Dark Knight Megathread

[Carighan]

So, MP-Blood interplay (deepened resource management), 47.5% Haste uptime (speed tank), Bloodweapon/Delirium being more than a poorman's Infuriate/Inner Release and making skillspeed not a turbo-griefing stat? Do these not matter for identity?

The only thing that sounds like it could make the job feel unique out of those would be the 1.3s GCD, as it would make Dark Knight a unique experience compared to the other tanks. There's no other conceptual or gameplay identity I can spot.

Also, Dark Arts really doesn't matter. Whether you deal potency as an oGCD from gauge in way A or way B, it's both just utterly benign potency damage. You say it feels conceptually better, but eh, to me it just makes no difference. If you didn't see the numbers, you could not even tell the difference if we're being honest between the oGCD dealing one instance of damage, or it being folded into the subsequent GCD.

Somethink like Dark Arts could be cool, if done in a tank-centric way, and it could also give Dark Knights identity: A sort-of tanky Eukrasia. It's a GCD, but a short one. It empoweres another GCD afterwards, just like Sages use Eukrasia. But the effects should be tank-specific, unlocking TBN (stronger, longer lasting, a GCD), dealing extra damage to drain health to heal ourselves, etc etc. Not just "Jo this is your damage stance MP spender, press stuff".

[Shurrikhan]

So, MP-Blood interplay (deepened resource management), 47.5% Haste uptime (speed tank), Bloodweapon/Delirium being more than a poorman's Infuriate/Inner Release and making skillspeed not a turbo-griefing stat? Do these not matter for identity?

Also, I think it is more tasteful to empower your attacks with Dark Arts than to toss out magical Shintens (Edge).

Functionally, just like Kaiten, it's just a potency timed at certain points in your attack flow, but it feels different because of the intent of empowering a skill rather than to use an OGCD you could press anywhere from two gcds before to after with minimal difference.

None of those things had to do with DA except in that you went from a flat bonus damage you could use in any GCD to flat bonus damage you could use in *most* GCDs. I.e., a difference of your combo opener.

Kaiten had dependency. DA was just 140p. As long as flexible tank sustain remains mostly meaningless for rDPS, returning DA would just be another Shinten.

Which is, again, why we shouldn't be thinking DA in isolation. It only does anything of notable value within a fitting context -- one that may require gamewide changes to make tanking less of a matter of just scheduled Simon Says buttons atop a dumbed-down DPS kit.

And frankly, we feel APM, not just GCD speeds, let alone from a mere 10% (vs. Ninja and Monk's 15% or Bard's 16% at the time). An Endwalker DRK in burst felt at least as speedy as any Stormblood DRK, just from the sheer amount of buttons presses (the issue being how long was between those bursts).

[bundythenoob]

What would that identity be?

do players not remember HW/StB DRK and its unique gameplay kit?
it wasn't just a bootleg WAR, it was much more about resource management and maintaining consistent damage
Blood Weapon/Blood Price giving us plenty of mana to spend made the job feel FAST since your APM went up every 45 seconds thanks to the extra resources
Dark Arts empowering your skills felt GOOD since you were making split second decisions based on the context of the fight
Delirium and the mana/blood interchange that it allowed felt INTUITIVE, the job had room for tons of optimisation

was the job perfect? not in the slightest... but did it feel good to play?
I personally LOVED having to learn how to git gud at DRK back in the day, it made the job feel rewarding once I better understood the kit and how it worked
Visually, DRK might still be the magic-based Tank, but our actual, ingame kit has been reduced to "press DPS laser button", which is quite sad considering what we used to be able to do.

[Shurrikhan]

do players not remember HW/StB DRK and its unique gameplay kit?

Note the suggestion that was actually made, though, to which Carighan asked the question you're quoting.

It wasn't to return to HW/StB DRK. It was literally just to re-add DA.



I.e.,

Q: In what way / to what extent would present DRK's identity shift if DA were re-inserted? --> Likely answer: Unnoticeably.

Q: Would DA itself be sufficient to give DRK a distinct identity? --> Likely answer: No, especially so long as defensive expenditures of MP would remain mere traps.

Q (in extension): If not sufficient, what else would we like to see that might make it so? What would be synergetic to it? How would those things craft a tank that FEELS different?

