Dark Knight Megathread

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

Yeh. In the case of oGCDs, what Dark Knight needs is one or two other oGCD that is/are used constantly, to break up the braindead Edge/Flood of Darkness/Shadow spam, into a oGCD weave rotation, that flows along with the GCD combo rotation...
Even just.. like.. reducing Abyssal Drain to 30sec CD, as it has no reason at all to be up at 60 seconds, with how underwhelming using it is, and bringing back the old far superior Salted Earth, with its 45sec CD, would be better than naught...

while, as for...

and one more defense skill, like a second bubble shield, to really make it function.

Dark Knight aught to ditch Rampart and have ShadowSkin return, as its replacement, and for one more defense skill, Dark Knight can also have Dark Dance return, albeit with its effect changed... I posted my idea for a remastered Dark Dance action in a different thread, where-in I said that Dark Dance could reduce damage taken, and increase parry chance, similar to GunBreakers' Camouflage...

[Beddict]

Dark Knight aught to ditch Rampart and have ShadowSkin return, as its replacement, and for one more defense skill, Dark Knight can also have Dark Dance return, albeit with its effect changed... I posted my idea for a remastered Dark Dance action in a different thread, where-in I said that Dark Dance could reduce damage taken, and increase parry chance, similar to GunBreakers' Camouflage...

I kinda wish they'd just ditch Role Actions altogether. No more Rampart for all Tanks, instead we get Rampart for Paladin, Foresight for Warrior, Shadowskin for Dark Knight, and something new for Gunbreaker. No more Esuna for all Healers, instead we get Esuna for White Mage, Leeches for Scholar, Exalted Detriment for Astrologian, and something new for Sage. Yoshi-P talked about wanting to focus on Job identity going into Endwalker, maybe give Jobs unique animations rather than making them share generic Role Actions. (Maybe. Could've sworn a focus on Job identity was mentioned during the Announcement Showcase or the Keynote Address, will need to rewatch those streams. Could just be me misinterpreting things up since there was a Famitsu interview where he talked about how he wants Jobs to look even more awesome so players like their Job more.) Not like they don't have a lot of old animations floating around somewhere seeing as how Foresight, Shadowskin, Leeches, and Exalted Detriment used to be in the game and were killed for Role Actions. How the kit functions is one part of Job identity, how it looks is another part, and stuff like Rampart doesn't scream Dark Knight, it's just Tank.

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

I kinda wish they'd just ditch Role Actions altogether. No more Rampart for all Tanks, instead we get Rampart for Paladin, Foresight for Warrior, Shadowskin for Dark Knight, and something new for Gunbreaker. No more Esuna for all Healers, instead we get Esuna for White Mage, Leeches for Scholar, Exalted Detriment for Astrologian, and something new for Sage. Yoshi-P talked about wanting to focus on Job identity going into Endwalker, maybe give Jobs unique animations rather than making them share generic Role Actions. Not like they don't have a lot of old animations floating around somewhere seeing as how Foresight, Shadowskin, Leeches, and Exalted Detriment used to be in the game and were killed for Role Actions. How the kit functions is one part of Job identity, how it looks is another part, and stuff like Rampart doesn't scream Dark Knight, it's just Tank.

More or less what I was thinking, yeh... /slight smile
some Role Actions are sort of fine to me, such as Provoke, Interject, Shirk, and some Role Actions I sort of forgive, Low Blow and Reprisal, though I have
a concept for Dark Knight gaining two new "Slash" actions, remasters of old Low Blow and old Reprisal, but.. the Rampart, I do not forgive that one.

And did the man himself really say that? ...To focus on Job Identity in EndWalker... Gods forgive me if I am dumb enough to hope that 6.0 really will be redemption for Dark Knight, if we can make the safe assumption of that means the possibility of no more WAR clone.. perhaps the things in Dark Knight threads are being considered...

[Beddict]

And did the man himself really say that? ...To focus on Job Identity in EndWalker...

I haven't seen Yoshi-P even mention the term 'job identity', but pretty much everyone else is demanding it.

I could've sworn that Koji or Yoshi-P said it during either the Announcement Showcase or the FanFest Keynote Address. I dug through the slides and wasn't seeing anything, nor did I see the words "Job identity" when I did a Google search for Endwalker interviews with Yoshi-P, and so it might be something that was simply spoken during the stream with no slide backing it up. The FFXIV subreddit Discord didn't bother doing their usual translation for either of those because we got the stream in English at the same time so I think I'd be in for the long haul of sitting through both streams until I either come across it or don't. At the very least, the closest thing I found was from this Famitsu interview:

But of course, just because our main character is using Paladin this time does not mean we’re giving it a favor… so this is something I can say that is not limited to Paladin but to all jobs here, this also applies to parts where people would go “We want that too!” and by making it look even more awesome would make players who have their own favorite job like them more.

