Thoughts on PLD/GNB/DRK

[Aegis_Harvey]

Dark Knight (DRK):
There are two things DRKs can really feel. One, the dps/burst dps is very obviously the best - when the EX2 crystals die and your add disappears while the other lives, you know you're pumping out loads of damage and this feels good. Two, when bosses are not scary but dungeon pulls are, this feels bad. DRK feels starkly different from the other tanks to play and to heal for, especially in HW/ShB/EW dungeons. They need a change for the sake of both old players and new players to bring DRK in line with the way people expect tanks to handle dungeons these days. Other things I've noticed, I will not mince words on: Oblation is bad, Living Dead is bad, TBN is great except for when it's bad. I could point to more, but those are beyond the scope of the suggestions I'd like to make here.

DRK Suggestions
> Quietus reduces the recast time of Abyssal Drain/CaS by 15 seconds. This is the smallest change I can think of to give DRK the help they need in dungeons without affecting Trials/Raids significantly, short of just making Quietus heal like Abyssal Drain does. We know they can implement this mechanic thanks to Enhanced Unmend (lol), this is a property that should be added to the Enhanced Blackblood trait do it takes effect as early as possible.

> Oblation. Even the name doesn't make sense - did they mean the archaic form of Ablation? To take away incoming damage? How would this move be an Oblation, an offering to God?
Even if you could put both charges on one target it wouldn't be as good as Intervention or Corundum and would cost twice the oGCD windows.
Rename it Ablation, target party member takes 10% less damage, you are healed for the damage prevented. Works like Oblation for party wide damage and a double tank buster scenario, only with better TBN synergy and uses only one oGCD.

> TBN is great. It scales with your Effective HP, meaning it will eventually be bad. By i575 with food, I was noticing tank busters and raid damage couldn't reliably break my TBN in EX2, and now at i580 it's the same problem even without food. As a result DRK becomes less fun to main tank with the stronger it gets, because TBN becomes effectively more costly.
At a minimum, the MP cost of TBN should be halved (the free attack on break becomes a +1500 net MP instead of a +0 net MP). This would emphasize placing TBN strategically where it needs to go to break every time (+1500 net MP over just using EoS) compared to current cost (+0 net MP over EoS) and compared to no cost / free attack guaranteed (mindless mash whenever CD comes up).

[Aegis_Harvey]

> Living Dead is indefensible on DRK. There is no use case where it isn't flat-out worse than the comparable cooldowns, Holmgang and Superbolide (imo, Hallowed Ground belongs in a separate category).
In order for these three cooldowns to have any benefit, they must be used within a window where you are certain your HP will drop below 1, otherwise LD and Holm do nothing, and Bolide will vary somewhere between slight penalty to slight benefit, averaging out to doing nothing (contrast with Hallowed Ground, which will always have a benefit). These are emergency situations, to which LD's very generous 10 second window is a paradox - if you need that big a window for emergency use, it isn't an emergency use.
Assuming, then, that you pop your cooldown within 1 second of needing it, Bolide and Holm effectively grant 9 seconds of life-saving time and LD grants 10 seconds.
In that 9 seconds with no external healing or crits, my GNB can heal itself to around 20k HP with Aurora and Corundum (roughly 28% HP), my PLD could heal itself for 56k HP with just Clemency, WAR can probably fully heal itself, even a lvl 30 MRD could heal at least 20% HP with Thrill of Battle. My DRK can heal itself for 7k HP, only having time for abyssal drain and one syphon strike, 11k HP if combos line up for two syphon strikes (somewhere between 10% and 15% HP). To put that into perspective, a lvl 42 WAR is better prepared to go from saved by Holmgang to stopping a boss from killing them with the next tank buster - with one button - than a lvl 90 DRK is to go from saved by LD to stopping themselves from killing them, by a wide margin. In my example Abyssal Drain heals a 72k HP DRK for 2750, so the only way for a DRK to actually save themselves from their own ability is to be actively tanking 25 targets. This is how absurd LD currently is.
As such, the LD mechanic would make sense on a tank that focuses on self healing, but instead is placed on the only tank that is ostensibly focused on self shielding (arguably, WAR is also better at shielding than DRK). My suggestion, thus, forks out into two possibilities.

Either:
Remove Living Dead and replace it with a copy of Hallowed Ground. Call it Dispersion, make it turn you into the Living Shadow jet-black shader effect. It can maybe take away some of your HP or deal AoE damage on activation to give it some flavor but functionally it's the same as Hallowed Ground. Yes it's boring, but at least it works.

Or, Keep Living Dead, but when it activates it gives you two buffs: Walking Dead for 2 seconds that gives you a Holmgang-type "can't drop below 1HP" effect just so you don't get gimped by lag; and Rigor Mortis, a shield for 100% Max HP that lasts 10 seconds. You'll still need to be healed, but at least it's no longer actively working against the tools DRK has.