Design of DRK and PLD

[Mimilu]

Because PLDs use their shields to randomly block hits, decreasing their damage (using the Block Rate and Block Strength stats, which I think are now hidden stats(?)), while DRKs uses the power of darkness as a barrier, absorbing the damage.

[ArthurATDayne]

The Real Life Meta Reasons why shields would fall out of favor for a Knight is that the armor that they wear evolved enough that a shield feels redundant for protection and to defeat the defenses of their peers/enemy they needed the 2nd hand for greater control and leverage over increasingly sturdier weapons beyond arming swords so we see more Long Swords/Bastard Swords and later large True Two-Handers that possessed either dedicated thrusting or combination thrust/cutting capabilities to get through the gaps in armor or if thrusting isn't possible at the time, hitting with enough force to better break bone and flesh through trauma etc.

Maybe for narrative reasons we can interpret the Dark Knights/Gunbreakers/Warriors as either possessing enough personal defenses to make shields redundant and/or enough offensive 2-handed leveraged might to get through the best armors of Eorzia & the First, and in the Gunbreaker's "arming sword" case, their Gunblades are so Aether-Tech Mechanically Superior & Powerful that even with one hand they are more than enough to get through enemy armor.

/End Rant

[Kalaam]

Damn HW Dark Knight was fun and reactive with those parry procs.

[Lyth]

Most actively raiding DRK players in Heavensward also played PLD and vice versa. There definitely were fights that were easier to progress on with PLD than DRK, A7S being the blatantly obvious example. You see this decision-making reflected in the WF clears as well. WAR was the only constant in that they were good against all damage types. MNK and DK were completely equivalent to Delirium and were probably up even more often. You'd have to be playing with an incredibly subpar MNK for them to play without their blunt resistance down buff.

I wouldn't consider the proc-based gameplay on HW DRK to be 'tools' or 'utility'. It just ensured that your resource generation was more variable, forcing you to think on your feet. FFXIV players tend to be very much against any randomness or variability that prevent you from mapping out your rotations on a spreadsheet, which is why DRK unfortunately has moved closer towards PLD style faceroll rotational design despite being originally set up as resource management tank. The problem is that it feeds back into this culture that every pull that you do has to be able to potentially yield a mathematically optimal result (even if you're not at the mechanical skill level where you can achieve said result), or else we just wipe and reset until you get the numbers that you want. This was the kind of thinking that made them effectively remove Crit/DH from affecting WAR. It's an incredibly dumb design direction. Who cares if you didn't crit on your 22nd Fell Cleave? Just play your best and you'll average at what you should.

[Ultimatecalibur]

This was the kind of thinking that made them effectively remove Crit/DH from affecting WAR. It's an incredibly dumb design direction. Who cares if you didn't crit on your 22nd Fell Cleave? Just play your best and you'll average at what you should.

Actually it was the opposite of dumb design, what it replaced was dumb design. The initial StB War was very random and Spiky due to so few attacks having such a major influence on average damage. The difference between direct crit Fell Cleave and a normal Fell Cleave during Berserk was 562 potency which was more than Fell Cleave's base potency of 500. When you have only 5 or 6 of those attacks every 2 minutes you only have a total of 25 to 30 of those attacks in a 10 minute fight which is far to few for the law of large numbers to ensure that each run was having the WAR deal roughly the same average damage.

[Shurrikhan]

You'd have to be playing with an incredibly subpar MNK for them to play without their blunt resistance down buff.

Or just one running enough SkS to drop DK only on Demolish and DK itself (for 7+15 bonus potency lost, or at most an extra 8 from the normal auto, while gaining the 130 potency of an extra Boot-True per rotational string). Such could cause small but potentially notable gaps in the Int Down debuff.

I wouldn't consider the proc-based gameplay on HW DRK to be 'tools' or 'utility'. It just ensured that your resource generation was more variable, forcing you to think on your feet.

This, and perhaps a bit more compensation for MTing (which, back then, every tank had in some different form -- DD, Reprisal, Low Blow, and self-heals if in tank-stance; Shield Swipe and MP generation; Vengeance and [very mild] rotational self-heals that didn't require tank stance).

