Dark Knight Megathread

[Awful]

I can't bring myself to level DRK anymore I tried and I got to the 97 dungeon with a friend and I could feel how boring it is to play and how terrible the MP generation is, the scarlet Delirium moves feel so underwhelming when WAR gets a new animation for Nascent (A previous expansion ability no less) that's a FREAKING CHAINSAW SLAM they made the new animation so good, where's the weight and power in DRKs animations? It's truly amazing how little thought it takes to play DRK and it feels just so bad from mobs not noticing you with the new dash, how my MP just is bottomed out, when you don't have a gauge OR Delirium you just have old ass Blood Weapon and they just give MP for that extra crappy Edge/Flood.

We've truly hit DRK rock bottom this expansion, I mean I know we've been slowly getting everything taken from our job since SB but holy kupo nuts how much more are they gonna take away at this point?

[Derio]

Hopefully they buff PLD to be right under GNB so I can go play that instead.

[Ryaduera]

So out of curiosity I decided to do the math on how much GNB and PLD can out mitigate damage compared to DRK. I'm ignoring Ramparts, Reprisal, Arm's Length, and parry rates, also ignoring the passive block rate from PLD, for the sake of keeping the math simple. I've been using a 2 minute window, so let's keep using that. Here's how I am doing the math.

Every cumulative second of mit added together for how many seconds of total uptime the mit has within the 2 minute window I have been using. In this case if we end up at a number being a decimal (like 7.5) we are rounding down. Then divide it by every second in a 2 minute window (Divided by 120) to determine the average damage reduction, this should be a decent indicator of how much less damage the other tanks take in comparison, but I'm not 100% convinced this math will be actually accurate. since I am not calculating overlapped mits with diminishing returns I'm also not entirely sure how accurate it will be for actual damage reductions, but it should be a solid indicator of damage reduction differences between the tanks. I am leaving out Warrior because it's power comes from self healing and is the outlier for tanks whereas I feel GNB and PLD sustain and reductions are pretty solid standards. Also obviously pulls don't last 2 full minutes, but pulls this expansion have been beefier and have room for 2 minute burst windows in them, so the logic should apply even if the math doesn't.

For PLD if you consider you can HS once every 21s roughly, we're going to call it once every 25s since, like I said, it's only "roughly" every 21s and we want consistency here. 120/25 is 4.8 casts of HS, which is split between 4 seconds of 27.75% damage reduction (Remember, since it's 2 buffs it has diminishing returns on itself) and 4 more seconds of 15%. That's 4x4 each, so 16 and 16. Bulwark lasts 10 seconds and while it isn't a flat damage reduction, it's essentially 20% reduction for 10s on a 90s cooldown, so you can use it twice in a 2 minute window. So to sum it up: ((16*27.75)+(16*15)+(20*20))/120=9.03% Reduction

GNB is basically the same math but instead we change the 20% reduction on Bulwark for 10% reduction on Camouflage and raise its uptime (Ignoring Parry rate as we ignore PLD Passive block): ((16*27.75)+(16*15)+(40*10))/120=9.036% Reduction

DRK we will start with full charges of Oblation, meaning we can get 3 off in a 2 minute window, but outside of that that's the only thing we have for personal and unique mits. Then we do the math again for magic damage, knowing full well magic damage is so rare and you almost never would use Dark Mind off cooldown to any effect. First, physical damage. Since it's just 3 Oblation charges at 30 seconds of 10% reduction, this is easy: (10*30)/120=2.5% reduction.

