Dark Knight Megathread

[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.