Stormblood gave us decent examples of something at least mildly better, sure (though it was scarcely if at all less braindead in Stormblood outside of dungeon Quietus-cheese, and not much more in Heavensward).
But, said Heavensward/Stormblood DRK is also not something that can be recreated anywhere near verbatim / as it was in the present game.

Enmity and its separate combo actions are effectively or wholly gone. TP is gone. Active mitigation beyond oGCDs is gone. We'd therefore going to need a gamewide preamble to DRK-specific changes if we wanted to reuse those old designs, at which point we wouldn't be saving time anyway by looking at the past anywhere near verbatim.

As such, we may as well be less complacent and dream a little bit larger, especially if that might be able to achieve something even within the scope of a game that doesn't much allow for tanks to have any nuanced skill expression through their actual tankiness.


Edit:
To be clear, I'd far rather see frequent and nuanced use of active mitigation, revitalizing tanks as a whole. I'd love for tanks to offer in-fight engagement even in repeat clears, especially in more "tank-ish" ways.

But short of that, a "return to Stormblood DRK" would probably look solely like...

• losing a bit of CD-based APM in exchange for GCD APM (1.14 from BW-accelerated GCDs, which is far, far less than just what the decoupling of BW itself provides),
• exchanging <strike now for X potency of damage> with <amp next GCD by X potency of damage>,
• possibly having TBN give a free cast of Blood of a free MP cast (which would make it a hefty DPS loss unless DA were heavily nerfed relative to Edge/Flood or Bloodspiller/Quietus heavily buffed), and
• some extra MP via Blood Weapon that we could as easily give by literally other means as well (passive tick rate, Syphon Strike and Stalwart, CnS, current BW/Del, or any combination of the above).

I don't think that's going to be nearly enough to make DRK feel distinct. Not even close.

By all means, though, I'd love to see varied GCD lengths, but far more so --- such as the ability to ramp up to Hysteric speeds before ending the phase via an empowered oGCD nuke before the state can't be sustained anymore. I'd want back choice between Blood Price and Blood Weapon, or reasons to rotate between them, but emphasized to far more than they did in HW/StB. Bring back Darkside, but as more than just a mechanic we have to remember to turn off before jumps if over 3 ticks' time in length and back on again after, perhaps even offering a sort of HP-sacrifice mechanic that allows DRK to get more value out of what would otherwise be downtime for self *and* heals, both. Let's take what seemed neat and turn it up to 11 and, from that, see what might stick.

[bundythenoob]

SO SORRY!! I misread the quote chains! D: will be sure to get more coffee before lurking.
you guys do bring up some cool discussion points though, so thanks for the replies!

IDENTITY. Not the gameplay stuff. Because then we open a whole new can of worms.

Visual presentation and mechanical gameplay of the job fantasies felt intrinsically tied in the past than they do now. Visually, WAR swings a giant axe (gameplaywise, WAR had lower APM), while DRK uses rune magic to allow us to wield the our greatsword with ease (DRK had higher APM), with PLD being the middle ground for both.
FFXIV's rendition of DRK uses runes and sigils to empower itself, which translated gameplay-wise into skills like Blood Weapon, Blood Price, TBN, and Dark Arts.
The visual effect of Dark Arts was something that made DRK stand out from the other tanks AND created a separate gameplay style for itself. Dark Arts gave us some good old style-points along with rewarding good mana usage!

I do believe that being an "anti-magic" tank would just NOT work within the current XIV encounter design, but if DA was re-integrated (maybe it could do something like, change your next Souleater to Power Slash) , then you at least get a return to older visual identity AND mechanical gameplay, rather than the current iteration.

We'd therefore going to need a gamewide preamble to DRK-specific changes if we wanted to reuse those old designs, at which point we wouldn't be saving time anyway by looking at the past anywhere near verbatim.