Include Dark Mind, you can get 2 off since it has a 60 second cooldown. Still easy math here: ((10*30)+(20*20))/120=5.833%

Honestly this surprised me. I thought DRK would pull through in magic damage reduction with Dark Mind in a 2 minute window, but it looks like being the "Magic Damage Tank" isn't even actually happening when the math is said and done. Keep in mind, the actual disparity should be even larger after considering PLD Block and the Camouflage parry rate, but I don't really want to add the math for those steps. As I said, though, it would only increase that gap. In longer durations, DRK should catch up in magic damage reduction eventually because Dark Mind cooldown is 30s less than Bulwark and Camouflage, but honestly 2 minutes is already far too long to be holding a pull. I think technically DRK pulls a bigger average in a 1 minute window for magic damage as well, but I'm unsure because longer durations will start to show the weakness of Oblations longer cooldown. In pulls you are taking mixed damage at best so you're probably somewhere between the 2 averages, anyway, so I'm not convinced that the Dark Mind cooldown can even help it catch up. In fact, I'm quite convinced it can't when you consider the far superior cooldown of the even better cooldowns the other tanks get at level 82.

For clarity's sake, this math is basically saying that if over the course of 2 minutes 1,000,000 damage is applied to the tanks (Just using an easy to quantify number) in equal amounts of damage over each second (8,333 damage per second) the PLD reduces it by 83,666, GNB reduces it by 90,300 damage, and DRK reduces it by 25,000, or 58,333 if it's magical. This is without standard tank mits like the standard 40%, 20%, 10%, and 20% slow from Arm's Length that is basically 20% reduction as well, as those are standards and this math is intended to show the difference between tanks unique cooldowns.

So yeah pretty sure Oblation just isn't enough and TBN isn't as efficient as it looks at a glance when you consider the total HP Shielded is about equal to the total HP a PLD can restore within the same 2 minute window. In a scenario with constant incoming damage, healing is harder to calculate actual efficiency since overhealing is health not used that shielding doesn't suffer from, but at this difference does that even matter? I also calculated the healing without crits because that complicates the math a lot. I think we have 15% crit rates now without melds and about 150% crit potency and I'm not about to do that part of the math.

These numbers show that DRK isn't even succeeding at the thing it was meant to succeed at. Oblation just isn't enough.

EDIT: Just did Expert as PLD and realized blocking is not 20% reduction, it's 16%, so to adjust the number, ((16×27.75)+(16×15)+(16×20))/120 =8.36% or reducing 83,666 from 1,000,000 damage over 2 minutes.

[Tunda]

dark knight is so bad i leveled the job as first tank level 100 but bro i never bother buying gear it is just a scuffed version of warrior.. i mean comparing dark knight vs warrior it is disrespectful to warrior

[Zairava]

I thought about making another thread to make it more center stage but I'll put it my general thought or feedback here instead.

I'm honestly shocked you somehow managed to make it feel worse to play than before, I didn't think we could go any lower.

Let me get the good out of the way:

• The Delirium combo abilities look cool, even Quietus got a glow up.
• Disesteem also looks cool, doesn't really add much to Living Shadow, but it's there. We still don't really need to think about LS as a whole, though.
• Shadow Wall's upgrade is nice. We still need to rely on healers to live if we're doing big pulls, which I'm thankful stayed.

aaaand..that's about it for the good. Onto the criticism.

Look, I don't know who's in charge of Dark Knight but it's still just an unholy amalgamation of random abilities that just somehow manages to be playable and not eat itself alive. It's still an uninspired mechanically devoid mess.

• I'm not sure if it's an oversight or not but we can definitely feel the drop in mp per minute, especially for active TBN usage.
• Blood Gauge is still literally just a carbon copy of the Beast Gauge.
• Darkside still just kind of...exists? if your TBN's don't pop there's a high chance it can fall off.
• Living Shadow is still pretty forgettable, while Disesteem helps ever so slightly it doesn't really add much if anything outside of it being a GCD and not an oGCD, which isn't relevant to Living Shadow.
• Burst downtime is still woefully boring, and even in bursts it can get stale now. While the apm decrease while bursting is nice for more easily weaving defensives, you went too far with it in my opinion.

As I said before, job mechanics virtually don't exist, they haven't existed since Shadowbringers launched. Which, mind, feedback regarding this mechanically vacant mess of a job has existed since ShB as well.

