less than 10 seconds.
Unleash, Stalward and Unmend are spells. This means that they are on 2.5 second recast no matter your SkS. This is problematic for non-stacks Bloodweapon but at the end of the day it's also just very annoying that a part of the kit isn't in any way interacting with one of your substats. Could either change them to weaponskills because other than flavor it really doesn't matter anywhere or could just condense SkS and SpS materia into one thing. Either would fix this.

Having said all that I do like 5.0 DRK overall. I think it fixed a lot of jank from 4.0. It's laid a solid foundation to build on without probably having to completely redesign the job every expansion which I don't think they'll be doing again no matter how much the HW DRKs want to. It's just still got some QoL problems that I'm a bit baffled haven't been touched already and these 5.0 foundations actually do need to be built on instead of just ignored. Also, I didn't specifically mention Delirium in there as I'd consider that something that could be built on to make it more interesting if only SE was willing.

EDIT: Just as they seem to be unwilling to change this stupid character limitation of 3000 on their posts on these forums. C'mon...

EDIT2: Forgot to mention the leveling experience / being synced down. Stalwart should be moved to an earlier level and that would help a ton. Alternatively, I'd imagine you could even take the mana regen from Stalwart and give it to Unleash as a trait on some pre-50 level and it'd be OK. Not being able to generate mana in AOE on sub-72 is the biggest hurdle I think the job has on earlier levels. I personally don't have an issue with TBN staying at lvl 70.