FFXIV players tend to be very much against any randomness or variability that prevent you from mapping out your rotations on a spreadsheet, which is why DRK unfortunately has moved closer towards PLD style faceroll rotational design despite being originally set up as resource management tank. The problem is that it feeds back into this culture that every pull that you do has to be able to potentially yield a mathematically optimal result (even if you're not at the mechanical skill level where you can achieve said result), or else we just wipe and reset until you get the numbers that you want. This was the kind of thinking that made them effectively remove Crit/DH from affecting WAR. It's an incredibly dumb design direction. Who cares if you didn't crit on your 22nd Fell Cleave? Just play your best and you'll average at what you should.

Given the shit we'd bar lock out over minute rDPS gains (that ended up rivaled or even beat out by off-meta comps by StB's end), I wonder what would happen if we ever had to deal with actually playing differently depending on our comps, rather than merely having a 5% dmg shuffle from ones' aDPS to another's rDPS, etc. A true Pandemonium?

[Kalaam]

I aggree on that, most of the times bosses move, you have to get away, this will delay a GDC or two etc etc. We aren't TAS machines.
A bit of random is fun, having reprisal and low blow proc on parries (I don't remember the rate but if I recall it was fairly high if not 100% ?) was fun oGCD to weave in. The ressource management felt more organic, dynamic than what we have now.
Right now it feels very... cold ? As you said it's spreadsheet where we know exactly, to the digit, how our ressources will be generated and spent. To be honest I kind of prefered MP not being the same cap for everyone and being an actual stat.

[Lyth]

This is largely a perceptual thing, and it can be difficult to wrap your head around, but it doesn't really matter. At all. The expected value is still going to be the same under target dummy conditions, regardless of whether you are playing a burst dps job or a sustain dps job. You can go a step further and say 'Oh, I happened to Crit 522 out of 590 auto-attacks that last run out of pure dumb luck but then we wiped, game is so unfair'. But again, who cares? Anyone can get a really lucky run. What matters is your consistency, pull after pull. This is especially true if you're a tank.

The reason why WAR's 'Crit RNG' received so much attention in Stormblood was because:
1) Increased focus on Crit/DH with the introduction of DH
2) Xeno campaigned for the current 'Critless' WAR design because it was adding RNG to the fflogs rankings

For good or for ill, this was the bandwagon that the community jumped on. WAR Crit/DH on everything, and so, they Crit/DH on nothing. So enjoy, players got exactly what they asked for.

Personally, I don't care too much about whether Crit or DH actually exist. I do think that this game doubles down on comfy predictability too much, and I'd really like to see more twitch reaction-based mechanics and job design which makes you respond on the fly. But that's just my bias. You might think that your spreadsheets are the pinnacle of mechanical skill, who knows.

[Undeadfire]

And now Warrior is a pile of garbage. It provides no interaction than spam Inner Chaos/Fell Cleave, spam Nascent Flash, doesn't work under certain comps, it's Dark Knight on easy mode.

Gunbreaker is fine for now
Paladin is doing great
Warrior needs a rework
Dark Knight needs tuning

[shao32]

And now Warrior is a pile of garbage. It provides no interaction than spam Inner Chaos/Fell Cleave, spam Nascent Flash, doesn't work under certain comps, it's Dark Knight on easy mode.

Gunbreaker is fine for now
Paladin is doing great
Warrior needs a rework
Dark Knight needs tuning

DRK is a simlified WAR with a mountain of fluff oGCD, if WAR is bad DRK is worse overall now more clear that WAR moves to the 60s mark raid buffs with DRK, at least the job have more interesting downtime with Infuriate charges, storm eye management and having 3 charges of onslaught allowing him to have one always ready outside of raid buff if he still need it, DRK just sit there eating grass with soul eater spam and a ocasional bloodspiller while his uncohesive kit refresh his fluff and his MP regens at the stepping on eggs speed.

WAR may be no really complex and is easy to manage but his kit is one of the most solids we have in terms of design and cohesion, WAR is the arguable one that would need tweaks to make it more interesting, DRK needs a rework on almost everything it have.