Dark Knight Megathread

[Duskane]

DRK was good before - it's still good now.
People who didn't like it before still don't like it - big surprise.

Blood Weapon is fine. 5 stacks would make more sense but there isn't anything wrong with it now if you know how to use it correctly.
Living Dead is still fine - you use invulns as a planned out cooldown in fights. It's not a "last resort" button - once again works fine if you know how. Only issue I have with it is that now all invulns are 10s in length, it's cooldown and holmgang should be switched,

People complaining about not having a buffed up defensive like the others? How do you add an extra effect to TBN? Heal on it is pointless. Excog on it is pointless. So we get an extra defensive.

DRK was already the best tank because of TBN - now they have 1 more defensive on top - lots of extra flexibility there. DRK is the undisputed king MT.

Intervention, Nascent, Heart - can all have their fancy effects. With a DRK - TBN + Oblation you don't take any damage anyway, so you don't need fancy effects.

On top of all this DRK has had the biggest increases in damage potential out of all tanks, and looks now to be rivalling GNB for being the biggest damage.

A lot of the doom and gloom I see around here is from people who do not play the game at a high level, or do not understand how jobs and skills interact in the game. If you don't like the gameplay loop then that's fair - there are 20 other jobs in the game for you to find something to like. I don't like MNK, SCH or GNB - too busy, too clunky, too boring - but that's okay.

I think we will still see the majority of the games best tank players in the game going for DRK - it still seems to be the consensus that DRK/GNB will be the best combo.

There are some minor things that can be improved on, but right now DRK is looking very strong.

Bloodwhetting is better than TBN,
no such thing as king MT since all 4 can do it fine and even if there was DRK has no healing like other 3 now so its definitely not even considered as one

DRK will probably still be the weakest in terms of DPS you'll burn your 2 charges of ShB in opener for Drk then after youll burn it every 60 seconds,salted earth follow up and esteem new ender will not compare to PLD magic Cart combo and spirits within buff,GNB getting more consistent damage with burst strike continuum and double Down
and WAR having 30 seconds of knock back immunity is insane and i doubt itll stay but you can ignore an entire phase of some mechanics with this making it easier for uptime with WAR plus 4 gap closers.

obligation sucks ass considering other tanks team CD are 25 seconds and have much greater effect

[Danelo]

Yoshi should have said at the live letter “there will be new benefits to timing defensive CDs now... unless your DRK... we are just passing out the last bit of uniqueness in their kit to the rest of the tanks. Please look forward to it!”

[MagiusNecros]

I think when MT you'll have to rotate every Defensive CD you have with TBN. The sad part is Rampart is more effective then Oblation. I'd only give Oblation to someone else if you are an offtank. Probably something like...

TBN+OB
TBN+OB+Reprisal
TBN+Rampart
TBN+Shadow Wall

Dark Mind and Missionary will be in a funny place.

I dunno I hate it. Shit sucks.

[Mekhana]

Is Oblation at least off GCD?

[MagiusNecros]

It's an ability so yes.

Meanwhile in PvP(current) a plethora of Dark Knight actions restore HP and MP. And AoE attacks with those attacks give those effects per enemy hit.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/darkknight/#pvp

Stick to PvP I guess for the true Dark Knight experience.

[Lyth]

Reprisal is more effective than Oblation. That's a scary thought.

The problem with cooldown stacking is that %DR is multiplicative, not additive, resulting in diminishing returns. If you're pairing up Oblation with another %DR ability, you're probably only going to get 7-8% additional %DR out of it. I'm not really sure what problem this ability is designed to solve. Maybe it'll be used to save two party members from a physical raidwide when you can't use Dark Missionary.

On a side note, whichever dev attempted to come up with 'timed mitigation rewards' doesn't really get it. Tanks ideally aim to catch tankbusters at the tail end of a defensive move to reduce the effective recast, sometimes using a defensive move 18 seconds before the attack hits. Frontloading a defensive just rewards players who have no idea when the tankbuster happens and just react to the cast bar in a panic.

Of course, this is probably just a moot point and we'll continue to see fights designed for invuln-swap.

[Marxam]

a side note, whichever dev attempted to come up with 'timed mitigation rewards' doesn't really get it. Tanks ideally aim to catch tankbusters at the tail end of a defensive move to reduce the effective recast, sometimes using a defensive move 18 seconds before the attack hits. Frontloading a defensive just rewards players who have no idea when the tankbuster happens and just react to the cast bar in a panic.

That should probably be their queue to update the Novice Hall and maybe introduce game mechanic styled trials, ex;

-Survive the next enemy attacks (5/5) Reward: Jet Black Dye x1

This trial has an enemy hit you five times and one of them you need to invul to survive. It's a simple test that says a lot without saying much. It also teaches tanks the importance rotating cds and also knowing when to use them at the appropriate time. Different timed cast bars will also teach them the timing of how to use them.

While DRK will obviously function in 6.0 this is further proof that TBN is too strong for its own good and that it's hard carrying the rest of its toolkit which is why you get skills like Oblation. While not a bad skill per se, you're right Reprisal does the same thing but affects the whole party instead of just two ppl and if co-ordinated with the other tank makes Oblation slightly under-whelming. I am assuming the intended purpose is to use TBN with it Oblation but that's two buttons while other jobs only have to press one to achieve, more or less, the same thing.

