Dark Knight Megathread

[WhyAmIHere]

I just don't understand why they put it on the 40.....why not make ablation 15% and throw it on that? I understand it's probably due to TBN but what happens when your shield bursts instantly (certain dungeon trash packs)? There's been so many scenarios where I could have 2 manned the boss with gnb and simply couldn't because I'm DRK which raises the question if tanks should or shouldn't have sustain. I love 100 drk and it's a lot more fun (personally) then GNB...however another gripe I have is the delays on a lot of pretty important abilities. Why does living shadow take so long to come out, why is there a huge delay on salted earth, why is there is huge delay on disesteem, why is there a big delay on the animation of bloodspiller. I understand it's snapshot damage but come on....imo the worst part about DRK isn't that it sucks, it's that it literally needs tweaks and not a whole rework and it's just not gonna happen. I'm screaming about the job being sus, I'm just confused at small dev decisions and if anyone at square ran a few dungeons and raids it wouldn't take long to see AT LEAST some quality of life changes that need to happen. Am I crazy?

I feel like tanks should have some self sustain. That's, to me, part of what makes a tank a tank. They shouldn't have the capabilities to replace or supplant a healer, but that's where the real issue lies; WAR's self sustain is nuts compared to the other tanks.

But yeah DRK needs a rework. After all the expansions it's done nothing but lose abilities and shit, they've gutted it to the point of "bring it for the damage or for the aesthetic but that's it."

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

[1] I just don't understand why they put it on the 40.....why not make ablation 15% and throw it on that? I understand it's probably due to [2] TBN but what happens when your shield bursts instantly (certain dungeon trash packs)?

1.) The reason they put it on the 40% Shadowed Vigil / Shadow Wall II was because this time around it was about upgrading the 30% CDs. Oblation was our addition in place of general short mitigation upgrades, last expansion at Lv82. I'm all for making Oblation better though.

However I wouldn't go with 15% mit, at least not directly. I'd like to remind you that 10% is surprisingly strong for a shareable cooldown. Our Reprisal is also 10% and that makes or breaks (or at least massively soften up) incoming damage and is actually used for busters as well in a variety of fights. For Oblation, I can see a few possible additions to make it more interesting:

• A regen effect - but the least likely one since that overlaps with Aurora from GNB.
• An Exaltation effect - a burst of heal that occurs when the cooldown expires. Can either just be a flat potency (say 400-600) or use damage compiling (25% of damage taken) to calculate the heal
• A "defensive Dark Arts" - using it on self or teammates will grant yourself an effect, that modifies or enhances another defensive you are using. Like TBN on break creating a HoT, Dark Mind creating an HP shield, something like that.

2.) Your shield instantly bursting isn't a bad thing, it just shows how hard whatever you throw at it was hitting you for in general. Some basic math...

TBN is a 25% HP shield. Assuming full HP, this is literally just +25% eHP (effective HP), assuming no further healing or mitigation thrown in.
Rampart for example is 20% mitigation, i.e. you take 80% of the damage. Say you have 100k HP.

80% inc damage = 100,000 HP
100% inc dmg = x
x = 100 * 100,000 HP / 80 = 125,000 HP // which is +25% effective HP.

Over the course of 20s with Rampart, your HP pool effectively was 125%. Assuming you only used TBN a single time in that same time frame, your HP pool was also 125%. TBN is as strong as a 20% mitigation in a vacuum. Now, TBN isn't a %-type mitigation but an HP shield though, so it does not suffer from diminishing returns but instead gets exponential returns when paired with tools like Rampart, Dark Mind, etc.

If you know Rampart is 125% eHP and so is TBN, you multiply them to get their combined eHP. [1.25 * 1.25 = 1.5625 // 156.25%. An additional +6.25% eHP]
Let's try it with Shadowed Vigil, ignoring the heal. Shadowed vigil with above formula is +66.66% eHP. [1.6666 * 1.25 = 2.0832 // 208.32%. An additional +16.66% eHP].

So TBN simply performs better the more and stronger layers of mitigation you have and to a degree makes up for diminishing returns of the other CDs. TBN is not weak. If it was then Rampart is weak.

But to sum up my opinion, I agree DRK could use some adjustment regarding sustain. Living Dead puts you at the mercy of your healer letting you "die", Abyssal Drain has over double the CD of Bloodwhetting and half the healing potency (why) and is tied to CaS.

[Terhix]

Abyssal Drain has over double the CD of Bloodwhetting and half the healing potency (why) and is tied to CaS.

BW heals 4 times too, so AD healing is 12.5% of a single BW, even discounting the shield and just accounting for the cooldown Abyssal Drain is just about 5.2% of the HPS of Bloodwhetting. It is kind of funny how out of the two (ignoring Living Dead) tank self-heals that have multi-target scaling one is ridiculously overtuned, and the other is barely noticable.

[AlucaDragonheart]

So after switching to Paladin (which is actually fun) it's made me wonder, if Paladin can get a whole new combo off of Atonement, why couldn't Dark Knight get a Power Slash combo after Souleater or something?

[Mecia]

It really feels like DRK didnt gain anything in DT, more so than some other jobs. Does Disesteem even have a sound or visual effect?

[Zairava]

It really feels like DRK didnt gain anything in DT, more so than some other jobs. Does Disesteem even have a sound or visual effect?

Outside of the animation being cool and the niche case of it being useful for forced disengagement to keep uptime it's pretty much the same once every 2 minute nothingburger almost if not every job got

[WhyAmIHere]

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5850863

No matter how much things change, things always stay the same.

[Rizlee]

i honestly think that they should combine dark mind with tbn, and reduce the cost of tbn and edge of shadow to 2000 MP, and add a small heal over time on oblation (like 100 cure potency), and add an extra 200 potency damage button to replace dark mind that will add a bloodbath effect for 10 seconds, that should fix drk by a mile when it comes to being mt in raids and running dungeons

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

i honestly think that they should combine dark mind with tbn

No, for the same reason Oblation should not be merged with TBN, Dark Mind should also not be merged with TBN. You'd essentially kill the flexibility between those cooldowns.

There are scenarios where you don't want to pop Dark Mind along with TBN because you already happen to have Shadowed Vigil running for example, so Dark Mind would be overkill mitigation and better used for auto-attacks or a buster later. Likewise there are moments you'd want to Dark Mind, but not want to have the TBN effect up because you might not get actual value from it.

The keyword here is "flexibility", which you'd dearly sacrifice with a change like that. Even the additional sustain suggestion would not make up for that as you suggested and would make it less viable in content where it matters a lot more.

Dark Mind needs to be addressed, but it should not be done with heavy-handed changes like this - instead the usability against physical attacks should be implemented in the first place, so like a half-power physical mitigation (10%) tacked onto it or a general rework like making it a generic mit with additional HP shields that could change in value under certain conditions.

Do not increase or decrease the available cooldowns. Merging cooldowns in most cases lead to really bad gameplay feel and a gigantic loss in flexibility.

[excelsiorjones]

What if:

• DRK gets a new gauge that replaces Dark Arts. Let's call it Dark-MP (DMP). It does not regen over time like MP. If DRK has any DMP stored, they preferentially spend it over MP. So if you have 2k DMP and 10k MP, using TBN or Edge of Shadow (3k MP cost) will eat the DMP and leave you with 9k MP left.
• TBN now gives you DMP upon expiring based on the % of the shield that was consumed. If it's completely consumed, you get 3k DMP. If it's 90% consumed, you get 2700 DMP, etc.

This still lets you use TBN as a way to generate an extra Edge and still incentivizes correctly managing incoming damage, but isn't as binary and punishing if the shield doesn't pop.