Dark Knight Megathread

[Colt47]

Traditionally DRK turns pain into power. That's why in some iterations of the job they sacrifice HP to do damage to an opponent. In other iterations, they drain life and MP from opponents with sword skills or apply status debuffs with certain attacks. It's why DRK was a very odd choice for a tank job since the majority of what they are about is being a DPS more than being a tank.

Also, because of this theme DRK is the only tank coming out of Shadowbringers that did not get additional healing in their kit to balance out the lower defense of tanks in general this expansion. They effectively "work" at end game because self healing doesn't have as much meaning when attacks are more binary in nature. In fact, Shields are better at end game since it lets someone to go past 100% hp and survive things they have no business surviving, like some tank busters.

Truth is Tank design in general is kind of broken right now compared to other MMOs. Tanks in other MMOs have higher defense and your hope is that the healer keeps you alive instead of letting your hp drop to 5%, they start healing, and then you just fall over. In this MMO right now, you just run through a dungeon like a crazy person and flip the healer the bird if you're a warrior, because you'll just pop defiance and self heal your way out of everything while rotating in holmgang if the group gets cheeky, because all the tanks except DRK are self healers. Then you get to end game and stuff hits so hard that you suddenly have to use mits that you didn't know existed. Like p3s has stuff that one shots 100% HP tanks if they don't blow at least one mit and a healer or DPS used something as well.

Like if that is the direction the FFXIV team wants to go than DRK needs a complete rework to even hope to get there. And if they do that they likely are going to make someone angry on the forums given how many people have complained about samurai simply losing Kaiten. At least the DPS jobs have only one purpose to deal with: Tanks have to both take blows well and do damage.

******

So on the constructive part of this whole thing...

1) I believe that TBN does need to have some kind of self heal component instead of being a potential refresh on darkside if your shield breaks. If they do that then it pretty much goes into full cooldown status and no longer uses MP, which is used mostly to determine how many times someone can use Edge of Shadow / Flood of Darkness.

2) Probably controversial but they need to get rid of Blood spiller / Quietus. For one they were a plague on the leveling experience through the entirety of shadowbringers because before level 68 you didn't even have delirium, and you couldn't gain blood gauge off aoe combo, only the souleater combo. They also are just potency increased GCDs with no benefits otherwise. The job has a huge number of OGCDs at 90 and it just does not need an alternative rotation path to be interesting. You're going to be spending all the time managing...

1. Salted Earth WITH salted darkness
2. Shadowbringer
3. Carve and Split
4. Edge of Shadow
5. Plunge (because gap closers need potencies...)
6. Blood Weapon (which speeds up Edge of Shadow)

3) There should be some kind of healing on Carve and Split so it at least matches up with Abyssal drain. However, the problem is capping on healing and the fact that the game is designed around having things either be damage or survival with tanks. An attack that heals is still a damage ability primarily, so maybe giving them a skill that lets them self heal from attacking would be better than giving carve and split a healing potency.

[Kalaam]

All the more reason for the "power" aspect I was highlighting.

Though it could also have been Living Dead since they describe him falling dead shortly after, I imagine it was a mix of both

[Archwizard]

2) Probably controversial but they need to get rid of Blood spiller / Quietus. For one they were a plague on the leveling experience through the entirety of shadowbringers because before level 68 you didn't even have delirium, and you couldn't gain blood gauge off aoe combo, only the souleater combo. They also are just potency increased GCDs with no benefits otherwise. The job has a huge number of OGCDs at 90 and it just does not need an alternative rotation path to be interesting. You're going to be spending all the time managing...

1. Salted Earth WITH salted darkness
2. Shadowbringer
3. Carve and Split
4. Edge of Shadow
5. Plunge (because gap closers need potencies...)
6. Blood Weapon (which speeds up Edge of Shadow)

This is where we're going to disagree, because even with so many oGCDs to manage, your rotation is going to primarily be the same 3 button combo over and over and over and over, interspersed with cooldowns.

And, to be clear here, DRK is not unique in having a large number of damage oGCDs to manage either, even among the tanks.
GNB has Bow Shock, No Mercy, Blasting Zone, Continuation (which is used SIGNIFICANTLY more often than Edge), Rough Divide, and Bloodfest. It also has (depending how you count the Cartridge Combo) 7-9 GCDs in the core rotation between them, so there's very little monotony to the job.

The primary difference between them of course is that DRK also has Delirium and Living Shadow (and Abyssal Drain for AoE), but half as many GCDs.

So what you advocate here is that the job get pared down even more... while substituting that loss with nothing?