I might've just misinterpreted that as Yoshi-P wanting to make sure the dev team nails the theme of a Job by giving them awesome looking abilities. Sorry if I gave any false hope, will rewatch both streams when I have the time. Really hoping I didn't provide misinformation there, sorry in advance if I am wrong. I'll go back to my previous post and cross that bit out for now.

The absolute worst thing you could do from a game design standpoint is make several identical abilities and then make one just slightly better. Because then you can directly compare them and know that you're being shafted on the deal. Vengeance is an example of this. The smart thing to do would have been to add a unique special effect to each one of the 30% damage reduction cooldowns that you couldn't compare the effectiveness of.

Yeah, this one irks me. I'm amazed that Vengeance has kept the thorns effect for so long given how gung-ho they've been about homogenizing everything, like when they turned Rampart into the Role Action at the start of Stormblood. Ideally I'd like to see the other three 30% mitigation tools get a unique effect to them as well, like Shadow Wall getting the old Blood Price MP restore which can be used on Flood/Edge (or Dark Arts is a miracle happens and that returns), but realistically we'll probably either see nothing special added to Sentinel/Shadow Wall/Nebula, or the removal of thorns from Vengeance. Would be nice to get proven wrong though.

[Lyth]

DRK's selling point is that the gameplay is built around oGCDs. This is akin to asking an ice cream parlour to sell only melted ice cream to everyone because you find it too cold. Just get a crepe instead. WAR is a much better alternative if you want everything to happen on the GCD. It's also a lot more forgiving.

[Lyth]

I haven't seen Yoshi-P even mention the term 'job identity', but pretty much everyone else is demanding it.

There are way too many jobs at the moment, especially for the size of their job design team. But 'new jobs' is too much of an expansion selling point for them to hold off on adding more.

The role action system is just a cost saving measure. They've never had to develop a 'Rampart-like' action for GNB because there's one already in the template. They'd probably merge a lot more actions on to the list if it wasn't for the fact that they know people would complain even louder about homogenization. But there's actually something even worse than that. Partial homogenization.

The absolute worst thing you could do from a game design standpoint is make several identical abilities and then make one just slightly better. Because then you can directly compare them and know that you're being shafted on the deal. Vengeance is an example of this. The smart thing to do would have been to add a unique special effect to each one of the 30% damage reduction cooldowns that you couldn't compare the effectiveness of.

The raidwide mitigation abilities are almost an example of how to do this correctly. Passage of Arms is an area of effect %damage reduction effect. Shake it Off is a party-wide version of TBN. Reprisal is a damage down debuff. Dark Missionary and Heart of Light are... well, okay, they're both obviously inferior defensively to the rest and they're identical to each other. But they were doing perfectly fine up until that point.

It's really quite baffling how they can make such bad and inconsistent job design decisions that the playerbase obviously hates, but we're supposed to wait 2-3 years before we roll the dice and hope that they get it right, just because we can't fix things mid-expansion. They really should do a Q+A session with the job design 'team' and sit them in front of the forums here, without cherry picking questions.

[Jandor]

It's a fairly minor thing all in all, but I do agree it would be nice if they'd ditch role actions and give us job specific ones.

Reprisal - Dark Knight. As is.
Flash - Paladin: Blinding light has reduced the effectiveness of enemy attacks by 10%.
Intimidate - Warrior: Fear is making your enemies hesitate, reducing damage by 10%.
Aether Field - Gunbreaker: A blast of compressed aether has weakened your enemies, reducing damage by 10%.

Ok I struggled a bit with Gunbreaker there, went with a concept of just smashing some of your ammo open to give everyone around you a quick bout of aether sickness, you get the idea anyway. Job specific animations are fun even if they're functionally identical to other jobs abilities

[Shin96]

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I like that idea honestly. They should make job actions unique and exclusive from each other. Rampart doesn't fit the Warrior identity like it would on a Paladin, if I recall correctly it even used to be an exclusive CD on Paladin. Same with Reprisal, it used to look brutal and visceral but lacks all impact since it's shared between tanks. This homogenization only takes away from what made these skills interesting in the first place.

[Jandor]

I like that idea honestly. They should make job actions unique and exclusive from each other. Rampart doesn't fit the Warrior identity like it would on a Paladin, if I recall correctly it even used to be an exclusive CD on Paladin. Same with Reprisal, it used to look brutal and visceral but lacks all impact since it's shared between tanks. This homogenization only takes away from what made these skills interesting in the first place.

Rampart was Paladin only yeah, Dark Knight used to have Shadowskin instead.



Same with stuns, Low Blow used to be Dark Knight exclusive, while Warrior had Brutal Swing and Paladin had, and still has, Shield Bash.

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Giving DRK unique looking versions of the role skills wouldn't fix DRK by any means, but when nearly a third of your abilities are generic shared ones it definitely contributes to the job feeling watered down.

[shao32]

The only thing i remember Yoship saying is they want every job have a super flashy skill like passage of arms so that would be the main additions to all jobs in terms of visuals and he insisted in Reaper offering being a unique job, i won't be surprised they leave tanks aside like always and DRK condemned to be a WAR clone forever, it wont be the first time.