Your Dark Knight players are unhappy. あなたの暗闇騎士プレイヤーは不幸です

[Sacrilegion]

So I have to wonder, "DRK is fine" why does it have to be mediocre? You didn't settle for fine with PLD, WAR, or GNB. Why couldn't you do a 4th? You had plenty of time and could of just copied the other 3 tank changes and made slight changes. When I look at the other 3, I had to ask, was he drunk the whole time writing it? Why was this not caught and had someone better do it. Instead you let them take the Bethesda approach to spellcrafting with dark arts, just remove it and put some bastardization in its place. I don't care if y'all can't handle harsh criticism, if you're going to be lazy, you're going to be called out on it. No one asked to be a terrible warrior, no one asked for Dark Arts to be removed, no one asked to have our skills ripped from us and given to other jobs as better version, and not a single person wanted backwards progress on animations.

[Garlan]

...no one asked for Dark Arts to be removed, no one asked to have our skills ripped from us and given to other jobs as better version, and not a single person wanted backwards progress on animations.

That isn't remotely true. For every bit of praise I shared about 4.0 DRK with others back in the day, I got an equal amount of dissenters lambasting Dark Arts and wishing for its deletion. Now that we actually lost Dark Arts, we seemingly forget the huge amount of feedback from actual players wishing that it was removed. Yes, some wanted it to get altered, but there were still a sizable portion that simply wanted it gone period.

Also, the animation bit is also a tad subjective. I won't pretend to say we lost a lot of cool animations over the years (RIP Scourge, Power Slash, and Sole Survivor), but Edge of Shadow, Flood of Shadow, Oblation, Stalwart Soul, and Shadowbringer are all incredibly awesome looking abilities. It is not fair in the slightest to say that all of the animations DRK has been given post 4.0 have been lackluster.

[ItsUrBoi]

That isn't remotely true. For every bit of praise I shared about 4.0 DRK with others back in the day, I got an equal amount of dissenters lambasting Dark Arts and wishing for its deletion. Now that we actually lost Dark Arts, we seemingly forget the huge amount of feedback from actual players wishing that it was removed. Yes, some wanted it to get altered, but there were still a sizable portion that simply wanted it gone period.

Also, the animation bit is also a tad subjective. I won't pretend to say we lost a lot of cool animations over the years (RIP Scourge, Power Slash, and Sole Survivor), but Edge of Shadow, Flood of Shadow, Oblation, Stalwart Soul, and Shadowbringer are all incredibly awesome looking abilities. It is not fair in the slightest to say that all of the animations DRK has been given post 4.0 have been lackluster.

That is true, I hope the best way they can improve the job is take things people liked from the 2 iterations ( HW + SB vs ShB + EW ) and combine them into one. It sucks to work on animations and job design and then scrap those concepts, but that doesn't have to happen. Work on Scourge, Shadowbringer, Darkarts, Edge/Flood , Bloodprice, Livingshadow is amazing, but it should be put together into one strong version. I don't think the 2 versions of Dark Knight are opposite, I think they could complement each other very nicely.

[Kalaam]

There is a lot that both version can bring each other.

[Danelo]

Yes, a lot asked for it to be deleted but many also asked for it to just be tweaked. I said either or. The just needed to tweak the numbers so you didn’t have to da so much… like HW

[Lyth]

When I first laid eyes on the RPR trailer they showed us back in the second EW keynote, my first thought was "Goddamnit. I wish this mechanic had been employed on DRK." And I shook my head. Tbh I've never really been a fan of transplanting mechanics from one job to another, but even before RPR was announced, I envisioned DRK having a sort of "superpowered" form. Now, this ain't to say it'd have been the exact same thing as RPR, that is, super speedy attacks with a reduced GCD... But the idea of say, being possessed by our dark side just felt right for DRK.

You see, when they showed us the job action trailer for 5.0 and it ended with the DRK summoning Fray to fight alongside us, I was very excited! It wasn't long, however, before I started asking questions... Was there going to be some sort of interaction with Fray? Can we influence how he fights in any way? Do we just summon them and they just do their thing?

