Dark Knight Megathread

[Marxam]

Imo the two min meta should be DPS exclusive while T/H stay on the one min. It would give tanks and healers more consistent damage while DPS can focus on doing more "bursty" damage. It would also bring back dots to tanks since their damage is more consistent throughout a fight and is not heavily reliant on party buffs. All jobs will still meet at two mins but the emphasis is now more on the DPS to actually do the damage. Other than that, direct hit needs to be DPS exclusive and they need to do something with Tenacity.

Personally I would like to see tenacity be a passive buff to mitigation and healing received while all mitigation across the board gets nerfed in tandem. ex. Rampart 15%, 30% mit reduced to 20%, ToB healing reduced to 5%, etc. Defensive cds currently are too powerful and using tenacity as a way of building back that mitigation is a great incentive not just in prog week but as a whole. ex. 800 Tenacity will increase Ramparts base 15% to 20%. It gives you some flexibility in how much defensive do you want in exchange for damage. This would also affect jobs exclusive short cds i.e. TBN, BW, HS, HoC.

People are complaining about WAR's op healing? At base Tenacity you are only getting 100 heal potency per hit. DRK's TBN is 15% at base tenacity, etc. Ultimately, this change will also benefit healers as now tanks are taking more damage so they have to heal more and tanks have to mix and match defensive cds more thoughtfully because they can no longer rely on a single cd to carry them, especially when they go for crit/det. They don't even need to change the outgoing damage of bosses and this would prolong the need to do another stat squish.

[Absurdity]

Imo the two min meta should be DPS exclusive while T/H stay on the one min. It would give tanks and healers more consistent damage while DPS can focus on doing more "bursty" damage. It would also bring back dots to tanks since their damage is more consistent throughout a fight and is not heavily reliant on party buffs. All jobs will still meet at two mins but the emphasis is now more on the DPS to actually do the damage.

This would fix absolutely nothing for most tanks because it's basically what we have right now. I know this thread is about Dark Knight but tell me what would change about Warrior's or Paladin's gameplay? They're already on a 60 second loop, sure didn't make either of them more interesting. Even Dark Knight is technically already on a 60 second loop, you just bank Shadowbringer for the party buff window, something you would still do as long as they keep the 2 stacks.

And if you keep tanks and healers on a 60 second rotation the 2-min meta will not be "DPS exclusive" because tanks and healers will inevitably play into it as well.

[Kalaam]

We ougth to get rid of party wide direct damage buffs and replace that by more horizontal buffs. Things that'll help damage by facilitating doing it (increased movement speed to execute mechanics, why not stuff like increasing range by 10yalm for 15 seconds, etc etc)
In any way the 2 minute meta is stifling a lot of things in the job design and it makes a lot of problems more apparents

[Marxam]

This would fix absolutely nothing for most tanks because it's basically what we have right now. I know this thread is about Dark Knight but tell me what would change about Warrior's or Paladin's gameplay? They're already on a 60 second loop, sure didn't make either of them more interesting. Even Dark Knight is technically already on a 60 second loop, you just bank Shadowbringer for the party buff window, something you would still do as long as they keep the 2 stacks.

And if you keep tanks and healers on a 60 second rotation the 2-min meta will not be "DPS exclusive" because tanks and healers will inevitably play into it as well.

That's the point. You want to back off the 2 min meta by emphasizing that its the DPS's job to do damage. The devs have shown they are incapable of balancing around job exclusive windows but 120 can be divided 2, 3, or even 4. This would open up the possibility of bringing back 40 sec cds like how blood weapon used to be in SB. This would benefit DRK in the most part as they can finally get back to SB DRK which imo was peak. It had the high resource management and ogcd spam of ShB/EW DRK but had the utility to match PLD and the healing to match WAR. Everyone will still meet at 2 mins but what they do in between can vary wildly because cds aren't just 120 or 60.

Imagine if in DT we get SB BW and you got to regain MP every 40 secs while also getting a haste buff. It would feel vastly different to the other tanks since you have these mini ogcd burst phases. However, if they really wanted to de-emphasize T/H from taking part in the 2 min meta they can just make all all dps raid buffs affect them at a lower potency ex. MNK Brotherhood is 5% for all DPS but 2% for T/H. This would just make it so that tanks meeting every 2 mins with the DPS is a nice bonus but not the difference between clear and enrage. Lets try to avoid P8S again where jobs that lined perfectly with that 2 min burst window was heavily favored.

