Dark Knight Megathread

[Lyth]

As far as I can tell, your physical distance from a mob only matters for initiating auto-attacks and not executing them. If you're far enough from an attacking mob, the auto-attack won't be initiated until it gets into range. However, once you see the mob pause to 'cast' the auto, it doesn't matter how far away you are, because the attack is already snapshotted to you.

The same is true for tankbusters as well. If you move away from the mob, it will wait to catch up to you, pause to start casting, and then the attack lands regardless of how far away you get in the interim. I think that an auto is just a unique case of a 'cast' that has '0' cast time, but still takes a non-zero amount of time to cast because of execution issues.

The responsiveness of a mob depends on how far away you can move before it also starts moving to close the distance. In Warcraft, that distance is really small, so it feels really responsive (you also were able to force a mob to backstep by entering into its hitbox). In FFXIV that distance is a lot bigger. That's why FFXIV's mobs feel a lot less 'maneuverable' to drive around the arena.

I think I know the reason behind why this critical movement distance is set so large. It comes down to 'casts'. You've probably seen this yourself, but if your character is moved a sufficient distance while casting a spell due to a movement effect (knockback/draw-in/etc.), it interrupts your cast.

In ARR, you could interrupt mob abilities this way as well, including abilities that you weren't actually supposed to. The Wavetooth Sagahin in Leviathan Ex uses an uninterruptable Dreadwash as a roomwide fear. It was likely intended as a mini-enrage, which is why you couldn't interrupt it. However, any action that displaced the mob (classically getting your WAR to Holmgang and jump away, pulling the mob with them) cancelled the cast. I suspect this was the reason behind the 'Spin' glitch back in ARR/Heavensward as well, given that a mob that is constantly being moved is unable to initiate a cast. I think that's the primary reason why all player knockback/draw-in effects were removed in PvE over the course of Stormblood.

I think that the reason why mobs are coded to be relatively 'movement-insensitive' is because they probably found that movement jitter from the player was preventing casts. I personally don't mind if a mob autos me from across an arena. It's not really immersion breaking, and you're really not supposed to be able to 'kite' a raid boss by outdistancing them. What I do want to see are mobs that move the instant that I do.

[Mortex]

that heal effect is bonkers as long as you are attacking you will clense LD and unleash just a full bene in packs.

mitigation still awkward but just gotta kitchen sink.

Pretty sure you talk about DSR in general there. Fight is
Just pure kitchen sink every big hit and invuln the rest and the some times tank swap.

[baklava151]

I have never actually gotten to experience the Living Dead changes, because every time I pop LD thinking I'm going to die? The healer will suddenly spam everything, and bam I survive.
Or sometimes I survive just long enough for the LD buff to fade, and then splat.
I won't say the "Cure on weaponskill" bit isn't powerful. It seems like it should be. But I'm still seeing a problem with the ability compared to the other Tank cooldowns.
Maybe that's just me tho.

It's pretty nice for mob pulls, you can just tell the healer to ignore you for a bit and and when it activates you can cleanse it in one hit. My one small complaint is that the self-heal goes away when you go into Undead Rebirth but not a huge deal honestly.

It's also been fine in raids so far, the only situation I can imagine it being an issue is if you proc it and the boss jumps or becomes untargetable

[Marxam]

If you want to see 'Dark Arts' in its original form, you would likely need something similar to MCH's PvP Analysis ability.

Ryu is right in that it would need to be free from resource costs and utility/defensive exclusive, or else the highest damage choice always wins out. The downside is that it reduces your weave space, although it could equally be implemented as a proc buff.

WAR has already proven the DA could have worked in the 5.0+ rework. I've stated several times that DA could work like Infuriate where it changes your gcds and you perform a different animation but rather DA just gives you 3 stacks which you can use on either gcds or a limited set of ogcds. It's basically automatic and no need to double weave since its already active and ready to use and simulates what DA used to do.

Personally I'm hoping they would just fuse oblations effect to TBN and change TBN to 2 charges on a 20-25 sec recast with no MP cost. The oblation effect will still stay the entire 10 sec duration regardless if TBN popped and keep MP usage strictly to just dps. That would then let them remove DA from TBN's flavor text to reintroduce it as something else in 7.0. Imo TBN should not cost anything as shields a single shield is not necessarily "good" enough when compared to the other short tank job cds, which do more than just give a shield in some cases by providing heals and mitigation. If they really think TBN is as strong as it is, then either lower it a bit, in favor of ease-of-use. It's the only cd among the tanks that has a downside after 6.1.

[Lyth]

Nascent Chaos isn't a great example. It's just an offensive potency buff with no real thought involved, and Fell Cleave still feels like the better animation after all these years.

The closest thing that we have to Heavensward's Dark Arts is SGE's Eukrasia. The reason why it works is because it doesn't cost resources, is usable on demand, and purely acts as a toggle between sets of non-competing abilities.

