Dark Knight Megathread

[Shurrikhan]

Dark Knight could also have strong self-healing to sustain the risk and reward, or.. since the Dev Team insists that Healers heal more and DPS less, then Dark Knight could just have this high heal-demand that forces Healers to heal more often.

Parse-run communities: I sense a disturbance in the forcelogs.

[NobleWinter]

Dark Knight is supposed to sacrifice their hp for unreasonable amounts of power. The GNB Super Boilide would actually make sense on DRK. I also think they would benefit thematically from two combo chains. One that allows them to gain MP and HP like we have now but another more powerful 3 part combo that sacrificed 5% HP with each attack. The second attack would grant a self haste in my vision and the last attack grant the damage buff like Edge and Flood currently provide. This self damaging combo could be used in conjunction with The Blackest Night to neutralize the hp loss and more daring Tanks could really push the limit with it depending on how much they trust their healers. Idealy switching between the two combos back and fourth with TBN on cooldown would make a perfectly neutral scenario where they can't take more health from themselves then they gain naturally with each individual able to decide how safe or risky they want to be by how often they use each combo tree.

[Absimiliard]

A tank that sacrifices health on anything but an immunity (which even that is questionable) is never going to fly with the community. DPS is king, and anything that lowers DPS (such as a tank forcing healers to heal more often) is going to be shunned into non-existence.

[Drkdays]

Read my hate filled forum thread "DRK tanking. A little bit of pain" and enjoy! I wrote the idea while thinking of a certain character who shall go unnamed (who the entire class is widely acknowledged to be based on) and received a lot of...unenthusiastic replies regarding the changes I suggested, yet the idea keeps circling back around and I'd still like them to take further steps towards making the class better reflect that heroic struggler.

[ExileOmnisoul]

Wow. Good ideas

[Shurrikhan]

A tank that sacrifices health on anything but an immunity (which even that is questionable) is never going to fly with the community. DPS is king, and anything that lowers DPS (such as a tank forcing healers to heal more often) is going to be shunned into non-existence.

That would be literally irrelevant. There is no reason for a HP-sacrificing tank not to gain in bonus throughput and/or eHP commensurately to the HP they spend (and healer throughput they'd thereby consume). It's not like this would be designed in to be solely a weakness, with nothing to leverage in the exchange (spending something for effectively nothing). The larger problems would be only

1. synergies (or less positively termed, dependencies), such as already the case with Living Dead and Benediction (even if that's still a far less than ideal pairing),
2. errant, and especially if varied, community perception as to whether the exchange is worthwhile,
3. DRKs greeding for extra resource when others need timely healing (an added skill ceiling element).

None of those, however, are unique or crippling issues.

[OdinelStarrei]

Oh, are we doing the "What DRK truly is supposed to be in FFXIV" again?

Come on now. You can't even get people to heal LD, a 5 minute cooldown, without complaining about it, after risk-reward playstyles via stance dancing were deleted, HP draining, especially after B4B on DRG got the damage vulnerability up portion removed, is not a realistic direction for almost any job except maybe WAR? High risk playstyles in this game can't work post-ShB, because tanks are straight up are not allowed to be rewarded unevenly in their gameplay loops to keep the all-important "balance" intact. SB DRK and 4.1 WAR prove this, High risk, loads of "wow I was an idiot with my job actions and ruined everything", just to not be an outright detriment to the group and those two only impacted themselves in job resources, not a universal thing like HP. DRK already has to be carried on jobs that utilize raid buffs to be even slightly interesting/competitive, and I don't want to rely on healers pumping me full of HP so I can abuse high-potency draining actions at the detriment of what little remains of their play experience, because that's what would happen to pad ADPS DRK numbers.

Would I PREFER something that interacted with the kit more? Yeah, sure. Honored Sacrifice drains your HP in Bozja, and with enough Fortitude stacks, it's an objective benefit over Noble because you can TBN and significantly reduce the amount of self damage. But that's not something you can take in regular content, because you'd have to either A. Introduce systems on other tanks that could also outright kill them for doing basic rotations to keep disparity low, so healers don't immediately say "We are never taking a DRK in content, they literally kill themselves LMAO" or B. Make DRK so OP with this, people don't get a choice, which completely shatters balance ala HW WAR. Can you imagine doing an opener in something like God Kefka or Oracle or Exdeath or Cruise Chaser where your HP gets dropped to 1, and you're disproportionally punished because you aren't allowed to use your damage rotation for a period of time, unless you are catered to specifically? "Hey guys, I'm going to take this Bahamut triple tankbuster at 70% post-trio, my TBN is getting eaten by my own damage skills, just use more GCD heals on me." That sounds really frustrating! Even if you completely neutralized the HP drain in concept, people are still going to kill themselves, a narrative is going to form, and we're going to be right back to "Delete MNK" and "Dark Arts the Dark Arts" tier.