This makes complete sense. Players have expectations around burst that relate to DRK's design as a resource management job, as well as the way greatswords have traditionally been portrayed in Final Fantasy games. Build up gauge. Unleash fast multi-hit sword attack with lots of 9999s. I think that if the assigned goal was 'build a melee DPS job around greatswords', nobody would bat an eyelid at this.

It's also worth mentioning that there are two competing greatsword aesthetics at work. The first is the traditional Monster Hunter/Dark Souls greatsword with a long wind-up and a big impact. That's a pretty fun approach to the weapon, but it's heavily dependent on effective use of hitstop, which DRK doesn't use in its animations. That's why Fell Cleave is viscerally satisfying while Bloodspiller is not.

The other aesthetic is Cloud Strife. They've been trying to move away from the latter towards the former, without an understanding of what visually makes each of these combat styles fun to use.

The one thing that's been consistent with every iteration of DRK is dissatisfaction with the burst window. In Stormblood, players complained about how Delirium felt ineffective. 8-15 extra seconds of resource generation? Exciting. But what are you going to spend that on? Dark Arts? Bloodspiller? In the past two expansions, the complaints have been about how Delirium and now Living Shadow are still fairly boring. And I think that people would be willing to accept Living Shadow if it felt like we were going somewhere with it. It still feels like there's a move missing that ties everything together.

I think that one thing that Reaper did extremely well was in making your burst window resource-gated rather than time-gated. Why am I building up resources? Ah yes, to spend them on this supermove. I think that's the first step in addressing DRK's burst window. Remove everything else from the Blood gauge. Put Delirium in at 50 blood, 15 second recast. Give it a fun dark flaming aura. You know, the one that Frey uses at Whitebrim. Or the one that Julyan uses in the Heavensward Hildebrand questline. Replace your existing combo actions with new ones that hit harder and faster. Replace your Edge/Flood actions as well.

The reason why we've avoided this sort of design previously is because of the issue of syncing up burst with buff windows. The answer to this is simple enough, you just need to make Living Shadow give you 50 blood when you activate it. That way, by intention, you enter your burst phase at the same time that that Frey shows up for a tag team. Just go the Kings of Lucis route with this. Let the moves you perform in this Delirium window give you stacks. When the window ends, all your stacks are consumed into a multi-hit finisher. One shadow for each of them.

I understand that at the end of the day this is a tank job and the actual gameplay itself ends up being an afterthought, but there really needs to be a central focus here rather than throwing new actions at random.

[zcrash970]

I think Yoshida has already received many suggestions and opinions but they do not have available resources to start reworking DRK. Rework of SMN is just a accident for them(Yoshida said they overtime for two nights, making the rework). And for the same reason, they leave the job identity and balance issues.

This kinda prove there's no happy accidents...I'm just saying

[Malthir]

Shameless repost.
Posted this on the Dark knight mega thread but got lost in the post storm. Personally I think something like this would give us back an original feel of the class, make us unique again and make us actually enjoy what we do.

Dark Knight Changes:

Remove the auto darkside and turn it into an OGCD toggle

When not in darkside all moves give mana back

When in darkside mana is constantly drained, the final move in the weaponskill combo and all OGCD all cost mana but all heal the Dark Knight.
Obviously numbers for this need balancing to not make it OP but ideally keep the cost of the abilities low but keep the constant mana drain moderate, allowing for at least one full darkside weaponskill combo with 2 OGCD weaved in which then leaves you zero mana and kicked from darkside. Realistically you would never want to use the whole of darkside and be zero on mana because you have no health regen moves outside of darkside, so the aim would be to balance the mana gain outside of darkside with mana cost of being in darkside, similar to the original design.

Take quietus and bloodspiller off the blood meter

Unlink C&S and Abysall drain

Remove the current delirium and bring back the old weaponskill

Remove Living Dead

New move Overwhelming Darkness to replace living dead so same cooldown time. Fills all darknight resources mana, blood and darkside meter, resources and health regen increased massively overtime for 15 seconds after 15seconds all meters are zero'd regardless of state when the ability ends and all gain for these meters are blocked for 5seconds.

Weaponskills:
Weaponskills to reflect what stance you're in. When in none darkside you're effectively just using a greatsword, once in darkside you start using some of the more darkness themed moves.