Removing the MP cost from TBN and increasing its recast is a hard nope from me. Xeno has his moments, but you really have to be able to filter out his good takes from his bad ones. I think you're much better off just individually buffing Oblation into a more useful ability. They shouldn't touch TBN.

[Crater]

It's the only cd among the tanks that has a downside after 6.1.

This is and always has been a strong argument for why they should keep the MP cost, and an incredibly weak argument for why they should remove it.

There are three out of four tanks that do not have any risk:reward associated with their short-cooldown mitigation skills. If you don't like risk:reward in your class design, there are multiple tanks that are already doing exactly what you want out of tank class design.
For those players who do like that aspect of risk:reward, Dark Knight is the only tank in the game that offers it as part of their kit.

What possible justification can you have for saying "I think it's fair to take away the one tank that is enjoyable to people who disagree with me so that they don't have any tanks that they find fun, in the service of making every tank do what I want it to, instead of the wholly unacceptable-to-me situation where every tank but one is designed to cater to my tastes"?

[Kalaam]

There isn't much reward though, having a risk is neat and it was very enjoyable in ShB. But if the only reward is "you do about as well as others tanks, if not worse" then... it's not satisfying.

[Crater]

There's plenty of reward, both offensively and defensively. Dark Knight is almost universally either the sturdiest tank, or in a dead heat with one other tank for sturdiest, and that is almost always a result of the lower cooldown on TBN and Dark Mind - two skills that people are constantly crying about and trying to nerf in service of removing the risk:reward for "ease-of-use".

This is at the same time that Dark Knight is sitting comfortably ahead of every other tank in terms of offensive output in full-uptime striking dummy situations like Savage (and far ahead of every other tank in downtime-heavy, burst-oriented fights like P2 and P5 of DSR). Which is largely a result of how much potency they can put out in 120s burst windows, which is largely a result of their deeper resource pool, which is largely a result of things like TBN's Dark Arts proc effectively extending their MP pool to 13000.


I honestly don't know how you could say that Dark Knight doesn't get rewarded for the 'risk' in its kit, unless you formed your opinion during the Media Tour tooltip doomfest and then didn't bother to update your assessment once the expansion started to play out. The class shows extremely high performance within its role across the board, despite the fact that you still see people saying that they find it weak, or squishy, or whatever. That is pretty much exactly what you want to see if you want there to be a tank with risk/reward built into its kit.

And it's largely being achieved through a defensive toolkit that doesn't feel like a carbon-copy of another tank, hasn't been reduced to a boring, homogenized "25s cooldown, no cost/risk/downside" set of skills, and that rewards fight and system knowledge on a deeper level than the other tanks. These are things that should be protected and preserved for their own sake, even if they didn't carry a corresponding advantage, because nobody should want every tank to be that similar to one another. Again, there are three out of four tanks who do basically function in the same way that people are prescribing for Dark Knight. It's childish and selfish to say "So Dark Knight should also have the exact same set of things that they do and do not have to worry about, because I want all the tanks to play the way that I want them to, instead of just most of the tanks."

It's far from a perfect class and there are plenty of ways to improve it, but if the phrase "no other tank has to _______" enters into your reasoning, then that should automatically become an argument in favor of preserving uniqueness, not washing it away.

[shao32]

GNB does better dps that DRK right now so he is not comfortable sitting ahead and in the JP are demanding damage buffs for WAR and PLD so DRK can potentially become completely irrelevant of that happens.

DRK mitigates the same way every other tank do, TBN + Rampart/Shadow wall as a standard TB mitigation, they don't take advantage of the short recast due not having TB under 25s and due lack of sinergy and lack of vision DRK is the only tank that suffers if the encounter don't have magic damage presented wich is the case of dungeons where DRK is severely underperforming compared to the rest of the roster and the job is no more sturdy than the rest on savage, WAR is hella more effective defensively wise that DRK and GNB is way more versatile at the same time he mitigates as much as the job, DRK holds right now purely by his DPS numbers and nothing else, if they didn't have that it would be SB again but with a worse and a a more nonsensical set of skills.

I'm pretty much against homogenization and I like risk skills that require at least 1 brain cell to use but design it well, DRK is not well designed and that's why they have a lot of skills that feel underwhelming to fill the gap like obliation.

[Lyth]

...

I have to agree with this.

Players love to blame the development team for 'homogenizing jobs', but they virtually never highlight the individual posts and threads from community members responsible for those changes. I don't think that we can even begin to talk about 'skill expression' on jobs if players can't handle basic resource management tasks or correctly anticipate incoming damage patterns. I don't care if DRK is uniquely 'challenging' in this regard, so long as it has dps and mitigation parity. This is the best expansion that we've had since Heavensward.