I think by re-integrating Dark Arts, the devs could solve some of the issues you brought up while further developing DRKs visual identity and gameplay kit for future expacs.

increased GCD APM via Blood Weapon would help the job look visually distinct AND separate itself mechanically, since we would be returning to the consistent damage type gameplay of HW/StB, rather than the current 2 min burst with giga downtime style. This would also allow WAR to regain its own visual identity of having that 2 min berserker window, which I always thought was a cool thing that separated us.

exchanging <strike now for X potency of damage> with <amp next GCD by X potency of damage> might seem redundant on paper, but DA-empowered abilities open the door to future skill design and even the return of old animations. having TBN give free Blood skills again wouldn't be a loss if those skills could be empowered by DA to leave bleeds/debuffs to offset the lost potencies

if we allow DA to give our personal cooldowns a "Dark Price" effect, we could use the extra MP/blood to offset the DPS loss from mitigating (or even let it be a DPS GAIN with more adds like it used to be), while also opening up future defencive cooldown design. This would let us feel like we're sacrificing our HP for more power once again

Allowing Darkside to return as a way to sacrifice HP for raid buffs during downtime sounds amazing. Bring back Sole Survivor and other sigil-based effects for this sort of thing!




Re-integrating Dark Arts might seem like a challenge, but the devs were already more than halfway there, at least from my experience. I mean, SGE's Eukrasia exists, so why can't Dark Arts exist too?

[Carighan]

do players not remember HW/StB DRK and its unique gameplay kit?
it wasn't just a bootleg WAR, it was much more about resource management and maintaining consistent damage

IDENTITY. Not the gameplay stuff. Because then we open a whole new can of worms.

DRK's identity was "The anti-magic tank". To a very very marginal degree and looking just at the class, it still is. Just that encounters no longer exist like that (compare for example old WoW where in TBC you wanted a Demo Warlock to tank some bosses). Nothing specifically shreds tanks that don't have extra magic-specific reductions, and hence asks for a magic-specific tank.

And now? What is DRK's identity? And what would it be if DA came back? The "get yourself RSI faster than ever"-tank?

[Shurrikhan]

IDENTITY. Not the gameplay stuff. Because then we open a whole new can of worms.

DRK's identity was "The anti-magic tank". To a very very marginal degree and looking just at the class, it still is. Just that encounters no longer exist like that (compare for example old WoW where in TBC you wanted a Demo Warlock to tank some bosses). Nothing specifically shreds tanks that don't have extra magic-specific reductions, and hence asks for a magic-specific tank.

And now? What is DRK's identity? And what would it be if DA came back? The "get yourself RSI faster than ever"-tank?

Honestly glad that "identity" is buried then. An "identity" just being a category of fights for which one's participation is more permitted or other tanks less so has never been healthy for any game where one is supposed to be able to play what class they want rather than only what role (with the expectation of having one of each type).

Typal capacity alone is a crap identity, its main difference in "feel" coming before combat, in selecting one's class, or occuring mostly just on the healers supporting it (in a tank's case).

Perhaps in a game where magic were more functionally different than just an arbitrary nominal distinction such could then have gameplay impact, but asking for identity *outside* of or inconsequent to gameplay is just how you reduce the roster of choices available for a given fight, especially if encounter design isn't able to constrain itself enough to roll with the types available. Identity should stem primarily from gameplay, not be purposely separate to it.

[SalamanderIX]

In none of the iterations I played could I say Dark Knight had a strong identity, in SB/ShB it was "TBN being amazing". in EW/DT it has been "having nice, consistant damage, and mitigation", which about as bland as you can be for a tank.
Dark Arts was interesting, and it certainly played and felt a lot different, though in absolute terms, it was about the same burst damage as Paladin hitting one button 5 times. I wouldn't mind seeing it back though.

[Carighan]

Oh I'm not saying that's a good way to make classes feel distinct. I will say that it was enjoyable back in early WoW-TBC to have three tanks be "The mitigation tank", "The HP cake tank" (which made them superior at any fight involving a lot of DoTs etc) and "The aggro tank" (superior for fights with loads of adds or quick swaps). It didn't balance well, and a more neutered version of the differences was lame, plus back then your raiding roster was 25+ players, so having 1 tank of each and rotating who MTs for each fight was easy.

But yeah it's not a good way of doing it, particularly in the context of FFXIV. I'd much rather see tanks achieve their EHP via different ways, and ideally in slightly different patterns over a whole fight, but ultimately all work towards that (which is where what you said above, more active tanking, comes in).

[Oizen]

Dark Knight still is the anti-magic tank, that identity came almost exclusively from having a 2nd Rampart to magic damage on a lower cooldown.
That button is just no longer dead in normal content or whenever the devs decide to use Physical, it also means you don't need to mass memorize every single cast in the game and what damage type it is to get value out of the button, while still rewarding you for being twice as effective against magic.

I don't see the issue.