[Shurrikhan]

On a side note, whichever dev attempted to come up with 'timed mitigation rewards' doesn't really get it. Tanks ideally aim to catch tankbusters at the tail end of a defensive move to reduce the effective recast, sometimes using a defensive move 18 seconds before the attack hits. Frontloading a defensive just rewards players who have no idea when the tankbuster happens and just react to the cast bar in a panic.

I could have sworn there was a Sentinel skill in FFXIII that actually would have matched that reward system somewhat... Steelguard, I think it was. It'd have a base resistance/defense increase, and then increase that further with each attacks (or damage?) mitigated, so you'd want the biggest attack to hit just before its channel ended.

But even just generally speaking, if that was the direction they wanted to push us towards, I'd have expected to see defensives with effects that were neither flat percentage nor easily capped flat absorption values, such as by decaying or ramping rapidly with time or attacks absorbed.

[Ignimortis]

As a casual player (who still spends hundreds of hours doing almost all the content that isn't Savage and up), I seriously don't care all that much about numbers. I try to optimize and play properly, because I like to know I did my best, but not to the extent of hardcore players, I think. I have also mained DRK since I got to HW in early 2017.

However, the issues with DRK are not really about "is it gonna be good or bad numbers-wise". If anything, all the attempts SE made at homogenizing the tanks were for their numbers (both clear rates and DPS) to be very similar, i.e. "bring any job, it'll work".

The issues with DRK are that it's a very unimaginative job gameplay-wise, with very few interactions between its' abilities and a lack of mechanical identity other than "I have TBN".

Now, I've heard that SE won't be returning any job to its' HW complexity level. That's fine by me. However, I would like to get some HW back — a cohesive design that feels distinct from all the other tanks. What I can't understand is, why not just make DRK the fast tank again? It's very easy to achieve, too, and would fix its' issues with downtime being very slow and unengaging.

• Reduce EoS/FoS costs (maybe to 1k, something almost spammable), reduce potencies appropriately.
• Shift Darkside from +10% damage to +10% skill/spell haste. Add a trait that makes your SpS equal to SkS, or just merge the two stats already, it's not like you can abuse it.
• Make TBN just refund MP on break instead of rather meaningless "Dark Arts", maybe a bit more to incentivize proper use.
• Change Blood Weapon to 5 stacks anyway.
• Drop Stalwart Soul to level 40. Better to have an empty level in ShB than to wait until 72 for your only AoE combo.

Now, if we want to go deeper and promote interaction between abilities, I do think EoS/FoS could serve the same function Dark Arts did previously, and you can repurpose the Dark Arts UI element for that.
Damage is already built into those abilities, so you'd need to make non-damage interactions.

• Make EoS->Souleater restore a chunk more HP or apply a HoT, or a shield equal to Souleater cure potency. Something similar with EoS->Stalwart. Both should also increase Blood gain by 10 to encourage the MP->Blood->MP cycle and make it a thing again.
• Make EoS->CnS also generate Blood. Change CnS cooldown to 30 seconds (not charges). If you really need to, reduce potency somewhat.
• EoS->AD might increase the heal significantly (say, 1000 pot? Equilibrium is still better), so it's worth something in single-target situations (which are the majority of even remotely challenging endgame content, as you know).
• EoS->Bloodspiller/Quietus...I got nothing. Those actions should restore MP by default, to play into the MP->Blood->MP cycle that has to be going on, so you can't add an effect that rewards spending MP on them, I think.

Ran out of space, Delirium/new stuff in the next post.

[Ignimortis]

Contd.

Delirium could be a 30-second cooldown that grants you a Dark Arts stack? Or, if you really want to keep a burst skill on a 60 second CD, it could be changed to just be like Gnashing Fang (Scourge animation, 3.0 Delirium animation, Power Slash animation) while doing the same damage and restoring the same MP as three free Bloodspillers in a row. Losing free Quietus doesn't feel like an issue to me, considering EW brings two new AoE-focused skills.

As to what to do with the new abilities... I have very little idea. They don't really work with the rest of the kit. It's been evident that in ShB, SE already struggled to give DRK new abilities (we got a combo AoE everyone else got early, Dark Missionary, and Living Shadow, and EoS/FoS which replaced Dark Arts and Dark Passenger). EW is even worse on that front.

• Traits — frankly, I have no idea. They're very boring. Making LS sync to your ability use would be good, but too complex for current SE design.
• Oblation — could tie it into EoS interactions, 10% DR non-EoS, an additional 10% DR for the first 4 seconds (as is the current zeitgeist) with EoS.
• Salt and Darkness — not sure. It's an obvious placeholder, something to weave during the opener and then just use whenever SaE is available. Good for dungeons, kinda meh for everything else.
• Shadowbringer — um...maybe make it restore MP/Blood? Seriously, this ability doesn't really fit anywhere, you just press it when it's available during raid buffs. Then again, it overloads the already busy opener, so perhaps it should be a GCD instead?