Dark Knight feels terrible to play

[Throrface]

Hello! I would like to start this off by saying that I am posting this as a fairly casual player who spams a lot of dungeons. My experience comes from tanking dungeons, and I acknowledge that the DRK job may feel entirely different in content such as savage raids.

Dark Knight was my last tank to level up in Endwalker, and I have to say, it was a dreadful experience, because of the DRK mitigation. In comparison to every other tank job, it's terrible and lacking. Despite proactively weaving my defensives on a DRK, I often run into situations when I just run out of good defensives. This is especially painful when you're pulling wall to wall, but even when doing small pulls it can hurt sometimes.

On PLD, WAR and GNB I often make pulls where I hit a good stride with my defensives and it feels great, I feel like I'm taking very little damage, I see that the healers don't need to spend GCDs on spot heals, everything is great. On DRK? Oh boy do I see healers whip out those GCD heals, and it hurts to see.

I don't think I can exactly name the issues. The Blackest Night feels like a joke compared to the short-CD defensives of other tanks. Also, for some reason, DRK is the only tank where your defensive ability shares a resource with your offensive abilities. During big pulls, The Blackest Night protects me for about 1 or 2 seconds, while the other tanks, with their short CD defensives, can enjoy protection for 8 wonderful seconds.

Living Dead is an absolute joke. The invulns that revolve around you surviving at 1 hp are already all useless for dungeon tanking, but this is the only one that can kill you, and that the healer can just end early by being a good healer. I only push Living Dead on accident and it always feels bad, this ability is terrible.

I would also very much like if on tank jobs, there was a little more focus on defensive utility even in their damage rotations and such. You know how all the tanks have a hit in their combo that does a little self-heal and such? Yeah, that's great, more of that please. There is one tank job that does this well and it's paladin. Most of the damage abilities you use as Paladin have defensive utility and feel great to use. I guess this is not exclusively a DRK issue but on GNB and WAR the mitigation is flawless, so there's nothing to complain about.

It feels terrible when the job design is focused around me keeping up some lousy DAMAGE BUFF while juggling blood gauge which only helps me do DAMAGE while I am GETTING KILLED. As a tank, I want to not die FIRST, do damage SECOND.

[Endolas]

For Endgame Content DRK feels good but of course we lack the self-healing there too,
for Dungeons specificaly it's a Nightmare since we have literaly 1 way to Heal ourself and its on a 60 sec. Cooldown and it doesn't heal very well.

TBN should cost no Mana at all and provide more Defensive Effects like a Heal maybe or something else, you could even put a healing effect on Oblation and it would be great.

Don't start with Living Dead, it's the worst ability since the beginning of Heavensward and it never changed, but everyone wants it to be changed.

The Situation with DRK is so bad right now, that too many people are saying "i'm not playing that in a dungeon, the poor healers".

Only thing we can do is wait and pray that SE reads all the DRK threads in here.

#BringBackScourge

[Fubous]

Blood Weapon is also really bad. Imo it should have stacks and give both HP/MP; DRK should be the lifesteal tank, not WAR lmao. That combined with a buff to Oblation/TBN would go a long way. Living Dead would be fine if they just removed the healing requirement.

also bring back the power slash animation

[Kolsykol]

All I can say is that DRK feels noticeable more difficult to heal as Healer.
I dunno why really but I feel like DRK just suddenly drops and needs to be saved while other Tanks don't.

[Xrison]

All I can say is that DRK feels noticeable more difficult to heal as Healer.
I dunno why really but I feel like DRK just suddenly drops and needs to be saved while other Tanks don't.

That's because DRK has no good heals, and it's only truly unique damage mitigation (TBN) pops after like, 3-4 hits in larger groups.

Meanwhile, the other tanks are much more viable:

WAR: Arms Length + Bloodwhetting

PLD: Arms Length + Holy Sheltron + Divine Veil

GNB: Arms Length + Camouflage + Aurora/Heart of Corundum

DRK: Arms Length + The Blackest Night + Oblation + Abyssal Drain

Maybe throw in a Reprisal for extra large pulls.

The first three have very viable self sustain combos, whereas DRK's is lagging significantly. The only heal is Abyssal Drain, which is decent as a quick burst heal in group pulls, but it only procs once then it's on a 60s CD.

[Dauntess]

I've been maining DRK since HW and it feels absolutely awful this expansion. You get destroyed on bigger pulls and its clunky as hell to play. Im enjoying PLD now which is crazy. PLD was the clunky tank in HW while DRK was smooth to play. After 3 expansions of purging and consolidation, it's a clunky tank with no identify, but at least it does good DPS, am I right?

[Atreides]

Blood Weapon is also really bad. Imo it should have stacks and give both HP/MP; DRK should be the lifesteal tank, not WAR lmao. That combined with a buff to Oblation/TBN would go a long way. Living Dead would be fine if they just removed the healing requirement.

also bring back the power slash animation

I agree that they should give Blood Weapon a strong HP absorb too this would help DRK alot. About the DRK should be the lifesteal tank, no in the FF series DRK was notoriously known to sacrifice his own HP rather than recovering, granted that would be bad for a tank job but it was never their identity to recover.
But yeah it baffles me to this day that they left LD untouched...
Maybe turn TBN in a free ability that proccs a regen/heal when it pops, that would also take care of the punishing DPS loss when it doesn't pop issue.

[Windwalker]

Quiteus needs its life steal back, or atleast i remember it had life steal would be a simple fix for sustain.

[Shurrikhan]

Quiteus needs its life steal back, or atleast i remember it had life steal would be a simple fix for sustain.

Quietus never had lifesteal, as far as I recall. It, when paired with Blood Weapon, granted MP restore per enemy hit, which then funded DA-AD, which had lifesteal.

[Windwalker]

Oh maybe that was it, though a lifesteal on quietus would fix the sustain for big pulls.