I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not attached to Bloodspiller and Quietus either -- especially where they exist in our kit as WAR-lite elements -- but I'd much rather see them expanded upon or replaced with something that builds on the kit, than simply removed.

[The_User]

I wish Lost Ark isn't restricted to top down and elsword/vindictus isn't p2w. These 3 games have better greatsword user/dark knight job that make drk in xiv seem pale by comparison

[Oizen]

I wish Lost Ark isn't restricted to top down and elsword/vindictus isn't p2w. These 3 games have better greatsword user/dark knight job that make drk in xiv seem pale by comparison

Vindictus is also just dead.

[Runeslayer]

I wish Lost Ark isn't restricted to top down and elsword/vindictus isn't p2w. These 3 games have better greatsword user/dark knight job that make drk in xiv seem pale by comparison

We don't talk about the unholy elsword in this house.

All I really want from DRK is its own brand of utility along with a rotation that doesn't get monotonous and incoherent. It would be very cool to have them lean into a tiered rotation, with enhanced animations and more functions as you go up in tiers before needing to reset back to tier 1. I still advocate for something like that, really bringing out the longer DRK fights the more wild and fierce they strike concept before needing to cool off and reset the dance.

[Briarthorn]

I had hoped that DRK would have more of a spell weaving aspect to them. paladin has a spell and melee part of a rotation and it think DRK mashing them together was where is was going to go back in heavensward with hard slash and abyssal drain as a spell.

Having mana skill naturally making black blood skills is a way to do that. I know cloud talk can be touchy but i figured it'd be something like cross slash, where if you use mana correctly queitus would get it's orb bursts.

I think it's odd how DRK can have two separate bars and with so many of it's ogcds stacking to two it just ends up as the banky-ist tank. but the bank till buffs is more of a overall game gripe.

[The_User]

Who are "we" exactly? or is there a new commandment now in this thread while I wasn't looking?

[Archwizard]

Who are "we" exactly? or is there a new commandment now in this thread while I wasn't looking?

I believe their statement qualifies as what some would call, a jape.

[ItsUrBoi]

I think realistically right now the developers should really start addressing issues that are in regard to homogenization and job identity, especially considering the new savage dungeons coming. Homogenization is fine as long as it doesn't hurt job identity. Making it so that at the end of the day all jobs have the same DPS, healing and mitigation is fine, as long as they take different routes to get there.

->Carve and spit is used once every minute, along with Abyssal drain, this makes them very low impact regardless of single target or AoE situations. DRK has a decent ability ( Abyssal Drain ) for dungeon sustain, if they would only use it more often. Lowering the CD of both to 30 seconds, while adjusting the damage potency and the MP generation would make it so that you have something to do when you are not bursting for 1 target, and for AoE you'd have Abyssal Drain more often, which could be buffed up to 250 heal potency, from the current 200.

->A second combo that puts a DoT on target would be very easy to add back ( Scourge ), and would also give you something to do when not bursting.

->Delirium should not be an inner release copy. An easy change would be to make it so that its just a special 5 button combo making use of actions such as Bloodspiller / Quietus. Older animations such as Power Slash, old Delirium and Spinning Slash could also be brought back! Fray should also do this combo instead of using low impact abilities such as Abyssal Drain and Plunge.

->The blood gauge could be changed so that it is sort of a combination between PLD's and WAR's gauges. Blackblood is obtained from dealing damage with certain attacks ( Ex: Souleater, Scourge, Shadowbringer, Delirium combo etc ). Using defensive actions such as TBN or Oblation with enough Blackblood adds a special effect to them. For example if TBN is used with more than 25 blackblood, upon breaking it heals you for 10% of your max HP, while Oblation grants a 200 potency regen effect for 12 seconds.

-> Dark Mind should be changed to a defensive CD that allows the DRK to heal himself on demand in case of an emergency. PLD has clemency, War has Equilibrium, GNB has aurora. Something that would give identity to the job and reinforce its class fantasy.
For example: Sole survivor, 1 minute cooldown. Marks targeted enemy with "Another Victim". Dealing and taking damage from the marked enemy heals you, proportional with the amount taken/dealt up to a cap. If target is defeated, you are healed for 20% of max HP. And of course because the damage reduction from Dark Mind will be gone, a part of it could go into Oblation, making it 15% instead of 10%, so that it has more impact.

In all honesty, after playing this job for roughly more than 1 year non stop, these changes would certainly address at least my personal issues with it, and from what I keep seeing on this forum: DRK being a WAR lite clone, boring downtime between bursts, poor sustain in dungeons and overall low impact abilities in certain cases.