[Lyth]

Any setup with synchronous raid buffs is going to result in a 'Least Common Multiple (LCM) meta'. Changing burst windows timings to a number that is still a divisor of the LCM doesn't change your gameplay. All that this means is that you likely will have one or two low effort burst windows per LCM cycle where your burst happens outside of a major mechanics check.

For practical purposes, a lot of jobs currently have a 'mini burst' at 1 minute anyways. Where this has the potential to become more interesting is if you have the gauge space to 'store' your 1 minute burst in order to carry it into the 2 minute mark. As an example, RPR has the potential to setup a Triple Enshroud, which can lead to interesting setups around tincture usage as well as special cases like P8S Everburn. If that type of decision making doesn't exist on the job due to having a small gauge capacity, then the specific timing interval isn't really important as long as it's a divisor of the LCM. Asynchronous timings will tend to push a job out of meta.

Damage under raid buffs will always be a consideration for tanks, unless the relative damage contribution of the role becomes so low that it becomes irrelevant. I think you would see a dramatic shift towards 1/2/5 comps well before that point.

I think that the GCD/oGCD balance on DRK is worth commenting on, since all jobs have a limited amount of hotbar space. I think it's reasonable for DRK to swap in a couple more GCD actions so that downtime periods become more interesting. It's worth remembering that oGCD recast frequency has more of an impact on APM than the total number of individual oGCD actions that you have. That's why GNB plays at a higher APM than DRK.

[Colt47]

The two minute meta is a completely different thing to the dark knight rework. I mean the honest truth is that the changes it got from Shadowbringers was more like copy pasta warrior except with a worse inner release and no real organization to how the skills are supposed to be setup, leaving the player to figure out absolutely anything and everything while throwing even more OGCDs on it in Endwalker for no good reason. Even the sound staging of the attacks makes delirium feel like it is a cop out as the sound is done in relation to the swing animation rather than the impact of the attack like on warrior.

1. Part of the problem is likely that Dark Knight already had big splashy attacks with Edge of Darkness and Flood of Darkness, with shadowbringer just becoming an MP-less version of either Edge of Darkness or Flood of Darkness depending on the number of targets. Yes, it has different potency calculations. No, that doesn't make it special or different than Flood of Darkness and Edge of Darkness. It's just both of those skills in a single button with two charges.

2. Our living shadow is literally a DOT and I'd rather have a burst phase like reaper and just merge with the shadow than have Delirium and a DOT that looks like a person.

3. Can we just have the Salted Earth have the initial damage from Salt and Darkness as an upgrade, instead of having to manually trigger Salt and Darkness? There is never a time where I'm not going to activate Salt and Darkness INSTANTLY.

4. We do not need two completely disconnected resources.

5. TBN is not good in dungeons. What is the most common healer to go with you in dungeons? A WHM. What does a WHM do on pulls? Uses Holy spam. What does Holy spam do? Stuns absolutely everything! So in order to get the benefit of TBN, it has to break so we get a free flood or Edge, which can't happen if all the enemies are stunned.

6. Also just about every other tank has a better defense kit than DRK does. Shields are not as good as mitigation when dealing with multiple attackers and are only good for buffering against a really strong attack.

[Oizen]

I really see no reason why TBN couldn't give the dark arts stack upon the effect fading like HoC does with healing.

[Colt47]

I really see no reason why TBN couldn't give the dark arts stack upon the effect fading like HoC does with healing.

I know! It is baffling why it isn't that way and it is all of these little details that just leave me scratching my head.

[Rithy255]

I really see no reason why TBN couldn't give the dark arts stack upon the effect fading like HoC does with healing.

I think it's to add "risk vs rework" to the job, which made sense in SHB when it was bar none the best short CD on a even shorter CD.

Honestly I'd be fine with this though, I want to be able to use TBN actively to protect people who i think might mess up a mech, instead of just not bothering at risk of losing DPS.

[Supersnow845]

Jobs for punish you for using your skills wrong, TBN and dissipation are literally the last examples of this phenomenon existing

They don’t have to completely destroy your rotation if you do them wrong but you shouldn’t be able to just throw out skills whenever you want and not get punished if you do them wrong, HOC should only proc the excog if you take a certain amount of damage under clarity of corrundum, bloodwhetting and holy Shelton are even worse