Dark Knight Megathread

[Vallerie]

Oh, I just had an exceedingly stupid idea.

Enhanced Unmend II
Salt and Darkness (or could be plunge) grants Unravel, enhancing next unmend
Unraveling unmend potency - 500
Generates 20 blood and 600 mp

[Mekhana]

Oh, I just had an exceedingly stupid idea.

Enhanced Unmend II
Salt and Darkness (or could be plunge) grants Unravel, enhancing next unmend
Unraveling unmend potency - 500
Generates 20 blood and 600 mp

At least that way I'd be able to deal with early pullers in hunts. Do actually want.

[Oizen]

I don't actually hate Enhanced Unmend, but it is baffling that they made this trait in the same expansion where they decided that all bosses needed arena wide hitboxes and melee downtime should never happen.

[Absurdity]

I don't actually hate Enhanced Unmend, but it is baffling that they made this trait in the same expansion where they decided that all bosses needed arena wide hitboxes and melee downtime should never happen.

They probably still think that tanks will just stand in Narnia for mechanics, spamming their ranged attack, for "safety" or something.

[RyuDragnier]

I don't actually hate Enhanced Unmend, but it is baffling that they made this trait in the same expansion where they decided that all bosses needed arena wide hitboxes and melee downtime should never happen.

Because they don't know what to do with DRK, they never have, same with SCH and SMN. That's why you see them constantly try to remove things from SCH just to get massive pushback, and why SMN keeps changing. From what I heard the original creator of ARR/HW SCH, SMN, and DRK left the dev team in HW...which does actually coincide with when they started making questionable decisions with the jobs.

[Lyth]

Pushback occurs whenever players think that the job differs significantly from the way that it 'ought' to work. Jobs that play differently from their previous series incarnations will get pushback. How many times since Heavensward have we seen requests to change DRK to use HP as a resource, or use a scythe, or to be changed into a DPS job? Likewise, jobs that play significantly differently from their previous reworks will get pushback as well. Which is a catch-22 situation, as the entire point of a rework is to change how the job plays. Yet you will invariably have divisions within the playerbase each demanding that the job play closer to various designs (FFXI DRK, 3.x DRK, 4.x DRK, and 5.x DRK). Ideally you just try your best to capture the spirit of various iterations while accepting that nobody will be entirely satisfied.

The broader issue with SCH is that SCH has been a very powerful job for the majority of this game's history. Much like WAR, there were a lot of advantages that it was grandfathered into in 2.x that set it up to dominate for expansions to come. Naturally, the dev team have systematically been curtailing these jobs' power to bring them in line with the rest, but it has taken them the better part of several expansions to do so, with their respective playerbases fighting tooth and nail to cling to those advantages. The majority of job nerfs, as you may have noticed, deliberately happen silently between expansions when players haven't been able to test how the math will work out. Everything outside of that is 'upward balance' to keep everyone happy. I personally think it's much too polite of an approach, and sometimes you just have to be aggressive with balance changes to ensure that there's a level playing field for all jobs. I'm glad that we're starting to see more of that now.

Enhanced Unmend has always been an odd trait. Historically, it used to remove the MP cost on your next Unleash, and it was equally strange back then. But I think mobility actions on tanks have needed a second look for a long time now.

[RyuDragnier]

Pushback occurs whenever players think that the job differs significantly from the way that it 'ought' to work. Jobs that play differently from their previous series incarnations will get pushback. How many times since Heavensward have we seen requests to change DRK to use HP as a resource, or use a scythe, or to be changed into a DPS job? Likewise, jobs that play significantly differently from their previous reworks will get pushback as well. Which is a catch-22 situation, as the entire point of a rework is to change how the job plays. Yet you will invariably have divisions within the playerbase each demanding that the job play closer to various designs (FFXI DRK, 3.x DRK, 4.x DRK, and 5.x DRK). Ideally you just try your best to capture the spirit of various iterations while accepting that nobody will be entirely satisfied.

Pushback also happens when design decisions make no sense whatsoever and end up causing a job to fall massively behind others. Look back at Stormblood SCH, Adlo and Succor had their MP costs increased back then to where SCH throwing out shields was a huge hit to their MP. The MP heal from Aetherflow was also cut in half to 10%, and was LESS than the cost of a single Adlo, causing SCH to have serious MP issues. There was massive pushback until they finally lowered the MP costs on Adlo and Succor in patch 4.1.

[Lyth]

SCH was mandatory throughout Heavensward. SCH had very deliberate nerfs during the transition period going in to Stormblood so that players would actually get to see WHM/AST comps being used in content. The SCH playerbase pushed back hard because they wanted their stuff back. SCH was then made mandatory for the rest of Stormblood. The end solution, which we've seen this expansion, was to simply turn SCH into its own healing subrole and create job alternatives to it, splitting that playerbase. Heavensward and Stormblood were some of the worst periods in the game for job balance because of how grossly overpowered the toolkits of some of these jobs were. It was incredibly difficult for the rest of us to push for the status quo to actually change to something more equitable for all, simply because when a job becomes that dominant, it also becomes incredibly popular and builds a strong following that resists any change.

There's no defense to excuse how those jobs were tuned compared to their counterparts.

[RyuDragnier]

Part of the problem with that lies in how they set up AST. From how things went in HW, it was clearly obvious to ANYBODY who healed or paid attention that the problem with AST was the Sects, they were nigh impossible to balance. Make Nocturnal too strong, and nobody will take SCH. Make Diurnal too strong, and nobody will take WHM. We saw that happen multiple times in HW AND SB, and I'm still surprised it took them until EW to actually deal with that damned problem, when they could have dealt with it back in SB.

[Mortex]

SCH was mandatory throughout Heavensward. SCH had very deliberate nerfs during the transition period going in to Stormblood so that players would actually get to see WHM/AST comps being used in content. The SCH playerbase pushed back hard because they wanted their stuff back. SCH was then made mandatory for the rest of Stormblood. The end solution, which we've seen this expansion, was to simply turn SCH into its own healing subrole and create job alternatives to it, splitting that playerbase. Heavensward and Stormblood were some of the worst periods in the game for job balance because of how grossly overpowered the toolkits of some of these jobs were. It was incredibly difficult for the rest of us to push for the status quo to actually change to something more equitable for all, simply because when a job becomes that dominant, it also becomes incredibly popular and builds a strong following that resists any change.

There's no defense to excuse how those jobs were tuned compared to their counterparts.

I think the biggest problem was that they couldn’t balance noc astro even if their life’s would depend on it. It was so bad in comparison to sch that you really didn’t had much choice in the shield department. The only choice was either astro or whm depending on what job was less bad.