Dark Knight Megathread

[Archwizard]

Like I said, the bare minimum I expect to read in the patch notes this Tuesday is:

-TBN duration increased to 8 seconds

I wish I could expect a full rework to DRK's mitigation and sustain on Tuesday, but more likely we're going to see a few small tweaks like this, and some vague mentions in the next Live Letter of a rework... to come in 6.1.

[Undeadfire]

Dark Mind > Camouflage, 5% higher shorter time, vs a 50% parry 5% lower longer time.

Can shorten the cooldown on Oblation to 30s, I reckon I was being pretty mean.

Point is Oblation is a longer consistency. Intervention is 5% stronger 4s lower, weaker than Oblation after 4s, Paladin has to give up a cooldown to stay ahead of Oblation. Paladin isn't allowed to freely pop the regens, it needs the 2nd cast on more urgency plus always needs uptime. Oblation can keep the cooldown rolling for it's availability.

[Undeadfire]

I wish I could expect a full rework to DRK's mitigation and sustain on Tuesday, but more likely we're going to see a few small tweaks like this, and some vague mentions in the next Live Letter of a rework... to come in 6.1.

Reworks have never happened unless the job was so poorly performing it effected the Week 1 kills too hard, happened in Edens Gate, AKA Ninja.

[Sazuzaki]

I think it's a split chance a rework will happen sooner or later. It's very obvious they don't know what they are doing with DRK, and the EW iteration didn't have enough time to develop. So I could def see it in the future, if not during 6.x

[Crater]

TBN maybe trash in Dungeons,

It's not. It's really, really not. Setting Bloodwhetting aside, TBN's ability to mitigate sustained incoming damage in scenarios like dungeon pulls is better than the mitigation and healing of Holy Sheltron until you reach about 6000 incoming DPS, and better than the mitigation+healing of Heart of Corundum until you reach roughly 10000 incoming DPS.

This graph assumes stats that are close to current endgame, with TBN on a 77000 HP tank (roughly accurate in full gear in a party) and ~16.5 HP healed per point of potency on Sheltron/Corundum (which I believe is a highball estimate):



This is the damage taken after other mitigation like Rampart, Shadow Wall/Sentinel, your healer's Kerachole/Exaltation/Temperance/whatever, etc. The hardest-hitting pull in any current level 90 dungeon tops out at around 6-6.5k incoming DPS, unmitigated, which tends to get dropped to 3.5-4.5k after standard mitigation like Rampart/Sentinel/healer stuff.

There's a caveat here in that this assumes that Holy Sheltron is being used once every 22.4 seconds, which is how long it takes to generate 50 Oath Gauge, but on some dungeon pulls you can come in with 100 banked gauge to get an extra use - and in those cases, Holy Sheltron does overtake TBN by a small margin. But A) That's not exactly leaving TBN in the dust or anything anyway, and B) Heart of Corundum has no such advantage, and people are hardly crying out for big HoC buffs in dungeon pulls.
(It's also assuming a fight of arbitrary length where things work out to be continuous, that incoming damage is uniformly distributed over time, etc, but these don't really fundamentally change the relation.)

People always fixate on "TBN breaks in a couple seconds and then you have no mitigation!" but they forget that until it breaks, it's effectively acting as 2-4 seconds of Hallowed Ground, and that they should be getting a significantly higher number of uses out of TBN than the other skills (save Sheltron with pre-banked Gauge). That adds up in a very obvious way once you start looking at actual numbers on it.

If people subjectively don't like the skill for whatever reason, then that's one thing, but objectively, mathematically speaking, TBN is a very strong dungeon skill relative to the PLD and GNB equivalents.

[RyuDragnier]

The thing is, due to how TBN is set up, you do NOT want to use mitigation with it, you want TBN to break, else you've wasted 3000 MP that could have gone to more damage with Edge/Flood. That's where the problem lies, IMO with TBN. What you want is to replace what TBN gives you for breaking, while also removing its effects on your DPS. Remove the MP cost on TBN, change it to 25s cooldown. TBN breaking burst heals you, TBN not breaking gives you a small heal. That changes TBN from something you want to break else it's a DPS loss, to something that you don't care whether it breaks or not, encouraging mitigation use alongside it.

[Crater]

The thing is, due to how TBN is set up, you do NOT want to use mitigation with it

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is the most insane shit I've ever read. Have you not been using TBN in conjunction with other mitigation in big dungeon pulls where you're taking easily 3-5x as much damage as it takes to break one? Did we just solve the mystery of why a bunch of you guys think Dark Knight is bad in dungeons?