None Darkside weaponskill combo
1 Hard slash
2 Syphon strike
3 Delirum

In Darkside weaponskill combo
1 Powerslash (our old combo finisher where we shot the blast from the hand)
2 Soul eater
3 BloodSpiller

OGCD non darkside
1. Unmend is now a OGCD
2. Scourge (bring it back)
3. Spinning slash (now aoe and a OCGD)
4: Carve and slice reduce cooldown to 18 seconds reduce damage
5: Plunge no change

OGCD darkside
1. Unmend becomes Abyssal drain
2. Scouge becomes Quietus
3. Spinning slash becomes Flood of Shadow
4. Carve and slice becomes Edge of Shadow
5. Plunge no change
6. Shadow bringer unchanged

Current UI elements

The counter for darkside is now the darkest night counter, instead of counting down it counts up while you're in darkside for however long you were in darkside. This is the resource pool for darkest knight and living shadow, at 50 is used to cast darkest night at living shadow can be triggered any point over 50 but last longer the more you use. Add in a second press to living shadow allowing the DRK to destroy the shadow early to return a portion of the cost to the counter.

Keep the blood gauge but give us a move that lets you absorb a portion of the blood gauge to either give a chunk of mana or heal depending on whether you're in darkside or not you could use the old dark arts animation for it.
(In a later change I would like to see this as a modifier with old dark arts. So give us dark arts as a button and bring back status effects either buffs or de-buffs on our some moves, have this bar the resource that is used for dark arts. As I said this would require substantial dev time so it is not needed right now unlike the rest of the changes listed above.)

[MerlinCross]

That isn't remotely true. For every bit of praise I shared about 4.0 DRK with others back in the day, I got an equal amount of dissenters lambasting Dark Arts and wishing for its deletion. Now that we actually lost Dark Arts, we seemingly forget the huge amount of feedback from actual players wishing that it was removed. Yes, some wanted it to get altered, but there were still a sizable portion that simply wanted it gone period.

Also, the animation bit is also a tad subjective. I won't pretend to say we lost a lot of cool animations over the years (RIP Scourge, Power Slash, and Sole Survivor), but Edge of Shadow, Flood of Shadow, Oblation, Stalwart Soul, and Shadowbringer are all incredibly awesome looking abilities. It is not fair in the slightest to say that all of the animations DRK has been given post 4.0 have been lackluster.

I recall a lot of people wanting the SPAM of it removed rather than Dark Arts itself, but I suppose that's maybe a moot point in the design space.

I do agree with the fact that animation is super subjective. I found Edge and Flood just to be so... bleh? In fact I think you can go too far. Looking at you Living Shadow you glorified DoT. But such talk between DRK is probably best left to the side. (COUGH Side note, WAR Storm Path, WHY you so limp?).

But it could have the best animations in the game and well.... don't care? I dropped it in Shadowbringers because of how badly it felt to play to the point I just didn't care to see what new abilities we WOULD get. And from what I've seen here, it doesn't seem like anything has really changed about the job.

[ItsUrBoi]

I think the overall ideas here are great however a few things worth mentioning:
1. An invulnerability shouldn't be anything else other than an invulnerability. Regaining health fast to full and then going to 0 after 10 seconds is ok, but the other resources no. People can use it offensively. Instead I have another idea. ( 2 )
2. Instead of Living Shadow at level 90 , add a trait which makes Fray fuse with you, and grant you a massive regen on ( blood and MP while granting access to 10 Darkarts empowered actions or perhaps a new combo )
3. C&S frequency should be 30 seconds, instead of 18. To align with raid buffs.
4. The combos you mentioned could be tweaked a bit to look like one ability flows into the other. ( using Powerslash -> Souleater doesn't seem to flow well, does it? )
5. Darkarts could be an off GCD with a CD of 5 seconds to augment 1 action ( GCD / OGCD ) changing not only its potencies but also the animation.

One suggestion of mine without scrapping the kit would be to make DRK Living Shadow grant SkS and a new combo ( that combo granting you access to Darkarts as well ). Kind of inspiring from Reaper's idea of you gathering resources and using them on a big spender which makes YOU go crazy - not a shadow that you can forget about.