I'm far past the point of "Just wait and see" or "wait till next expansion" It's been 5 years since shadowbringers launched, this is the third expansion now.

We don't need less mp per minute, we need MORE. We don't say MP management doesn't exist anymore just to be overdramatic. Decreasing the mp per minute doesn't suddenly fix what was lost or what it was. It's still just making sure it doesn't go below a certain threshold.

What I desire is active MP management. Actual resource management. Edge of Shadow and Flood of Shadow are boring abilities by design, and Darkside is..well..oh right we rarely if ever need to actually think about it.

If you want to bring more individuality to jobs, I've got some spitball suggestions for DRK.

You already have framework for it. You gave what's essentially Dark Arts 2.0 to a healer and if you think I'm swapping mains to Sage just because it has it you're out of your mind.

Give us more combo enders. Give them effects we need to maintain, give us a weaponskill slot that changes to different weaponskills based on which enders we used. Make DA empower said weaponskills or alter them. Go wild.

Give us more MP per minute. Like, enough to make it feel like we actually need to maintain it with skills. Revamp Blood Price to cost Darkside or Blood Gauge and it in turn allow us to leech MP for every weaponskill landed. No, I don't mean like Blood Weapon now. I mean for every mob hit. While you're at it, make Blood Weapon's effect do the same, like it used to. Make the Blood Gauge have interactions with MP like it did in Stormblood if you decide to keep it at all.

Make maintaining Darkside not an absolute snore or completely forgettable. I don't care if it's reverted back to Heavensward where it falls off if your MP ticks to 0 but it doesn't drain it(like in StB), or you give us an action like Scourge on the GCD that lets us maintain it.

Dot interaction (again Scourge) and give us some DoT interaction with Salt and Darkness that makes it spread to all enemies hit.

You already have all that you need whether it's something that you removed (which is a long list) or what we have now. The world is your oyster. Please use it and your creativity. I want this bit where DRK is the punching bag to end. DRK was a selling point for me back when I joined (mid 2017) and it's actually miserable at this point to see it keep getting lower and it's at the point where I'm just getting apathetic. I don't care if it's bottom tank dps or top tank dps. I just want it to be more fun and enjoyable to play.

[Ryaduera]

You already have framework for it. You gave what's essentially Dark Arts 2.0 to a healer and if you think I'm swapping mains to Sage just because it has it you're out of your mind.

Let's make a list

>Dark Arts 2.0 is on Sage
>Scourge 2.0 is on GNB
>Plunge was removed, replaced with non-damage, and WAR has 3
>Low Blow potency was removed, given to all tanks
>Reprisal potency was removed, given to all tanks
>Dark Dance was removed, reworked to remove evasion and just reduce damage, given to GNB
>Sole Survivor was removed and other tanks were given self heals in that patch, we have one now but every tank got something else, too, which still sets DRK behind
>TBN Kept DRK in an okay spot defensively, but the other tanks got their answers to it that were significantly superior to TNB
>Dark Passenger was removed, but given back to us as Shadowbringer, but without the Dark Arts component and without the blind. (Blinding enemies could be a cool way to buff DRK defensive abilities in pulls maybe? PLD gets block, DRK gets... Darkness? IDK just a thought)

TBN should consume Darkside time, too. Thought that since they reworked Darkside, it would make it interesting and give interactivity to your Darkside timer that you always overcap on.

[Ryaduera]

Math boy again...