It all falls down to DRK optimization starting to require negative things to happen to the DRK, while other jobs do not have that stipulation (outside of 3m BLM Convert I guess?). That's enough to ensure something like that never happens to keep the homogeneity intact, without a complete restructuring of the entire job to accommodate what is essentially a parasitic design path through HP restoration increases, eHP increases, ability reworks, and trimming/removing what systems currently exist to reduce bloat. Basically a new job entirely at that point, one that would be far more apt as a DPS than a tank. If we had more barriers than we do, I could actually see this working, but that's tying defensives to offensive actions again, and I'm skeptical about that design direction based on previous removals.

DRK already has two resource gauges, and potential for a third if Darkside ever gets expanded on. Drain that instead, there is MORE than enough Darkside to drain. Do more stuff with revenge procs with TBN, take damage, get Dark Arts, deal damage. Expand that system. We've continued to ask for Haste restoration. Build upon systems, please stop deleting entire sections of the job with no replacements. I think this would be a big backpedal on SE's part considering what happened to tank stances. But then again, whether that's good or not is debatable. I certainly think we need some backpedaling at this point.

I'm not saying it's impossible, or a bad idea, I'm saying that complex and intricate systems are just open to SE messing it up again, they cannot be trusted to make such an experimental system like that properly. So many things could go wrong, and patches/fixes for issues too infrequent. Too far in either direction and you have a dead job, or an overcentralizing one. If you keep reworking and redefining DRK to whatever idea you think it's "supposed" to be, you're just going to further disappoint yourself when it isn't YOUR DRK.

[Keagian]

Snip

I would agree, a risk reward gameplay would not fly going forward. Square is trying to make the game as simple as possible and remove as much possibility for the party to accidently wipe themselves. I would prefer them to follow a similar combo empowering moveset similar to DRG with Raiden Thrust.

Instead of Inner Delirium like we have now, it could instead be a buff that empowers our 123 combo with new animations and additional effects or increased effects. The DRK of old will not work as a Tank sacrificing HP to empowered moves brings too much inconsistency and put too much pressure on healers. Living Dead already causes healers to get stressed and more stress for only the DRK to benefit from is something that I'm sure Square wouldn't want.

We would never go back to SB 4.3 DRK as they made healers redundant to bring to dungeons as DRK and WAR could self heal themselves so much to the point that it brought to question why healers were needed for dungeons if a DRK and WAR could go an entire dungeon without needing healers assistance and ask why not bring another DPS. Which is thus nerfed in ShB so that healers will occasionally need to heal the tank and they had their overall damaged increased should their ever come a point that Tanks somehow learned to keep themselves alive indefinitely without the aid of their party members.

HW DRK while fun, had little synergy across all its skills which was one of its main complaints but its high APM was what made many like it as well as its amazing animations and effects.

With keeping those things in mind, their are few paths to take to give DRKs the mechanical change that many want, make it feel like DRKs of previous expansions but not accidently make another role or job obsolete. DRKs hated Dark Arts Spam but if we were allowed to spam Edge of Shadow, I'm sure many would be fine with it as its not clipping our other GCDs and we don't have to think about when we should use it, it comes out fast enough that we still get the sense of DRKs high APM in HW, if they increased the amount of MP we generated from Syphon Strike and Carve and Spit to 1000mp generated, DRKs would be much happier with the flow of DRK as you would be allowed to use Flood or Edge more often even if it meant they would lower the potency of both skills, as it retains the high paced HW DRK and some sustain of SB DRK. I would have also given Abyssal Drain two charges, so that you would have at least one Abyssal Drain for every wall to wall pull, strong but not overpowered.

[shao32]

HW DRK while fun, had little synergy across all its skills which was one of its main complaints but its high APM was what made many like it as well as its amazing animations and effects.

This is not really true, HW DRK has so much synergy betwen skills and mechanics it was fantastic, DA have synergy with almost everything but the most important aspect is that skill make priority MP system dinamic and the combo system too, you couln't use certain skills without having Darkside on running around and even on the defensive department have sinery with DA, everything was conected somehow.

What ppl complained about HW DRK was the DA effects of Dark dance and Dark passenger that make the enemies blind and increase your dodge chance making it contra producent with the proc system and generate MP by being hit with Blood price if you use them at the same time but those who complained about that never understud that the MP generate phase and the dodge/make blind everyone should be used separately and you become so strong defensively on mass pulls that was really fun to manage.

[Claire_Pendragon]

snip

While i partially agree with you, theres more to it than that. BUT I'd also say HW DRK had more synergy than SB, and ShB. Also, the tanks in general were usually lacking in their designs anyways. WAR was the closest to having its abilities work well with eachother.

anyways, back on point, your statement is "they work well together, as long as you dont use them in any conjoining way together..." which basically means "they dont work well together".
Also, DRKs animations were (and 1 still is) clunky, and exceeded the GCD when double weaved, which dark arts required double weaving, as it joined with oGCDs. which means the design of the class having "long oGCD animations that cant be double weaved" didnt work well with "you have to double weave by design".

this isnt to say i didnt love HW DRK, i absolutely loved it, and its been my favorite tank, much less favorite version of DRK.