Dark Knight Megathread

[Luizgazen]

If the life steal is the only change we get this patch it is slap in the face of drk players, a really non-fix to a fundamentally broken skill that needs to be completely remade and ignoring several other issues with the entire kit.

[Marxam]

I really hope the change to LD isn't the only one they plan on implementing, because if so I am extremely disappointed.

my concern atm is if LD still wears off once hp hits 100%. Also, "significant" amount could be anything from healing yourself back to full after the healer died in dungeon pulls or just a 400 potency heal on attacks i.e. BW/NF. Honestly, adding a convalescence effect (similar to ToB) would have been enough to help the healers. This just means that you HAVE to be attacking to help the healers and sometimes that's not feasible with certain mechanics. Gonna have to wait till the full patch notes to see, especially after the mentioned WAR adjustments.

Gonna say it now, nerfing other tanks to make DRK better is not good game design.

[Absurdity]

I also worry about the "significant" part. It is either only as strong as Bloodwhetting which still means healers need to pump resources into the invuln that they simply don't need to spend on other tanks, or it will be significantly stronger than Bloodwhetting at which point you might run into the issue of healing yourself to full too early, leading to you getting flattened because you cancelled LD too early by doing your job "too well". Either way it is still just an inferior version of Holmgang with a longer cooldown and shorter duration.


But I guess we'll see.

[Archwizard]

The LL was disappointingly brief in its discussion of job changes. Could be tone-deaf, could be miscommunication, could be just one part of an adjustment they didn't completely explain.
I'm still reserving judgement until we see the Patch Notes and can evaluate the full extent of what this means.

But if they're still reading and evaluating player reactions: make sure the "unkillable" effect of Living Dead doesn't end early when you fully heal, or this change will be self-defeating.

EDIT: I've been browsing for any live translations of the last LL, no luck on that front though I'm not in the translation discord, so I've just been compiling bits and pieces from reddit.

They will decrease some of the level requirements of job skills so that low level dungeons will be less boring as you will have more skills to use.

• DRK - implied that DRK can recover from Walking Dead by themself. Also mentioned that some actions have been given charges, and attacking without being affected by latency (my speculation: Blood Weapon is the only thing that is significantly affected by latency afaik).
• General - changing balance for low-level content to improve jobs without enough to do, specifically lowering the level that skills are acquired. He also said something about "reducing the potency of range A, making range B usable at the same time, etc." with regard to low-level content, but TBH I have no idea what he's talking about.

From the Crystal Conflict playtest, some people also mentioned seeing Sole Survivor return in PvP, as well as a new PvP ability where DRKs "seem to grow wings and send a massive blast of darkness in multiple directions."

[Jakulo]

Realistically, if the goal was to let drk save themselves from LD, then significant heal could be 20-25% hp per gcd. If it’s 20%, then latency would be a problem if you want to not rely on healers but you won’t end it early if you get all five hits. If it’s 25%, then you would be able to save yourself consistently but you will end it a few seconds early.

Maybe extending the duration to 12s could help but we’ll have to wait and see. Also I’m 90% sure bloodweapon will be change to stacks since Yoshi-p said one of drk’s ability will be changed to stacks and can be used no matter the latency which can only really mean bloodweapon.

[Oizen]

Realistically, if the goal was to let drk save themselves from LD, then significant heal could be 20-25% hp per gcd. If it’s 20%, then latency would be a problem if you want to not rely on healers but you won’t end it early if you get all five hits. If it’s 25%, then you would be able to save yourself consistently but you will end it a few seconds early.

Maybe extending the duration to 12s could help but we’ll have to wait and see. Also I’m 90% sure bloodweapon will be change to stacks since Yoshi-p said one of drk’s ability will be changed to stacks and can be used no matter the latency which can only really mean bloodweapon.

I'm really hoping its not a boring lock to gcds only.

Would be much more interesting of a skill if it self healed off of everything, making an interesting decision of saving part of your burst to ensure healing with Living Dead or blowing it all for damage.

[ForteNightshade]

I'm really hoping its not a boring lock to gcds only.

Would be much more interesting of a skill if it self healed off of everything, making an interesting decision of saving part of your burst to ensure healing with Living Dead or blowing it all for damage.

Not really. Putting saying, Shadowbringer, into LD means it no longer aligns with the next buff window, making it a DPS loss. Therefore, it'd be better for the healer to throw you an oGCD. The only oGCD that could be okay as a dump would be Flood. I'd say Curve and Spit or Plunge but they may not align, and you'd never hold onto them just for LD. Well, not CS at least.

My hope is once you cleanse the healing factor of Walking Dead, it just stays active for 10 seconds regardless. Alas, that requires some actual foresight. So I'm not holding my breath.

[Undeadfire]

The only way to make LD Lifesteal effective enough is to effect every attack possible than focused GCDs only, or it's still going to massively suck. After trying to speed run using Drk myself, I want to keep a 10 foot pole to keep it away from me, my goodness trying to fit in so much O-GCDs and trying to stay up to date on the mechanic situation is brain breaking.

[Keagian]

One change I do want to see that will make dungeon DRK less squishy is to just bring Abyssal Drain back to a GCD and make it the second AoE combo after Unleash.

We never use it in Raids and Trails anyway and since it’s an GCD AoE, we won’t be using it on our opener, so no button bloat there. Why they haven’t done this yet is beyond me.

[Lyth]

I think that they're still trying to gauge feedback on their ideas, or else we would have seen more specifics about the change and possibly even a proof of concept.

As long as the heal or die condition exists on Living Dead, there are going to be player complaints about it and there will be a need for UI changes to support the action's use. It fundamentally does not make sense for Living Dead to have a longer cooldown than Holmgang while having an extra punishment condition attached. If they just get rid of that instant death condition, then I think pretty much everyone will be happy with the proposed self-healing component regardless of how it gets tuned. If they don't, it's going to come up again and again.

Ideally I'd like to see something done about Oblation's underwhelming effect as well, but if they get Living Dead and Blood Weapon right I could learn to live with it.