Let's take that 1,000,000 damage over 2 minutes and see how it fares after everything is brought through the ringer full scope. Let's assume you are using short cd personals as an overlap to other cooldowns, using it off cooldown on your own. This will cause diminishing returns in this 2 minute window, so we need to do math a few times here but I've already established the equation. You can Ramparts first to make the cd work for you into Reprisal Into the 40% and cycle another Reprisal and another Ramparts into this mix, you can use Arm's Length (Calculated as 20% due to the slow effect) once to fill in any gap. All tanks can fit in 2 other gaps with their personal mits, so we can just do basic tank cooldowns and simply add the effect of personals, then add the effect of short cd personals, then in the same order subtract those percentages from the beginning number starting at the base value and using the modified number to simulate diminishing returns for short cd personals. Dark Knight, however, has to fill in its gaps with Oblation and suffers less diminishing returns than the others. For PLD and GNB I will again ignore passive blocking and Camouflage parry rate.

Base tank cooldowns: ((10×30)+(20×40)+(20×15)+(40×15))÷120=16.666%

2 Bulwarks: 2.666%

PLD should be 19.333%

2 Camos: 3.333%

GNB should be 19.999%

Now factor these into the 1,000,000 damage figure. PLD: reduces by 193,333 totaling 806,667 | GNB reduces by 199,999 totaling 800,001

Using 25s on Shelltron the math is the same as with GNB so we do this and apply to both. HS and HoC would reduce by 5.7%

5.7% of 806,667 is 45,980 meaning PLD damage reduction with diminished returns is 760,686 (Rounded to the nearest whole number) from PLD

5.7% of 800,001 is 45,600 meaning GNB damage reduction with diminished returns is 754,401 (Rounded to the nearest whole number) from GNB

Now DRK can probably execute the entire defensive rotation without overlapping so we just add Oblation to one instance then add both Oblation and Dark Mind to a second and calculate both.

Start with Oblation at 2.5% add it to the regular cooldowns and come up with 19.1666, reducing damage by 191,666 from the base 1,000,000 damage totaling 808,334 damage taken. Now add Dark Mind, 20% at 20s total in a 2 minute window, an additional 3.333%, or an additional 33,333 from the 1,000,000 total. 775001 damage taken. Still MORE damage taken than the others even with magic, and again, you are somewhere inbetween anyway since it's usually mixed damage in pulls.

So let's factor in healing. At ilvl 696 my 1000 potency Clemency heals for a rough average of 32000 health, so if we add all the potency over the 2 minute window and take a 1 potency heal, which would be 32.

PLD healing from Holy Circle is once every 3 GCD's, so we do 120/2.5 to determine the amount of GCD's there are then we divide the result by 3 to see how many Holy Circles we get and multiply that by the healing potency. It's 16 Holy Circles, so 6400 cure potency. Imperator can be used to twice in a 2 minute window, so we add it in with 400 potency on each set of 4 for an additional 3200 healing, however since these are 8 GCD's we adjust and take away 3 Holy Circle potencies. 8,400 potency so far, but now we factor in HS, assuming you take every tick of healing from it before refreshing and use at every opportunity in a sensible way. That's 5 HS at 1200 potency each for 6000 additional potency. That's 14,400 potency healing in a 2 minute window for a total of 460,800 without crits or Ramparts buffing.

GNB was already established earlier as 7200 over 2 minutes for a total of 230,400 healing.

But how much does DRK shield? in 120 seconds you can use TBN 8 times. 25% of that same ilvl health is 41,798 value. Multiply this by the amount of TBNs in a single 2 minute window, which is of course 8, but the last TBN happens on the 2 minute mark and subsequently happens outside our parameters making 7, and we get 292,586 shielding.

With these numbers if we apply both this leaves...

DRK and a remainder of 481,965.
GNB with a remainder of 524,001.
PLD with a remainder of 299,886.

