Dark Knight Megathread

[Archwizard]

Trait for a 3rd charge of Onslaught being oh so useful?

... arguably?

I mean the way I see it,

Every tank:
- Melee Mastery

Every tank except DRK:
- Updates to its on-demand/primary off-tanking tool

PLD (the "big" winner):
- Massive healing during Requiescat, which can be used to trigger Divine Veil and avoid damage lost to Clemency
- Raidwide heal upon activating its raidwide barrier
- damage buff on Spirits Within and contribution to AoE output

GNB:
- An extra charge on a HoT it can throw on allies, or can use an additional time on itself during W2W, or can hold for use during Superbolide
- Bonus Cartridge capacity and increased effect on Bloodfest, which benefits not only Double Down but contributes direct burst potential from Bloodfest
- bonus damage on normal combo finisher

WAR:
- Nearly doubled potency on its one-minute heal
- An extra charge on an oGCD that can, if nothing else, be used for free damage in its opener... or allow for withholding charges for an additional length of downtime at lower damage loss

DRK:
- Two separate, consecutive traits to increase the potency of the same CD (literally the only reason not to combine them is just to fill an extra trait slot)
- A CD reduction for its gap-closer... triggered by a spell we avoid using unless literally no other option is available to us

Enhanced Unmend is the only EW tanking trait doesn't affect a rotational skill or defensive tool. Even arguing it as an effective potency buff on Unmend is marginal given how we're meant to avoid it, not look for opportunities to employ it.
It's a stretch to say any of the others got something as bad or worse.

(Buffs to on-demand avoided as not to create anti-synergy. New, separate defensive given instead.)

Even that is something they could have worked around -- like having a mitigation effect trigger when Dark Arts is gained, or adding a Drain effect when spending Dark Arts, or using self-healing as a substitution for additional mitigation, or (as you yourself have suggested before) just reducing the potency of the barrier outright while adding mitigation on top of it to reach an effectively equal (or marginally offset) potency.
The addition of a separate defensive measure as a "solution" just ends up further bloating our oGCD pool.

Now granting, part of it is the unique nature of TBN since its barrier effectively already is the "upfront" effect that they were trying to give other tanks with Endwalker, but we keep coming back to how they missed the other side of the equation, since they added so much additional sustain to the others after the "upfront" effects expired.

[Shurrikhan]

DRK:
- Two separate, consecutive traits to increase the potency of the same CD (literally the only reason not to combine them is just to fill an extra trait slot)

Two things, though:

First, the number of traits aren't nearly equal anyways, even if we consolidate them per the fact that some powers are split over multiple skills and thus multiple traits (self and external for PLD and WAR's on demands), etc. Something so significant as a complete lack of added sustain, then, is unlikely to be

Second, if there were somehow a trait count cap, this would be the more apt culprit. Much like Bard wouldn't need an Army's Paeon upgrade trait if Army's Paeon itself had just been designed to scale reasonably, Living Shadow wouldn't need additional traits if it just scaled with the rest of the kit (e.g., if the Living Shadow performed one of each attack you have before leaving). (The difference being only that XIV tooltips simultaneously treat us as incapable of intuition and yet leave out the occasional relevant detail, such that they'd sooner write a multi-paragraph tooltip like that of Living Dead or Army's Paeon than possibly reference a previously set variable.)

Even that is something they could have worked around -- like having a mitigation effect trigger when Dark Arts is gained

Right, but my point was that it's not as if it went uncompensated for. No one else gained a completely new defensive ability. That increase in power given by that new ability happened to be weaker than the increase in power given by others' traits, but that's nothing inherent to the form of that power increase.

The on-demand upgrade seemed a no-go, so they gave something else in its place. If there were no such issue, you'd see one more trait and one fewer abilities.



More simply put, though, one needn't point at something they got in order to protest what they haven't gotten, as per the earlier Enhanced Unmend one-liners, when the two are far from mutually exclusive. There's no set number of traits that can be acquired at a given level. There's no set number of traits or abilities across the whole level span. There's not even a set total value across traits or abilities separately. There's only, ideally, parity of kits as a whole.

[Archwizard]

First, the number of traits aren't nearly equal anyways, even if we consolidate them per the fact that some powers are split over multiple skills and thus multiple traits (self and external for PLD and WAR's on demands), etc.

If we're looking specifically at number of traits, no, they aren't equal, because some jobs get new actions instead, and some require traits just to facilitate new abilities.

But when it comes to upgrades overall for an expansion -- both traits and active effects -- there are patterns based on each given role: In this case, every tank and DPS job gets an upgrade every 2 levels (as is standard for an expansion, until some get trimmed or reorganized in the next or later), with tanks receiving an additional Melee Mastery trait at 84 to boost the potencies of their core rotation.
A consistency implemented during the expansion so each job experiences growth at the same points in the leveling process, MSQ and dungeon experience. The mindset behind why we get abilities through leveling at all, rather than at level 1 or at the start of the expansion.

Through that lens, the concept of a job getting consecutive upgrades to the same skill, a difference felt when synching for exactly one dungeon, really is just there to fill a gap in the leveling scheme.