You are not in danger of ever not having a TBN break in a dungeon double-pull, no matter what mitigation you use alongside it, in any situation other than "A WHM is spamming Holy and enemies haven't built up Stun resistance yet" or "There are two enemies left from a 7-enemy pull and they're about to die too" - situations where you don't really need any mitigation because you're taking close to zero damage.

Using TBN while Rampart is up is the equivalent of a 31.25% shield without Rampart; using TBN while Shadow Wall is up is the equivalent of a ~35.7% shield without Shadow Wall. It makes an enormous difference to your overall survivability and you should always be trying to pair TBN with standard mitigation in a situation like a dungeon pull where you know that incoming damage is high.

[Archwizard]

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is the most insane shit I've ever read. Have you not been using TBN in conjunction with other mitigation in big dungeon pulls where you're taking easily 3-5x as much damage as it takes to break one? Did we just solve the mystery of why a bunch of you guys think Dark Knight is bad in dungeons?

Honestly, I'm speaking mostly from the experience of trying to heal DRKs. Even paired with TBN, Oblation does not nearly stand up to the buffs Sheltron/HoS/RI get at 82, and you definitely feel that difference trying to keep them up; any other tank honestly feels like they're doing half the work for you. Once TBN's down it usually feels like the DRK is hardly using any mitigation at all and they just drop like a stone, and that only gets worse on a Barrier specialist, even popping all my CDs.

If you're not on a WHM, healing a DRK feels awful.

Though with some of the DRKs I've been playing with, it's entirely plausible they weren't using any mitigation other than TBN like you're asserting. I was a bit too occupied trying to panic-barrier to keep them out of WD to double check.

[Weetzlo]

TBN will get better as HP values continue to rise, but right now with HP values where they are on an item level 577 DRK, TBN is worth roughly 1500 heal potency of shield. Holy Sheltron offers 1000 potency coupled with % based mitigation, Bloodwhetting offers 1600 just in single target situations, also with % based mitigation, and Corundum offers 900 potency again offering % based mitigation. "But Weeztlo," I hear you typing "you can just stack oblation with it." which is true, but 10% would still be the weakest mit of all of them and the other tanks' are baked in so they get it every single 25 seconds. TBN is good, not great. I think the first step would be just delete the mana cost. Then using it properly is rewarded instead of simply not punished. Yes, parsers will 100% deliberately take avoidable blows to squeeze even more DPS out of it but they do that already to greed melee uptime, doesn't mean the rest of the community has to suffer as a result.

[OdinelStarrei]

Honestly, I'm speaking mostly from the experience of trying to heal DRKs. Even paired with TBN, Oblation does not nearly stand up to the buffs Sheltron/HoS/RI get at 82, and you definitely feel that difference trying to keep them up; any other tank honestly feels like they're doing half the work for you. Once TBN's down it usually feels like the DRK is hardly using any mitigation at all and they just drop like a stone, and that only gets worse on a Barrier specialist, even popping all my CDs.

If you're not on a WHM, healing a DRK feels awful.

Though with some of the DRKs I've been playing with, it's entirely plausible they weren't using any mitigation other than TBN like you're asserting. I was a bit too occupied trying to panic-barrier to keep them out of WD to double check.

I can back this up as someone who does DRK in Expert fairly frequently. TBN is overrated, this is certain. But the two things it does INCREDIBLY well are the low recast timer, and how incredibly effective it is when you stack mitigation on top of it. Flat shields don't suffer from the multiplicative effects of percentage mitigations, TBN starts actually earning it's vaunted reputation under stacking. Oblation isn't strong enough to really pronounce this effect on it's own, but when you combine Rampart + Oblation + Reprisal with TBN sprinkled in between, you'll find the shields last quite a bit longer. It doesn't help that most DRKs who walking around right now throw Abyssal Drain at the first available opportunity rather than waiting until they can get maximum value vs overhealing themselves, without all the good parts of Bloodwhetting.

This is actually why I don't really understand why DRK + SGE is so vehemently bashed, since SGE's dedicated percentage based mitigation support skills mesh incredibly well with TBN and DRK's own personal mitigation. (Protraction for HP/Sacred Soil for mit also falls under this stipulation, I had no issues healing DRKs on SCH, provided they weren't idiots) I guess if the mobs don't die quick enough and both parties run out of resources it gets awful, but the pulls would have to last like a minute straight. Nevermind, I know exactly why, it's because LD is a ******** trashfire and we can't do anything about it if the SGE has already used their instants. FFS

Because it takes so much more effort to reach basic competency in big pulls, compared to 1 CD making you functionally better than invulnerable, the chasm on the surface is about as wide as the distance between Earth and the moon to a healer, PARTICULARLY if the DRK is bad, and are convinced the job is unplayable garbage versus requiring an entirely different, and frankly, unintuitive mitigation mindset for functional, but comparably worse results.