Interestingly this means on paper GNB should put more stress on healers, but it doesn't. My theory about this is that GNB has longer durations for cooldowns so regen effects and Kardia/Fairy heals are enough to keep a steady maintenance. Basically GNB mitigation is more stable and less noticeable and higher in cumulative value, but DRK has TBN fall off and runs out of cooldowns and their heath spikes down, it's less stable and more erratic causing large dips even though DRK is reducing damage by a greater amount. I cannot be certain of this, but it is curious nobody thinks GNB sustain is a problem. It could have something to do with how I simulated diminishing returns as well, it should in practice be a larger damage reduction value from HoC but it shouldn't be so much that it makes a huge difference. Perhaps it has more to do with the timing of the healing from HoC as well, but I don't think raw math can calculate why DRK feels so much weaker. The theory I'd put my money behind is that the healing crit rate really effects it, which should be possible to calculate by isolating the value of heals that are critting and multiply them by the crit modifier, but the idea of augmenting chance into this irks me, especially with overheal being real.

This is why I think DRK would be fine if Oblation had a small 100 potency heal for 12 seconds and Dark Mind worked just fine.

EDIT Okay so tank crit rates in my ilvl should be 15%ish and I need to know. Crits are definitely about 150% healing (tested with Clemency) so now I have to do this, too...

Take PLD healing of 473,600 and calculate 15% at 71,040. This is the value that would have crit on average, amplify by 150% by multiplying this by 1.5 and subtract the 71,040 or just multiply by .5 and we have 35,520 additional healing, healing for 509,120.

Same process for GNB and get 17280 additional healing making 247,680 healing still leaving a larger discrepancy than DRK has. Crit healing is not responsible for the difference in feel. My guess is it's the consistency of damage reduction making it easier to heal them.

EDIT: Technically I think the 8th TBN falls on the 120s mark so the number should also be lower by 1 TBN if we're being fair, but also I should have taken away 3 Holy Circle casts instead of 2, so the healing should be 400 less potency as well, but this changes very little for how the numbers fare, changes adjusted. Just pointing that out now. A possibility to explain the GNB feeling tankier is the 50% parry rate for a collective 40s over that 2 minutes is probably doing a lot more work than I had assumed and I'd be curious to know more behind the scenes in the game how Parry and Block rates are determined (Does 50% in Camo mean my 10% parry rate becomes 15 or does it become 60? Pretty sure it's the latter but cannot confirm very easily, will require testing.). The other possibility for the discrepancy in tankiness from GNB to DRK is that healing always, well, heals damage that's been done, and DRK can't actually heal damage that has been done outside a 1 minute and 2 minute cd, so in those gaps the DRK takes damage that just sits there until healed where GNB has a regen effect on the most of the time. We should be able to see this in WAR as well since it also has similar damage reduction values to DRK (BW is better for reduction than Oblation by a long shot, but no other unique damage reduction tool, just healing) but WAR can heal for such absurd amounts that it doesn't really matter what their damage reduction even is. A third factor could be that DRK does have to drop defensives sometimes, especially if you do choose to stack some, so that damage all comes in at once and drops the DRK lower faster than the GNB who has a more steady drop rate, allowing for more time to heal the damage instead of requiring a lot of fast paced heals for a short time.

[Karkarov]

Lol dude lay off. TBN is literally the best mitigation in the game and the reason Dark was the best boss tank for most of EW. The problem is we got screwed on mana regen, less mana = less tbn = significantly less mitigation and less dps.

Right now Gunbreaker continues to be the best tank DPS, as it was in EW, and might have been in ShB too I don't recall. Either way everything past that is meaningless. Best Tank DPS = optimal for all savage as a second tank.
Paladin currently has the best mitigation, which means they are the easiest to keep alive. Best mitigation = best main tank for savage.

Warrior is in the same place it was in EW, great is newb friendly dungeon, not great in the hard content. Self heals don't matter in savage. Dark sadly went from being probably the toughest dungeon tank but great in savage to just being sub optimal all around. But again, if we get our mp regen back that will help with this considerably.

[Ryaduera]

Lol dude lay off. TBN is literally the best mitigation in the game and the reason Dark was the best boss tank for most of EW.

This statement has been false for years.

[Ayan_Calvesse]

Anyone else feel the Delrium>Scarlet Delrium+Comeuppance+Torcleaver feels like a weaker version of the Confitieor combo?